Amid an ongoing lawsuit accusing Visa of facilitating the distribution of child pornography via Pornhub and other sites owned by parent company MindGeek, the credit-card company has suspended ad payments on Pornhub and other MindGeek-owned sites.
Separately, Mastercard suspended use of its cards for advertising payments on MindGeek-owned site TrafficJunky, a further step from its 2020 decision to suspend use of its cards on Pornhub. “New facts from last week’s court ruling made us aware of advertising revenue outside of our view that appears to provide Pornhub with indirect funding,” Mastercard said in a statement. “This step will further enforce our December 2020 decision to terminate the use of our products on that site.”
The pending lawsuit involves a woman suing Visa and MindGeek over the distribution of an explicit video of herself that her boyfriend filmed when she was only 13 years old. In the most recent action in the case, a U.S. district judge in California refused to dismiss parts of the lawsuit that contain allegations against Visa, determining that the credit-card company had continued recognizing MindGeek as an authorized merchant even though the company was aware of the presence of child pornography on its sites.
“Visa made the decision to continue to recognize MindGeek as a merchant, despite its alleged knowledge that MindGeek monetized child porn,” the judge wrote. “MindGeek made the decision to continue monetizing child porn, and there are enough facts pled to suggest that the latter decision depended on the former.”
Earlier this week, billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman publicly took issue with Visa over its continued monetization of Pornhub, despite the pervasive presence of child sexual-abuse material on the site. “There’s traditional breach of fiduciary duty when a company has a product or service that can cause harm,” Ackman said on CNBC.
“My interest comes from the fact that I have four daughters,” Ackman said. “When you think about the worst harm, economic, physical, mental harm you can impact upon a human being. It’s having a child trafficked . . . a video of the rape appear. I find it hard to talk about it.” Ackman said he is not a stakeholder in Visa, Mastercard, or any other payments company, but he offered to help finance lawsuits against Visa on these grounds.
This news is the latest development in a controversy that has been playing out for the past two years, ignited in large part by an investigative piece in the New York Times column by Nick Kristoff, which called attention the presence of pervasive child sexual-abuse content on Pornhub. The article caused a major firestorm during which Pornhub attempted to defend itself, while both Visa and Mastercard demonetized MindGeek sites. But Visa subsequently reversed that decision, leading to its inclusion in this pending suit.