Popular social media site Instagram has banned popular pornography website Pornhub from the platform after the latter created another account following an earlier dismissal from Instagram last month.
Things were looking up for Pornhub when the company announced a triumphant return to Instagram with a tweet on October 18 that read “We are BACK on Instagram with our new official account.” Shortly thereafter on October 26, Pornhub’s Instagram account was removed, says Variety. This most recent removal is actually the second time that Pornhub has been banned from Instagram — the first was just last month.
“We’ve permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies,” a Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo this morning in an email.
According to reporting from The Verge, Pornhub’s Instagram account was first removed in September, a few weeks after the account was disabled. Meta said that Pornhub broke its terms of service multiple times over a span of ten years, and explained to The New York Post that the website specifically engaged in “sexual solicitation” by encouraging users to leave Instagram to visit Pornhub.
Pornhub retaliated against this initial ban by publishing an open letter on Twitter from the company as well as several activist groups and adult performers. The letter was directly addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, and Meta Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead. “We demand an explanation and guidance as to why our accounts are continuously deleted, and why content we spend money creating in order to engage with our audience is removed, even when we do not breach any of Instagram’s rules,” the letter reads.
Pornhub and Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Both the September and October bans are a huge blow to the incredibly popular and seemingly floundering porn website. In August, Visa and Mastercard announced that they will not be honouring digital payments made by advertisers purchasing space on Pornhub. Earlier this summer, MindGeek’s CEO and COO abruptly resigned under unclear circumstances that MindGeek claims were in discussion for months prior to the announcement in June.