Instagram has permanently removed the official Pornhub account after a decade of allegedly violating the social media platform’s terms of service.
“We’ve permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies,” a spokesperson from Meta, Instagram’s parent company, told Motherboard.
According to Motherboard, the social media company claims it warned Pornhub about posts that violated unspecified terms of service surrounding adult content, nudity, and sexual solicitation.
The New York Post reports Pornhub violated the social media platform’s rules against sexual solicitation by telling its users to leave the site and visit a porn site, among other violations.
Meta’s decision comes after the big tech giant suspended the pornography site’s account after mounting pressure from non-profit groups like the Justice Defense Fund, which has repeatedly accused Pornhub of allegedly being complicit in the sex trafficking and rape of women and children.
Laila Mickelwait, founder and CEO of the group, praised Meta’s decision to kick the site off of Instagram for good after it lost 13 million followers.
“Now less people will be directed to watch Pornhub’s monetized child rape and sex trafficking videos,” Mickelwait said in a tweet.
Mickelwait said Pornhub allegedly has 175,000 searches for child abuse videos every month from “pedophiles [who] have known Pornhub was a good place to find it.”
Pornhub publicly shared an open letter with endorsements from 63 adult industry performers, models, and activist groups to Instagram on Tuesday demanding an explanation on why Instagram removed the site’s account.
“We, the undersigned, represent those in the adult industry that have for years been undermined by Instagram’s opaque, discriminatory and hypocritical enforcement of its own Terms and Policies,” the letter reads, according to Motherboard. “Sexworkers and performers have been unfairly targeted in the form of bans, shadow bans, suspensions, loss of Live privileges and content removal, despite taking extra care not to violate Instagram’s Community Guidelines.”
The letter says it posted “fully PG” material and calls out hypocritical treatment, citing some celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who was recently featured in a risqué post for Interview Magazine.
“Kim Kardashian has posted her fully exposed ass to her 330 million followers without any restrictive action from Instagram,” Pornhub officials wrote, per Motherboard. “We are happy to see that Kim and the artistic team behind the image are free to share their work on the platform, but question why we are denied the same treatment.”
“While Kim’s photo continues accumulating likes and making headlines, members of the adult community run the risk of deplatforming if Instagram decides our pants look a bit too tight to meet its arbitrary and selectively-enforced ‘standards,’” the letter further added.
Pornhub’s empire appears to be slowly crumbling as it has also recently come under fire after both Visa and Mastercard cut off payment privileges with MindGeek, the site’s parent company, and its advertising arm, TrafficJunky.
The move from the payment processing companies followed a federal judge ruling last month that it was reasonable to conclude Visa knowingly “intended to help monetize child pornography” on Pornhub and other sites operated by MindGeek in the Fleites v. MindGeek lawsuit.
Instagram joins Visa, Mastercard, Discover, PayPal, Grant Thornton, Heinz, Unilever, Roku, and many other companies in rejecting business with Pornhub.
Advocates for those allegedly trafficked on the pornography site have pressured other major tech companies to follow suit.
