Hi, I'm Dan Premack and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook.

Today is Friday, December 18th.

COVID hospitalizations are up, Bitcoin is down, just a little, and we're focused on the partial

fall of an online empire.

If you look at the top 10 most visited websites in America, you'll mostly see names you expect,

Google, Amazon, etc.

But also sitting there, nestled among the Twitters and the Yahoo's, is Pornhub, the world's

top site for adult videos.

Well, at least that's what it's supposed to be.

Unfortunately, Pornhub has also featured videos of minors and of non-consensual sexual violence. That's what caught

the attention recently of New York Times columnist Nicholas Christoff, who published a detailed

investigation of Pornhub's illicit and inarguably immoral content, including interviews with people who had

tried but failed to get videos of themselves removed. The blowback was swift. Within days, Visa and

MasterCard both said they'd stop processing memberships for the site, although their credit cards

can still be used to buy ads there. Pornhub said it will going forward only allow verified videos to appear, and then it scrubbed its archives,

resulting in the removal of more than 75% of its content.

Pornhub also stopped letting users download videos, which will help prevent redistribution of problematic material.

Congress, it too, is getting involved, proposing bills to let sites like Pornhub be sued for hosting rape content, something that could become folded into broader discussions of

Section 230 liability protections.

In short, in industry's days of self-policing without scrutiny are over.

In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper with the New York Times as Nicholas Christoph.

But first, this.

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