Mastercard Makes A Historic Move
Reprinted from rescuefreedom.org
Mastercard moves forward with policies to eliminate trafficking, child abuse, and rape from porn sites around the world.
Mastercard will now require documented age and identity verification for all porn sites that use Mastercard as a payment processor. This is no minor update; Mastercard holds a 30% global share of all payment processing, second to China.
What does this mean exactly?
This will pressure banks to safeguard legitimate consent practices of their merchants—AKA porn sites—before processing any payments.
This is a massive win in the fight against sexual exploitation and porn regulation. Before now, child sexual abuse videos, revenge porn, and non-consensual, violent sexual content could be among the most-viewed videos on these sites, bringing in money for porn sites and traffickers alike.
Even on porn sites that require age verification for the person uploading, it's a low bar that has left room for exploitation to thrive.
Your support has played a significant role in this breakthrough update. When you sign petitions like #TraffickingHub or share our ‘Refuse to Click' video, you put direct pressure on big corporations and help make change like this possible.
“The banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.”
Mastercard's Senior Vice President of Franchise Customer Engagement & Performance, John Verdeschi, said in a blog post this past spring.
Despite the significant backlash from the porn industry, we applaud Mastercard for demanding better standards where the law has not yet caught up. This is progress, but we won't stop until all are free.
This “Eyes on Trafficking” story is reprinted from its original online location.
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