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Call for credit card freeze on porn sites

Animation of hands holding phones showing porn

Major credit card companies should block payments to pornographic sites, according to a group of international campaigners and campaign groups who say they work to tackle sexual exploitation.

A letter seen by the BBC, signed by 10 campaigners and campaign groups, says porn sites “eroticise sexual violence, incest, and racism” and stream content that features child sexual abuse and sex trafficking.

One leading site, Pornhub, said “the letter [was] not only factually wrong but also intentionally misleading.”

Mastercard told the BBC they were investigating claims made in the letter on pornography sites and would “terminate their connection to our network” if illegal activity by a cardholder was confirmed.

The letter was sent to 10 major credit card companies, including the “Big Three”, Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The signatories from countries including the UK, US, India, Uganda and Australia have called for the immediate suspension of payments to pornographic sites.

The signatories of the letter include the conservative non-profit group the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) in the US, and several other faith-led or women and child rights’ advocacy groups.

The letter alleges it is impossible to “judge or verify consent in any videos on their site, let alone live webcam videos” which “inherently makes pornography websites a target for sex traffickers, child abusers, and others sharing predatory nonconsensual videos”.

“We’ve been seeing an increasingly global outcry about the harms of pornography sharing websites in a number of ways in recent months,” said Haley McNamara, the director of the UK-based International Centre on Sexual Exploitation, the international arm of the NCOSE and a signatory of the letter.

“We in the international child advocacy and anti-sexual exploitation community are demanding financial institutions to critically analyse their supportive role in the pornography industry, and to cut ties with them,” she told the BBC.

A report on the appetite for child abuse videos on pornography sites was published in April by India Child Protection Fund (ICPF). The organisation said there had been a steep increase in demand for child abuse searches on pornography sites in India, particularly since coronavirus lockdown.

Monitoring pornography online

Pornhub, the most popular pornography streaming site, is named in the letter. In 2019, it registered more than 42 billion visits, the equivalent of 115 million a day.

Pornhub was under scrutiny last year when one of its content providers – Girls Do Porn – became the subject of an FBI investigation.

The FBI charged four people working for the production company that created the channel of coaxing women into making pornographic films under false pretences. Pornhub removed the Girls Do Porn channel as soon as the charges were made.

Commenting to the BBC in February regarding this case, Pornhub said its policy was to “remove unauthorised content as soon as we are made aware of it, which is exactly what we did in this case”.

In October last year a 30-year-old Florida man, Christopher Johnson, faced charges for sexually abusing a 15 year old. Videos of the alleged attack had been posted on Pornhub.

In the same statement to the BBC in February, Pornhub said its policy was to “remove unauthorised content as soon as we are made aware of it, which is exactly what we did in this case”.

The Internet Watch Foundation, a

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