• The Pornhub account has been suspended for a number of weeks.
• Now the account has been permanently banned and removed from the platform.
• Pornhub has issued an open letter, calling the ban “discriminatory and hypocritical”. 

Roughly three weeks ago, Instagram decided to suspend the account of Pornhub, citing that it was a repeat offender of the social media platform’s community guidelines. That suspension has since escalated to a full blown banning, with the account also being removed from Instagram.

Pornhub tweeted out an open letter to both Instagram and its parent company Meta responding to the ban, characterising its enforcement of community guidelines as “opaque, discriminatory and hypocritical”.

The open letter was also co-signed by 60 people from the adult entertainment industry.

“Sex workers and performers have been unfairly targeted in the form of bans, shadow bans, suspensions, loss of Live privileges and content removal, despite taking extra care to not violate Instagram’s Community Guidelines. Three weeks ago, Pornhub’s official verified account was disabled with no reasonable justification,” the open letter highlighted.

“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,” it added.

Whether the website will indeed get a detailed explanation as to the reason for its ban and removal is unclear, but it has been careful to stress that while its own site publishes explicit content, its social media accounts do not.

The open letter also unpacks some of the hypocrisy Pornhub believes exists on Instagram, with high profile content creators like Kim Kardashian allowed to post images with partial nudity. The website cites a recent Interview magazine cover with Kardashian exposing her rear, with the post on Instagram garnering five million likes and seemingly no backlash.

Speaking to TechCrunch on the matter, Instagram says that all accounts are moderated in the same way.

“We do not have policies that target adult creators and we would never disable an account simply because it’s run by an adult creator — we don’t categorize accounts in this way. An adult creator may have an account provided they don’t violate our policies,” a spokesperson told the publication.

At the time of writing, neither Instagram, nor Meta have publicly responded to the open letter.

While it is clear to see that the Pornhub account is an easy target for banning, the company does highlight that there is indeed a problem when it comes to enforcing policy fairly on social media platforms, something Facebook (before it became Meta) has been guilty of in the past.

Whether Pornhub will get its account reinstated remains uncertain for now.