Pornhub’s Instagram Is a Major Casualty in the War on Porn
Instagram’s recent Pornhub ban is the latest offensive in the platform’s all-out war against sex workers, who say their accounts are often targeted for deletion with very little explanation.
The social media platform deleted the streamer’s official account around Sept. 3, despite the fact that the profile did not feature any sexually explicit content that would have violated its terms of service. Instagram did not respond to questions about why it took down the profile, which had over 13 million followers at the time of its removal, according to Variety.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Pornhub said its account has only been disabled temporarily due to Instagram’s “overly cautious censoring of the adult industry.” It added, “We look forward to our account being reactivated, as it always has.”
It was the first ban of this magnitude for the porn industry, but the issue of disappearing accounts is one that individual performers and OnlyFans models have grown accustomed to as sectors from technology to finance look to cut ties with sex work. In order to make money, performers have to promote their work, but they must also do so within the undefined parameters set by the world’s biggest social media company. Any slip-up, no matter how small or unintentional, could mean years of work and tens of thousands of dollars down the drain. Several performers tell The Daily Beast that they believe the process is automated, with no person on the other end to appeal to.
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Nevvy Cakes, 21, has had at least five Instagram accounts deleted since January 2021. That month, the app took down her page for the first time. The independent performer, who also posts on the uncensored websites OnlyFans and LoyalFans, had close to 600,000 followers on Instagram. She says she’d spent over $100,000 in promotional posts on other profiles to bolster her follower count.
“When it got deleted, there was nothing on my page that was sexual,” she said. “I believe my income dropped by at least 30 percent. Thank god I went viral a couple times on Twitter so I made that money back.”
Instagram’s community guidelines explicitly ban nudity. But neither that, nor the platform’s terms of use, prevent someone from being a sex worker and promoting their work on their page. Sister company Facebook, on the other hand, says “suggestive elements” like “sexual emojis,” certain poses, or links to outside websites that feature porn may comprise a violation of its rules.
“Since the 2020 update, their terms of use are much stricter about what counts as suggestive content,” says Madita Oeming, an independent scholar from Germany who specializes in porn studies. “They phrased it so vaguely that they basically get to randomly decide what is okay and what isn’t. My content has been deleted multiple times since, even though I’m just an educator. I constantly need to censor myself in order to not be censored by them by writing s€x and p0rn in my posts, for example.”
Instagram and its parent company Meta did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Daily Beast.
Marcela Alonso says she’s steered clear of Instagram’s aggressive censorship by keeping her page “PG.”
The New York-based performer says censorship on the app is “absolutely a huge issue,” and that it even affects sex workers who post content in lingerie or bikinis, which are common sights on other profiles.
Her relationship with Instagram is mostly positive. Her account has been monetized for almost two years, she says, a special status that allows her to earn “badges” from people who watch her live streams, which translates to dollars in her bank account. She’s also verified, with an official blue check at the end of her username lending a boost of credibility that helps people find her. Still, she says, she has to be exceedingly careful.
“There’s been a couple times they took it off for something so little,” she says. “One time, for instance, I was doing a live [stream] with a porn performer. OnlyFans came and started talking to us, and I lost my monetization for a full month.”
She’s since taken to teaching her friends in the industry how to tip-toe around the platform’s censorship bots.
“They cannot post, in stories, any links to OnlyFans, for instance. That’s the biggest no-no,” she says. “If I’m promoting anything, I can’t even promote other social medias on Instagram,” especially not Twitter, the most porn-friendly social network of them all. The content posted on that app could trigger Instagram’s censors.
In some cases, sex workers are forced to restart their entire online presences from scratch while celebrities post even raunchier content without repercussions. Romi Chase, a 29-year-old independent performer from Las Vegas, has lost eight accounts over the past few years. This past May, her account vanished, along with the 1.9 million followers she’d worked for years to accumulate. Her income, she said, dropped by 70 percent overnight. “The rules are not concise and nobody knows what they really are. If you say no nipples or no pasties, fine, I don’t have to post it, but if I go to Britney Spears’ page, why do I see implied nudity there? With emojis over her breasts?”
To make matters worse, she says spam accounts have co-opted many of her old usernames in an effort to impersonate her and scam money from her unwitting followers.
Juggling work, creative self-promotion in a saturated market, and self-protection from a social media company hellbent on taking you down takes its toll, according to various porn stars who’ve had their accounts wiped out.
“It’s really exhausting with these social medias,” says Alonso. “They need to be more clear and more transparent.”
Instagram’s notoriously opaque appeals process has even been the subject of tabloid fodder, as was the case with one OnlyFans model who claimed she had sex with a Meta worker to get her account reinstated.
Overall, Instagram is just one foot soldier in the ongoing war on porn. Those close to the industry point to the FOSTA-SESTA acts of 2018 as an early sign that the professional adult film industry was under attack. The acts, which were signed into law by President Donald Trump, made websites liable for accusations of facilitating human trafficking under the guise of protecting sexual-abuse victims.
“This has changed the censorship. This is what changed with Instagram, because they do not want to promote any sex work because they’re afraid of someone getting trafficked, when sex work is often a choice by the individual,” Alonso says.
There’s also Nikolas Kristof’s 2020 article titled “The Children of Pornhub,” about underage sex videos that made it onto the tube site. In the article, which featured dubious testimony from the leader of a shady anti-porn group with evangelical ties, Kristof called for payment processors to stop doing business with Pornhub, even though sites like Facebook boast millions more reports of child sexual abuse material. The young woman at the center of the story sued Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek in July. Shortly thereafter, Visa and Mastercard suspended payments for ad purchases on Pornhub.
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Lynn Comella, a professor of gender and sexuality at the University of Las Vegas, called Kristof’s article “a catalyzing moment” in this new war on porn.
“It was an important moment for those folks who had been working a little more under the radar. And here’s the paper of record,” she said.
One group toiling behind the scenes is the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, or NCOSE. It was called Morality in Media until 2015. Another is Exodus Cry, led by anti-porn crusader Laila Mickelwait.
“I think there’s been a very, very well-coordinated campaign by religiously affiliated anti-pornography organizations that have really set their sights on driving Pornhub out of business,” says Comella. “I think they have been very successful in mobilizing discourse around harm, particularly harm to children.”
This kind of rhetoric is similar to the talking points used by other right-wing groups that take umbrage with everything from Drag Queen Story Hour to openly gay teachers in schools.
“This is part of a larger campaign in which all sexual expression and all discussions of sexuality are flattened into pornography,” Comella explains. “What is considered pornography by some of these organizations on the right? It includes everything that falls outside of heteronormative discussions.”
Pornhub’s account is still off Instagram two weeks after the ban, calling into question Pornhub’s belief that the ban is temporary. And if the platform’s goal is to slowly kick out the adult industry, it may just be succeeding.
“I no longer will ever use Instagram,” says Nevvy Cakes, who has thousands of followers across her Twitter and OnlyFans profiles. “They keep deleting me. They don’t want me on there. I’m not gonna keep investing into my accounts.”
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