Porn production company BangBros lit up the internet on Thursday evening when it announced its latest acquisition.

The company had purchased PornWikiLeaks, a site dedicated to doxxing adult industry performers and sharing their personal details online, including the real names, family information, addresses, and/or phone numbers of over 15,000 members of the adult industry.

But BangBros, whose sites include Bang Bus and MILF Soup, weren't diversifying into violating the privacy of sex workers. After buying PWL, including the data-filled drives and the domain, the company wiped the site, replacing the content with a message on the homepage explaining the change.

An excerpt:

BangBros had enough. We have purchased this site with the intention of shutting it down and removing all information associated with it. There’s no catch. No hidden thing to getting your personal stuff off of it. We simply didn’t want it out there for the world to see anymore. Yes, it’s that easy. While shutting this site down doesn’t purge the internet of all possible ties to real names and what not, it does make it one less place to harbor and find these things easily. A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared.

If you had anything ever posted on here, it will be removed and deleted forever from here. As well as BangBros nows owns the domain. Nothing will ever be up here besides this page that you see now. So you don’t have to worry about it coming back either.

The site's archive has also been excluded from The Wayback Machine (which will remove any site's content from its archive at the owner's request).

The new homepage message ends by directing the reader to "see what we did with the data" with a link to the following YouTube video:

In case you can't bring yourself to click on a video with the BangBros logo in the corner: Yes, that appears to be a pile of hard drives having accelerant poured all over them, with some gusto, before someone clicks open a Zippo and sets that pile on fire.

A BangBros spokesperson or spokespeople confirmed to the Adult Media Network and Vice that the post was genuine.

It hasn't been revealed how much BangBros paid for the site and its data. But all sex workers deserve privacy and safety before, during and after they do their jobs, and shutting down anything that makes that tougher is a positive step.

I personally want to thank you @bangbrosdotcom for doing this. I was affected terribly by this site. To the point I was forced to sell my home and move and also changing my phone number several times. This is a serious godsend Announment. Thank you so much for this incredible act — Diamond Foxxx (@DiamondFoxXx2) August 29, 2019

Holy shit, “Bang Bros” is somehow better at dealing with doxxing than @Facebook and @Twitter combined. https://t.co/TR4SUROa6P — Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) August 29, 2019

Bang Bros has evidently purchased and *destroyed* the performer-doxing database Pornwikileaks. This is the chaotic good plot twist content I like to see on my timeline. https://t.co/ReCYKKkb9y — 𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕆𝔹𝕊ℂ𝔼ℕ𝔼𝕠𝕔𝕖𝕟𝕖 🎟 (@internetmaggie) August 29, 2019

Thank you for protecting the privacy of all sex workers! BRAVO well done Bang Bros! https://t.co/5WoD99mzfF — Playboy Plus (@PlayboyPlus) August 29, 2019

H/T Vice.