As its parent firm comes under increasing investigation, the adult streaming site XTube is closing.

A well-known pornographic streaming service called XTube is closing down due to growing allegations that its parent business encouraged sex trafficking on its affiliate websites.

As it got ready to shut down on September 5, the site announced this week that it was blocking video and photo submissions. Uncertainty over the closure’s cause has led anti-trafficking activists to hail it as a success for their cause.

The parent firm of XTube, MindGeek, stated to FOX Business on Tuesday that it thought one of its other platforms would be more beneficial for its consumers.

According to a business statement, “like any digital firm, we are continually assessing our content offerings and products to better serve our consumers.”
The committed but tiny group on XTube will, in our opinion, be better served on one of our current platforms, where they can benefit from more exposure and visibility.

The platform, launched in 2008, is only one of MindGeek’s several pornographic streaming services, which also include the popular website Pornhub. Although Pornhub has long been criticized, the reaction appeared to pick up last year after The New York Times published an article accusing it of, among other things, making money off of child rapes.

Visa’s payments were suspended as a result of the uproar, while Mastercard severed its relations with the business. Following Kristof’s revelation, Pornhub also deleted all of its unverified content and put in place a number of additional misuse prevention measures.
The idea that MindGeek operated as a criminal organization has lately been dismissed as “absurd” despite MindGeek’s repeated denials of accepting child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This claim was made in a class action complaint in June by 34 women who claimed they were forced to appear in violent films on Pornhub against their will.
The business has been the target of a number of cases of a similar nature, including one more class action litigation launched by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.

According to Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, “XTube’s planned shutdown is additional proof that MindGeek’s exploitation empire is unraveling.” “Given the accumulating evidence that MindGeek has hosted and made money from child sex abuse, rape, sex trafficking, nonconsensual material, sexual violence, and other racist and sexist sexual content on its numerous pornographic websites, this is encouraging news. The fight to make Pornhub, MindGeek, and the pornography business responsible for their facilitation of sexual abuse and exploitation has won a decisive win with the closing of XTube.”

The CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and activist Laila Mickelwait tweeted in support of XTube’s demise: “MindGeek’s porn tube sites don’t perform well financially without enormous volumes of illicit, unverified content—and without credit card processors.”
Due to its extensive reach, the rise of online pornography in the twenty-first century has generated a number of ethical, social, and regulatory concerns. Pornhub alone claimed to have had 42 billion visitors in 2019, or an average of 115 million per day. Additionally, that year saw a record 6.83 million videos posted to the website.
The website received 2.31 billion views overall in May of this year, down somewhat from the 3.2 billion visits it received in December of 2020, according to similarweb. According to a similar web, YouTube, one of its sibling websites, has received 10.77 million visitors overall. Total visits to XTube have decreased since December 2020, from 26.9 million to 10.8 million in May.
Similar to other platforms, MindGeek’s had the difficulty of constantly observing massive uploads from users all over the world.

In a statement to Fox News from last year, the business said: “Any suggestion that we condone CSAM is reckless and flagrantly wrong.” “CSAM is not tolerated at all. Unwavering in its commitment to fighting CSAM, Pornhub has implemented an industry-leading trust and safety policy to help us find and remove unlawful content from our community.”