MONTREAL — Pornhub released a statement denouncing the arbitrary censorship of its Instagram account, after it was briefly reactivated for a few hours yesterday before being shut down again.
“Within hours of reinstating our Instagram account, Meta has demonstrated that its policies have no rhyme or reason when they deactivated our account again, despite not violating any guidelines,” a Pornhub rep told Variety. “This comes at a time of increased censorship and discrimination against performers in the adult space, when platforms like Instagram should be inclusive and provide safe communities for creators to express themselves.”
Instead, the statement continued Meta and Instagram’s “haphazard and irrational enforcement of their policies place undue hardships on the livelihoods of those in the adult industry, an already marginalized group.”
The company called on Meta to “once again reverse its decision” to permanently ban Pornhub’s social media accounts on its platforms, first effected in Sept. 2022.
After yesterday’s activation and deactivation of Pornhub’s account — which has almost 13 million followers — a Meta spokesperson told Variety that it had been “done in error. As we’ve said previously, we permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies.”
Meta claims that Pornhub flouted its ban on “sexual solicitation” for over a decade, and also disabled a second account that Pornhub attempted to create after the permanent ban.
Meta and Instagram’s loosely defined concept “sexual solicitation” — borrowed from archaic anti-sex work laws and imprecisely adapted to the online space by terms of service drafters — has been sharply criticized by the company’s own Oversight Board last month.
As XBIZ reported, the Oversight Board recommended that Meta “clarify its public-facing Sexual Solicitation policy and narrow its internal enforcement guidance.”