Pornhub and a group of sex workers gripe that Instagram tolerates racy pictures from celebrities like Kim Kardashian while unfairly “censoring” the porn industry.
The group accused Instagram in a letter on Tuesday of doing “violent and profoundly damaging” harm to the porn industry by selectively enforcing its content moderation rules — though Instagram insists that Pornhub has repeatedly violated its rules.
“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,” Pornhub and the pornstars wrote to Meta executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri in a letter that was exclusively seen by The Post.
The letter comes weeks after Instagram disabled Pornhub’s official account, which had north of 13 million followers.
Pornhub claims that it never violated Instagram’s community guidelines. However, a Meta spokesperson told The Post that Pornhub had repeatedly violated the app’s rule against “sexual solicitation,” which the spokesperson said includes encouraging users to leave Instagram and visit a porn site.
Instagram declined to say exactly how many violations Pornhub had racked up but said it had warned the site multiple times over the past decade that it had violated community guidelines.
“We’ve permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies,” the spokesperson said, adding that Pornhub’s ban is permanent.
As evidence of Instagram’s alleged double standards, Pornhub and the adult performers pointed to a butt-bearing Interview Magazine cover that Kim Kardashian shared on Instagram just days after Pornhub’s account was banned.
“Kim Kardashian has posted her fully exposed ass to her 330 million followers without any restrictive action from Instagram,” the group griped. “We are happy to see that Kim and the artistic team behind the image are free to share their work on the platform, but question why we are denied the same treatment.”
“While Kim’s photo continues accumulating likes and making headlines, members of the adult community run the risk of deplatforming if Instagram decides our pants look a bit too tight to meet its arbitrary and selectively-enforced ‘standards,'” the letter added.
Meta did not comment on Kardashian’s post.
In addition to Pornhub, the smut site’s letter was singed by dozens of adult performers including Riley Reid, Johnny Sins and Asa Akira.
According to a screenshot shared with The Post, Instagram on Sept. 2 sent Pornhub a message saying: “Your account has been disabled for not following our terms. You won’t be able to log into this account and no one else will be able to see it.”
The message also contained a list of content that’s banned on Instagram, including “hate speech” and “graphic content including sadistic displays of violence against people or animals and depictions of sexual assault.” It did not include any mention of sexual solicitation.
The Instagram spat comes as Pornhub’s Luxembourg-based parent company, Mindgeek, has faced increasing scrutiny for allegedly failing to adequately crack down on underage and non-consensual videos on its sites, which also include RedTube, YouPorn and Brazzers.
The company is facing a $600 million class action suit filed last year on behalf of several alleged underage victims, including a 12 year-old girl, whose videos were reportedly shared on Pornhub without their consent.
A New Yorker exposé in June centered on a 15-year-old British girl who struggled to have explicit videos of herself removed from Pornhub and other sites after they were uploaded without her consent.
Two top Mindgeek executives, CEO chief executive Feras Antoon and chief operating officer David Tassillo, stepped down in June 2022. A MindGeek spokesperson said that Antoon and Tassillo’s departures were not related to recent reporting on the company and said that the “transition has been in development since early 2022.”