Instagram has suspended the official Pornhub account on their platform.
Before the sex site's account was removed from Instagram, Pornhub had 13.1 million followers and more than 6,200 posts. Reps for Meta, Instagram's parent company, did not respond to a request for comment. The move comes one month after Visa and Mastercard cut off payment privileges of TrafficJunky, the advertising arm of Pornhub parent company MindGeek. That followed a federal court ruling in July rejecting Visa's request to be removed from a case in which MindGeek is being sued for allegedly distributing child pornography and that alleges Visa knowingly facilitated MindGeek's ability to monetize the illegal content. On its Instagram account, Pornhub shared nonpornographic videos and images. However, it had "directly promoted pornography" and featured videos like "Next Career Goal" encouraging people to become pornography performers, according to Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. The NCOSE had been among a group of advocates that has lobbied Instagram to remove Pornhub.
For a guy that spent a large portion of his puberty trying to watch the scrambled channels lurking at the tail end of any cable package, I always find it shocking to see how commonplace pornography has become in society. And with the rise of sites like Onlyfans, it seems like the trend isn't going to change any time soon. As all of the major distribution channels for content find a permanent home on the internet, porn is only going to become more mainstream.
