Credit Card Company’s New Practice with Porn Sites

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is reporting that Mastercard is taking an important step to confront—and hopefully end—the “horrific” abase on sites hosting pornography. Their newest policies officially went into effect as of October 15.

Charisma News reported on Mastercard’s initial efforts to take down pornography sites like Pornhub months ago.

The new policies require banks connecting sellers of “adult content” (a.k.a. pornography) to Mastercard to ensure that the companies meet the following five standards:

• “Clear, unambiguous and documented consent”
• “Documented age and identity verification for all people depicted and those uploading the content”
• “Content review process prior to publication”
• “Complaint resolution process that addresses illegal or nonconsensual content within seven business days”
• “Appeals process allowing for any person depicted to request their content be removed”

This is a major step in protecting victims of rape and sex trafficking, child sexual abuse material, and those who are filmed or have content uploaded non-consensually.

Earlier this year, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation awarded Mastercard the 2021 Corporate Leadership Award at the Connect, Educate, Solve and Equip Summit. The summit was held online globally.

Since early 2020, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation has been working with Mastercard to shift the company policies that will protect individuals and prevent companies from using their services to profit from sexual abuse and assault. NCOSE’s global campaign on credit cards was first highlight on the front page of the BBC World, and it continued to rally international survivors and experts from 26 countries to call on the payment industry and other mainstream companies to support the infrastructure of Pornhub (and its owner MindGeek) due to their facilitation of sex trafficking, child sexual abuse and other non-consensual materials.

Over the last two years, NCOSE and other survivors and advocates have worked tirelessly to bring survivor voices, research and facts as confirmed in government investigations to Mastercard (another others’) attention.

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