9.2 C
London
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Why PornHub's Instagram account was banned and may never return

Pornhub lost its more than 13 million followers and more than 6 200 posts when the popular porn website’s Instagram account was banned.

The photo-sharing app has strict community guidelines that prevent the posting and distribution of pornographic material on its platform.

Despite abiding by Instagram’s guidelines, Pornhub’s account was taken down. It said in a statement that the account had been suspended previously in 2021 and restored within 24 hours.

However, the account has yet to be reactivated amid growing backlash from several activist groups, some of which strongly campaign to rid the internet of adult content.

One such evangelical and anti-human trafficking group, Exodus Cry, hailed the closure of Pornhub’s Instagram account a success for its campaign, Traffickinghub.

Exodus Cry said the Traffickinghub campaign was initiated to shut down Pornhub while holding its executives accountable for distributing porn, profiting from rape, child abuse, sex trafficking and criminal image-based sexual abuse.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Exodus Cry (@exoduscry)

“Pornhub said in a statement that it’s a temporary suspension. It’s been four days since this most recent suspension, and the infamous Pornhub account is still nowhere to be found,” the group said.

However, Exodus Cry counted Pornhub’s Instagram account suspension as just another success after the porn website made headlines in February.

A scathing report into non-consensual videos posted on Pornhub was published by the Washington Examiner and written by Traffickinghub’s founder, Laila Mickelwait.

In June another report, titled “The Children of Pornhub”, and based on graphic accounts by victims who sought help from the Traffickinghub campaign, was published by The New Yorker and previously reported by IOL.

As a result of the second report, chief executive Feras Antoon and chief operating officer David Tassill,o of MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, both resigned.

The executives widely reported departure was accompanied by detailed accounts of women and girls who had explicit videos of themselves leaked onto Pornhub.

The report highlighted failed moderation standards and filtering of websites such as these which, ultimately, allowed content of non-consensual victims and minors to be published on them and then widely shared on other sites.

In the most significant account detailed in the report, the victim wrote to Pornhub in December 2018, saying: “Hi, I’m underage and had many videos and photos posted of me on here… They keep getting re-uploaded onto this site, and I am only 15 in them, and I don’t have the links. I don’t know what to do because every time I get them removed, you keep allowing them to be uploaded, it’s ruining my life.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Exodus Cry (@exoduscry)

Pornhub is one of the most infamous adult websites with, more than 100 billion video views a year and more than 125 million daily visits to the Pornhub Network sites, including YouPorn and Redtube.

IOL Tech

Latest news
Related news