BREAKING: Pornhub's Instagram account removed for violating community guidelines

Update: On Wednesday June 17, Instagram restored Pornhub's account.

Pornhub’s Instagram account went offline late Wednesday night. Laila Mickelwait, Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the global #Traffickinghub movement, posted an image on her Twitter account which claimed that the Pornhub account went against Instagram’s community standards.

As of Wednesday night, Pornhub’s hyperlink is still visible with 12.5 million followers, but the page missing.

In a statement to The Post Millennial, Mickelwait said, "Today Instagram did what it should have done well over a year ago, it took a stand against Pornhub, a company well known for monetizing and globally distributing sex crime scenes. No legitimate company that has any value for human rights should have anything to do with Pornhub or its parent company MindGeek. It is time for Twitter and all other social media platforms to de-platform this mega sex trafficker and stop allowing its executives an avenue to peddle criminal abuse to the masses for profit. Shut it down."

Pornhub is the 10th most visited website in the world, with 42 billion visits and 6 million videos uploaded per year. According to Traffickinghub, Pornhub has been repeatedly caught enabling, hosting, and profiting from videos of child rape, sex trafficking, and other forms of non-consensual content exploiting women and minors.

The Internet Watch Foundation stated that it had confirmed 118 cases of child rape, sexual abuse and trafficking on Pornhub.

According to The New York Post, Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek, was hit with an $80 million lawsuit in December 2020 by 40 women who claimed the site made millions off the alleged GirlsDoPorn sex-trafficking scheme.

Court papers allege that in 2011, MindGeek "began selling, marketing, and exploiting videos featuring GirlsDoPorn’s sex trafficking victims on its website."

The Justice Department said in a press release that Ruben Garcia, 31, plead guilty in December 2020 to the sex trafficking scheme for the website GirlsDoPorn. Garcia and the company’s co-owners, Michael Pratt and Matthew Wolfe, tricked young women into filming the videos by posting modeling ads and then coerced their victims into filming porn. According to the New York Daily News, Wolfe is awaiting trial and Pratt fled and is currently on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

The judge in the civil case ordered GirlsDoPorn to remove the videos from its site and convince other sites, including Pornhub.com, to do the same. "This defendant lured one victim after another with fake modeling ads, false promises and deceptive front companies, ultimately devolving to threats to coerce these women into making sex videos,” U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman said in the release. “Even when victims told Garcia how the scheme had devastated their lives, he showed no regard for their well-being. The crime was utterly callous in nature and there is no excuse or justification for his conduct, which was driven purely by greed. The harm inflicted by this defendant will last a lifetime for his victims. Hopefully today’s sentence will offer them a sense of justice."

The website was shutdown, but according to The New York Times, those videos continue to surface and resurface on Pornhub. According to Mickelwait, all that is needed to upload pornography onto Pornhub is an email address. No government-issued ID is required, not even to become "verified."

Pornhub admitted to verifying a trafficked 15-year-old girl who was sexually abused in 58 videos on its site. The official Twitter account for Pornhub wrote in response to the story that the girl had been a verified member, but then deleted the tweets.

The Traffickinghub petition, an effort to hold those accountable "for enabling and profiting from the sex trafficking and criminal sexual exploitation of countless victims," has been signed by over 2.2 million people from 192 countries. The effort has been endorsed by over 300 organizations.