[HN Gopher] A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
___________________________________________________________________
A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
Author : deegles
Score : 390 points
Date : 2021-08-20 12:22 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| nonameiguess wrote:
| At least this explains why normal porn sites keep living on
| perfectly well using MasterCard and Visa. They already have to
| follow regulatory requirements to demonstrate they are complying
| with age and consent laws, each video includes a front-matter
| frame saying where you can get the documentation of their
| compliance, and many include behind-the-scenes extra content
| showing all of the performers presenting government-issued IDs
| and signing consent forms.
|
| This brings this conflict out of the realm of adult entertainment
| and into a broader conflict between incumbent central providers
| that are held to regulatory standards and apps providing a
| platform for individual contractors that don't follow those
| requirements. It's in the same field as people arguing AirBNB is
| only able to exist because it's allowing people to operate hotels
| without having to comply with hotel regulations, and Uber allows
| people to operate taxi services without complying with taxi
| regulations. OnlyFans was giving individuals a way to produce
| adult films without having to comply with adult film regulations
| related to age and consent verification of the performers.
| neaanopri wrote:
| If that's the case why can't OF impose these requirements on
| their creators?
| bob33212 wrote:
| The reason some creators use OF is because of the
| convenience. If you make it takes weeks and tons of work to
| get on the platform, they might as well start their own site.
|
| Also from a legal perspective it is very risky to take on
| that liability for so many creators. All it would take is one
| screw up on checking date of birth on an ID, and now OF is
| accessory to sex crimes.
| relax88 wrote:
| Presumably because of the costs of verification and record
| keeping.
|
| A single adult video studio might have a maximum of a few
| hundred people who they have to keep records for. Those
| people are paid per shoot, and the content is owned by the
| studio. There is a high ratio of revenue to number of people
| whose records must be kept.
|
| On OnlyFans, they have a huge amount of people producing a
| small volume of content and making very little money, of
| which they only get a cut.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Also, they need to view the footage before it's published.
| Studios do this when they're editing it. It's literally
| part of their process. A big one will deal with processing
| four 60 minute videos a day maybe? Onlyfans would
| presummely be dealing with multiple minutes of footage per
| minute of the day they would need to screen.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| That can't possibly be it. We're talking about a billion
| dollars business burning its main revenue source to the
| ground, and the main reason would be that they can't afford
| to do the easily-automated paperwork? The math doesn't make
| sense.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Exactly. It would change OnlyFans from an almost no-
| overhead (just servers and storage) business to one that
| would need a huge increase in staff (payroll,
| offices/equipment, benefits, etc) to do the verification
| reviews, as well as a bigger HR deparment to handle the
| recruitment and hiring of these people. Their overhead
| costs would explode.
| Notanothertoo wrote:
| Uhh pornhub takes btc and ach only
| twic wrote:
| Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over
| the important bit.
|
| > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York
| Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller "The
| Children of Pornhub" that accused the site and its parent company
| of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking.
|
| How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic
| transnational financial infrastructure company changes its
| rules'? In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like
| this purely on the basis of newspaper columns.
|
| Was there legal advice? Political pressure? Regulatory pressure?
| All of those would be much more material than a piece in a
| newspaper.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Specifically the how is covered here.
|
| https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-...
| crazygringo wrote:
| Honestly, in this particular case huge companies _did_ make
| changes on the basis of this newspaper column. It 's not
| common, but it's what happened here.
|
| It was an incredibly visible and influential accusation that
| seemingly came out of nowhere from arguably the most
| prestigious newspaper in the country, and legitimate businesses
| like PornHub and MasterCard are _terrified_ of brand
| association with child porn and sex trafficking -- if those
| stuck, it 's corporate suicide.
|
| You're right that most opinion pieces don't make a shred of
| difference. But this particular one, because of the seriousness
| of the allegation combined with its plausibility, did in a big
| way.
| afavour wrote:
| > in this particular case huge companies did make changes on
| the basis of this newspaper column
|
| Well, they made changes based on the _popular reaction_ to a
| newspaper column. I'm not sure why you'd point fingers at the
| column when the obvious reality is that it simply reflects
| societal norms.
| fouric wrote:
| You say "it's what happened here" and "But this particular
| one, because of the seriousness of the allegation combined
| with its plausibility, did in a big way" - but you haven't
| actually provided any evidence for it, just repeated
| assertions that it's true.
|
| Can you show anything aside from just speculation?
| [deleted]
| speeder wrote:
| https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhcz
| r...
| isoskeles wrote:
| Given PornHub removed a bunch of videos after that article
| came out, it seems reasonable to conclude that either the
| article was responsible, or the article made the idea
| popular enough. At this point, I'm not sure what the
| difference is, but I am sure that people denying the
| article played a role are the ones speculating here.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornhub
|
| > In December 2020, following a New York Times article on
| such content, payment processors Mastercard and Visa cut
| their services to Pornhub. On 14 December 2020, Pornhub
| removed all videos by unverified users.[15] This reduced
| the content from 13 million to 4 million videos.[16]
| throwaway444590 wrote:
| not just pornhub but from all their other sites too. huge
| amount of content vanished
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's literally been all over the news, with journalists and
| analysts directly linking the column with the changes at
| both PornHub in December and at MasterCard in April -- and
| these are the people who follow this professionally. You
| can Google it yourself trivially, you don't need to ask
| someone on HN to get it.
|
| But if you somehow don't trust that and you're asking for
| someone to report on the confidential goings-on of internal
| meetings at MasterCard and nothing else will satisfy you,
| you're not going to get that here on HN.
| navait wrote:
| Ok, well for those of us that didn't read the exact same
| set of articles you did, you sound like a guy making
| stuff up...so send some links.
| angus-prune wrote:
| This article from December 2020 exactly supports what OP
| is saying- https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2020/dec/10/pornhub-mast...
|
| Just like you, I hadn't read the exact same articles as
| GP. But I was able to find this article in seconds on
| google as GP suggested.
| twic wrote:
| > It's literally been all over the news, with journalists
| and analysts directly linking the column with the changes
| at both PornHub in December and at MasterCard in April
|
| This is not evidence of a link. What they have said might
| contain evidence of a link, in which case i'd be
| interested to hear it. But the job of talking heads on
| the news is to construct compelling narratives from facts
| they have to hand, regardless of whether those narratives
| are true, so the fact that they were talking about this
| is just noise.
| btown wrote:
| This was posted in another thread here, but it seems that
| activist investor Bill Ackman was the link in this case,
| and his personal interest (and general notoriety for
| extremely aggressive attacks on companies he believes are
| vulnerable) almost certainly played a part in him making
| this a five-alarm fire at Mastercard:
|
| > Ackman, who has four daughters, was outraged when he read
| how one teenager ended up a Pornhub victim... An
| influential shareholder activist, Ackman immediately
| thought about the growing interest in ethical, or ESG,
| investing... He was friendly with Mastercard's then-CEO
| Ajay Banga, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Ackman
| texted Banga, providing a link to Kristof's story with his
| tweet: "Amex, VISA and MasterCard should immediately
| withhold payments or withdraw until this is fixed. PayPal
| has already done so." ... Banga quickly wrote back: "We're
| on it."
|
| https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhcz
| r...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ackman
| throwaway306744 wrote:
| > businesses like PornHub and MasterCard are terrified of
| brand association with child porn and sex trafficking
|
| With PornHub that makes sense because the type of content
| they provide is the crux of their businesss.
|
| But does anyone care or know what MasterCard is associated
| with? I would not even think to blame PG&E for providing
| electricity, even if the recipient turned out to be doing
| some super illegal things with that electricity.
|
| So I am not convinced by reputation damage to payment
| processors. I am more convinced by unacceptably high
| chargebacks and fraud, but even there it is hard to explain
| the about face that payment processors have made here.
| Curious!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If PG&E weren't compelled by law to provide their services
| to all, I know they would cave to similar pressure w.r.t
| CSAM...
|
| "Your company provided the electricity to take these
| pictures. Now that you know are you going to continue to
| facilitate known predators?"
| NortySpock wrote:
| > But does anyone care or know what MasterCard is
| associated with?
|
| The average layperson would care if MasterCard got hit with
| a headline like:
|
| "MasterCard processed payments for Very Bad People for
| months/years!".
|
| Layperson: Guess I'm calling my congressman and switching
| to Visa!
|
| I assume MasterCard would (a) retain some very good PR
| firms to assist with keeping their image clean and (b)
| distance themselves from anything that might tarnish their
| image, like, well, regular porn websites.
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| Would they though? I very rarely consider which credit
| card processor I'm using - it's what card has the best
| interest/rewards/whatever, or what logo does my personal
| bank use on their debit cards. It's not like I can go to
| my bank and say "I'm done with the mastercard debit card,
| give me your visa debit card please"
| NortySpock wrote:
| > it's what [credit] card has the best
| interest/rewards/whatever
|
| ...and doesn't have a reputation in the toilet.
|
| Would you get a SatanCard(tm)? Generous 10% cash back
| rewards but we make our money by extorting the elderly,
| killing kids, addicting adolescents to hard drugs,
| profiteering on pollution in your hometown, kicking
| puppies on video, and if you die we come after your
| family for the money, regardless of local laws.
| throwaway306744 wrote:
| I bet MasterCard and the others have profited from
| literally everything on your list. They are too big not
| to have.
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| I mean, I know it's not -at all- the same but that was
| kind of a staple for Bitcoin. Hasn't seemed to bother
| anybody...
| saddlerustle wrote:
| The story [1] literally called them out: "And call me a
| prude, but I don't see why search engines, banks or credit
| card companies should bolster a company that monetizes
| sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal
| can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American
| Express, Mastercard and Visa."
|
| [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-
| ra...
| conductr wrote:
| I feel like the better comparison is what happened with
| Craigslist and Backpage. Their elevator pitch business
| model sounded legit but anyone that sniffed around knew
| what the site was predominantly focused on. CL was more
| diversified in terms of site usage, revenue, etc and could
| easily just ban adult services when the heat turned up.
| Backpage was just a front for sex work. There was no
| material classifieds business beyond adult services. A
| small percentage which could potentially be of the
| trafficked variety that brought on the heat. They made some
| dumb choices that contributed to their demise but only
| because of the bullseye that was put on them by the
| trafficking rhetoric. It feels to me like OF has either
| been told an investigation is occurring/likely to occur and
| is trying to soften any future blows -or- they are just
| being proactive knowing that this risk is present and would
| kill their company if it came down to it.
| nindalf wrote:
| > In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like
| this purely on the basis of newspaper columns.
|
| You'd think, but no. In my experience working at a large tech
| company, executives cared a _lot_ about what the _New York
| Times_ in particular thought. A piece published by them would
| have immediate attention from those executives, and it 'd be
| our problem to respond, even if the original article wasn't
| well founded. Once I figured out how much leadership cared
| about NYT, I even justified one engineering decision based on
| "what would NYT say". And it worked.
|
| It doesn't surprise me in the least that MasterCard cares so
| much about what the NYT prints.
|
| > Political pressure? Regulatory pressure?
|
| You're on the right track. If you think (correctly IMO) that
| politicians and regulators read NYT, then pressure from these
| groups is going to come soon after the NYT piece is published.
| Best take action before that happens.
| Terretta wrote:
| I intended to post this, but this is well said.
|
| Such an article is forwarded to "leadership" and "the board".
| Boards in particular, who hire and fire the leadership,
| prefer collecting advisory cheques without getting any side
| looks at the country club.
| dzonga wrote:
| journalists, are in a position of major influence but never
| having skin in the game. these are the same NYT journalists wo
| advocated for the Iraqi war. yet never been to Iraq and speak
| of whiff or arabic. it's a system where itself reinforces, the
| gvt / other actors influence the media and the media influences
| policy. yet those people don't suffer any consequences at all.
| those are the same people at NYT that slandered Bernie and
| propped up HC and wake up amused that Trump won. I'm all for
| freedom of speech, however journalists should be held to a
| higher standard. coz honestly most journalists except the local
| ones doing groundwork are pure scum.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| > Political pressure?
|
| Probably. Hunter Biden had a PornHub account where he uploaded
| incest porn with his underage niece:
| https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/huge-breaking-exclu...
| acdha wrote:
| The other question to ask is whether that piece came out of the
| blue or because someone was talking it up with Kristof. The
| author of that twitter thread thinks it's inspired by an
| evangelical group (Exodus Cry) and it seems highly unlikely
| that they'd only be talking with him. It seems more likely that
| companies like MasterCard are hearing from them, politicians
| who are getting lobbied by their supporters, etc. and the NYT
| editorial was more like the final straw than the trigger.
|
| It's important to note that this isn't wrong or malicious: many
| things most of us approve of (e.g. ending child labor,
| environmental reforms, banning dogfights, etc.) followed the
| same process. The concern is transparency and whether it's
| effective at the stated goals: for example, I think trafficking
| is evil but I also think that the best way to support it is by
| ensuring fewer people are financially desperate rather than
| driving them underground where abuse is more likely and harder
| to prevent.
| xg15 wrote:
| But the thread wasn't defending trafficking. It's claiming
| that the forces that push the anti-trafficking rules have a
| hidden agenda, which is not about trafficking at all: They
| want to get rid of the whole sex industry for religious
| reasons, specifically including the legal and consensual
| part. That's a different goal altogether.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm aware: that's the reason why I mentioned that topic -
| transparency is what helps the reader know why a topic is
| getting a spike in coverage and let's them decide whether
| they share all of the goals of the groups pushing it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The problem with that kind of argument is that these rules
| are what _everyone_ pushes to deter traffickers. No one has
| seriously managed to come up with a viable alternate policy
| that averts this kind of collateral damage on bona-fide sex
| work. It 's much like saying that all the efforts that are
| now saving elephants from being poached to extinction are
| just some shadowy "anti-ivory agenda" rather than being
| undertaken for the sake of the elephants. Terribly bad
| faith argument.
| surge wrote:
| It's the same crap as the ad-pocalypse.
|
| Journalists with an agenda use a disingenuous tactic, if they
| have a problem with a person or entity, they'll call up their
| sponsors, business partners, vendors, etc, and say "we're
| writing an article on X's platform which has been found to have
| (controversial material framed in a negative context), are we
| to believe that you're supportive and would your company care
| to comment." This leads to the company panicking, going
| completely defensive, and killing all contracts, services, and
| pulling sponsors or place of employment from the person whose
| being targeted in what is often just a hit piece with
| unverified out of context accusations. So yes, journalists,
| especially those that work for outlets like the NYT's can have
| someone's sponsors, money streams, etc pulled out from them by
| asking so called "innocent" questions in a passive aggressive
| way. They've done this numerous times not even giving those
| accused to respond, sometimes the article never even comes out.
| It's one of the abuses of power you can see in journalism
| today, where agenda driven journalism is used as a weapon to
| get someone removed from society, bank accounts closed, etc.
| Some targets are too big for it to work, or can lose a few
| sponsors, but they do it all the time.
| bostonalt wrote:
| Defending CP and revenge porn is such an odd hill to die on.
|
| Please tell me what was wrong about the NYT's opinion piece?
| That it painted a visceral picture of a literal child whose
| exploitations continued to be put on PornHub to profit off
| of?
|
| You give a lot of generic accusations without anything
| substantial.
|
| Are you upset that companies now have to answer for their
| actions? Why is that a bad thing? A private company isn't a
| government, if MasterCard or Visa doesn't want to do business
| with certain risk prone sectors why should they be forced to?
|
| Your reason for being upset is frankly odd and extremely
| dismissive of real issues, that companies are profiting off
| of CP, but decide to get upset that a news story can effect
| the public zeitgeist?
| Stevvo wrote:
| Nobody is defending CP and revenge porn.
| dbspin wrote:
| Commenter above isn't defending those things though... And
| in fact revenge porn, CP and other awful content appear
| across all social platforms. And just like Pornhub they
| remove them when notified. Thought experiment, what
| happened to piracy when Napster shut down? What would
| adding subscription options and regulating Napster have
| done. Would it have created spotify a decade earlier and
| disincenvtised the development of Gnutella, bitorrent etc?
|
| Right now we have a moral panic, fuelled by a microscopic
| proportion of content on a site, being used to fuel laws
| and economic exclusion to remove freedom of action from an
| entire industry. The consequences are, if not obvious,
| entirely predictable. Porn will balkanise, and what
| regulation exists (very strict in its production,
| relatively strict in its dissemination) will disappear.
| Sites like only fans being shut down - as with backpage,
| will force sex worker into enormously more dangerous street
| work, and ultimately lead to a vast amount of exploitation.
| And all this will happen, in practice not to protect the
| vanishingly smaller numbers of trafficked women, or
| children who appear on these platforms. But because an
| ungodly coalition of rabbidly anti-porn, anti-sexwork
| Christian fundamentalists, and anti-porn, anti-sexwork
| radical feminists have undue political influence.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| > While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it
| employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about
| 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison,
| Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36
| million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub,
| that means that each moderator would have to review
| hundreds of hours of content each week.
|
| So, this article alleges that MindGeek only hires 80
| moderators to monitor million of videos being uploaded
| each year despite taking in 460 million dollars in
| revenue? That's pretty damning, if true. It's little
| wonder so much is getting through.
|
| You refer to the amount of problematic content as
| "microscopic" and "vanishingly small", but on what basis
| do you believe that? On one hand we have an article
| filled with some pretty horrific examples of abuse being
| broadcast on PornHub, on the other I guess we have your
| gut feeling about this whole thing?
|
| > Thought experiment, what happened to piracy when
| Napster shut down? What would adding subscription options
| and regulating Napster have done. Would it have created
| spotify a decade earlier and disincenvtised the
| development of Gnutella, bitorrent etc?
|
| I don't even know what you're trying to say here. Sites
| like PornHub already adopt a model that fairly closely
| resembles Spotify when you think about it. In any event,
| it sounds almost like you're making the argument that a
| little child abuse is just the price we need to pay for
| innovation. No thanks.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub
| -ra...
| jimnotgym wrote:
| > , this article alleges that MindGeek only hires 80
| moderators to monitor million of videos being uploaded
| each year despite taking in 460 million dollars in
| revenue?
|
| >there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites
| (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000
| moderators).
|
| 'In the last three years, Facebook self-reported 84m
| instances of child sexual abuse material. During that
| same period, the independent, third-party Internet Watch
| Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub.'[0]
|
| Facebook's revenue is about 94 billion.
|
| It makes me feel like Facebook should have around 200x
| the number of mods that pornohub do based on revenue
| (pretty close, well done ph), or 700k more based on
| reported instances of CSAM (nowhere near)
|
| 0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/14/por
| nhub-p...
| atty wrote:
| Because MasterCard and Visa are essentially a global
| duopoly - they most certainly should not be allowed to
| discriminate against any legal industry, even if it is
| extremely high risk. Because that leads to very serious
| harm for people who legitimately work in those industries.
| It should be as hard for MasterCard or Visa to not serve a
| company as it is for a utility to turn off the water to a
| home.
| Gimpei wrote:
| To play the devil's advocate. Let's say a columnist in the
| WSJ wrote a piece with a bunch of first hand stories of
| people who were murdered by ex-cons who had been released
| early. And as a result the decarceration movement was
| stalled. Would you be okay with that? Anecdote focused
| reporting is very manipulative. Aggregate statistics
| matter. Context matters. Knock on effects matter.
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| > _Would you be okay with that?_
|
| What does it even mean to be "okay with that" in this
| context? I certainly think it should be legal for
| newspapers to publish opeds arguing for harsher
| sentencing, just as it should be legal for newspapers to
| publish opeds calling for more lenient sentencing. I am
| okay with both. If I said it was only okay when I
| happened to agree with it, that would make me an
| authoritarian.
|
| All the people hand-wringing about newspapers advocating
| against causes they believe in should spend less time
| wishing their opponents didn't exist, or weren't
| permitted to speak, and spend more time writing advocacy
| articles of their own. If you think anecdotes are more
| effective than statistics, then go dig up some anecdotes
| of your own. You're never going to stop your opponents
| from using anecdotes.
| afavour wrote:
| Let's look at this from the reverse angle:
|
| Did PornHub have revenge porn, child trafficking, etc. on the
| site? Yes. The twitter thread concedes this point. So this
| isn't "just a hit piece with unverified out of context
| accusations". Is that fair game to report on? I'd certainly
| say it is.
|
| If you're going to publish a potentially explosive article
| about something, is it better or worse to reach out to
| sponsors, partners etc proactively to get their reaction in
| the published piece, or should you surprise them with it? IMO
| the former makes sense. To suggest that these sponsors would
| somehow not be at all affected if a reporter didn't call them
| up doesn't match with reality at all. We've seen too many
| viral boycotts to count at this point.
|
| > They've done this numerous times not even giving those
| accused to respond
|
| Well, how long is long enough? If you were _required_ to wait
| for someone to respond before publishing it would be a
| fantastic stalling tactic, wouldn 't it? You could just keep
| putting it off and off.
|
| The problem here, IMO, is twofold: there is a payment
| processing duopoly, and societal mores are still very
| puritanical. These are the cause of the problem, not the
| article. Yes, Kristof wrote an article that resonated with
| those two factors but what's the alternative, not publish
| controversial stories that might have a negative effect?
| rkk3 wrote:
| > Did PornHub have revenge porn, child trafficking, etc. on
| the site? Yes.
|
| Does Facebook have revenge porn, child trafficking, etc. on
| the site? Yes.
| afavour wrote:
| I don't understand the point... journalists shouldn't
| report on child trafficking content unless they catalogue
| every instance of child trafficking content on the
| internet?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Nick Kristof is an opinion writer, not a journalist. His job
| is literally to write _his opinions_ and "The Children of
| Pornhub" piece was published in the opinion section of a
| once-weekly non-news supplemental publication.
| yarcob wrote:
| No. If a journalist asking uncomfortable questions about your
| business endangers your business, then the problem is not the
| journalist, the problem is your business.
|
| If a journalist blows a story out of proportion, then usually
| nothing happens and the story is forgotten after a few
| months.
|
| But in the porn hub story, the uncomfortable truth is that
| there was a lot of involuntary porn on the platform. The NYT
| story just made it a bit harder to ignore that uncomfortable
| fact.
|
| And it's not like mastercard just changed their policy on a
| whim based on a single NYT story; credit card networks have
| always been known to kick all kinds of sex related services
| off the platform. Sex related businesses have been
| complaining about that for ever.
| bko wrote:
| I'm surprised the post didn't mention Operation Choke
| Point, an Obama era regulation that put more restrictions
| on payment processing for certain categories.
|
| I think it's easy to point to "religious groups" and op-eds
| and not to the overall regulatory push into more aspects of
| the economy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
| colpabar wrote:
| from the same article
|
| > On August 17, 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice,
| under the Trump Administration, announced that the Obama
| Administration's Operation Choke Point would officially
| end, stating that it was hurting legitimate businesses
| instead of preventing fraud as intended.
|
| maybe Biden has done something?
| bko wrote:
| Or how NY Times framed it:
|
| > Banks Tried to Curb Gun Sales. Now Republicans Are
| Trying to Stop Them. [0]
|
| Corporations like predictability. When you see
| regulations going back and forth with administration to
| administration, companies just pick the worst case
| scenario and go by that. That's why you didn't see any
| cars lower fuel mileage just because limitations were
| lifted during the last administration. I imagine MC and
| Visa are definitely anticipating more restrictions and
| don't want to be caught flat footed.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/us/politics/banks-
| gun-sal...
| foerbert wrote:
| I'm not sure that reasoning would apply to something like
| payment processing.
|
| It absolutely makes sense when you are manufacturing a
| physical good. No point in designing a thing that you
| might not be able to sell for very long, particularly
| when you're dealing with something like automobiles. Plus
| honestly, which car buyer wants less miles per gallon?
|
| Payment processing though is rather different. You can do
| it today and make some money, and tomorrow you can stop.
| It's obviously not quite so agile, but the point roughly
| holds. Unless Visa and Mastercard require years of
| payments from OF to pay for their costs of starting to do
| business with OF... there's no real point to not doing
| this now. They can stop later if needed without a real
| problem.
| bko wrote:
| They'll preemptivly do it because the revenue is not a
| lot and the headache and worrying is not worth it. It's
| not black and white where something isn't allowed.
| There's likely more hoops you have to jump through. When
| it does get enforced its easier to just say we don't
| allow any transactions in that an even broader category
| than is currently being targeted.
|
| And there isn't a button that says "exclude all payments
| in category [X]" that they can click and the next day
| they're cut off. It takes time, especially in a giant
| organization where there might be different regulations
| based on the content, jurisdiction, etc.
|
| So it absolutely makes for them to cut it off
| preemptively.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| There's a difference between asking uncomfortable questions
| and asking loaded questions that misrepresent reality. The
| description of the CSAM & revenge porn issue in mainstream
| media painted the picture that this was a substantial
| portion of the site's content. In reality few would ever
| encounter such content, and PornHub did everything feasible
| to try and remove and report it. No joke, outlets
| highlighted the fact that "dozens" of instances of this
| kind of illegal content was found as though this was some
| kind of epidemic. The fact that incidents measure in the
| dozens, when 6.8 million videos were uploaded to the site
| in 2019 alone[1] strikes me more as testament to the rarity
| of this content.
|
| 1. https://www.pcmag.com/news/pornhub-reveals-explicit-
| traffic-...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > ...and PornHub did everything feasible to try and
| remove and report it.
|
| That's demonstrably not true, since PornHub _did do more_
| in response to the mainstream media coverage (e.g.
| finally require some kind of age verification for
| uploaders and purge unverified content).
|
| The only way they could be contextualized to have done
| "everything feasible" is within a _fundamentally flawed_
| model that they created, but it 's precisely that model
| that needed to be reformed.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I stand by what I actually wrote: that they did
| everything feasible _to remove and report illegal
| content._ Having more extensive verification of uploaders
| does not an expanded effort to remove and report illegal
| content that gets posted, but rather an effort to prevent
| said content from being uploaded in the first place. And
| as you pointed out, this comes with tradeoffs in the form
| of a more onerous sign up process.
|
| To be even more pedantic, they still haven't done
| everything they can do: they could shut down their whole
| site and eliminate 100% of illegal material with 100%
| confidence. Which, I suspect, is the goal of those
| propping up the narrative that PornHub was some sort of
| wild west where child pornography was welcome.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I stand by what I actually wrote: that they did
| everything feasible to remove and report illegal content.
|
| I mean they didn't even do that. Wasn't their enforcement
| team pretty small? The original op-ed said it was ~80
| people. In any case it was inadequate.
|
| > but rather an effort to prevent said content from being
| uploaded in the first place.
|
| PornHub chose a model that made it impossible for them to
| deal with their illegal content problem. The distinction
| between legal an illegal porn is often too subtle for any
| solution that just looks at the content or relies on
| "someone else" to do the work for them. That's the core
| issue. It's like a factory that dumps toxic waste into a
| river, and then "solves" that problem by building a
| little filtration plant far downstream of the factory
| that only filters a fraction of the river water, just
| upstream of some city. Their solution _can 't_ work, for
| reasons that should be obvious. The only solution that
| has any chance of working is filtering the waste before
| it goes into the river at all, and that's essentially
| what PornHub has started to do with their more-thorough
| vetting process.
|
| Businesses don't have the right to make compliance
| optional or inadequate if it doesn't work for their
| business model. They have to pick a business model that
| can be compliant.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| >Businesses don't have the right to make compliance
| optional or inadequate if it doesn't work for their
| business model. They have to pick a business model that
| can be compliant.
|
| Not to be snarky, but isn't the the SV business model.
| Facebook 'are not a publisher', because editors cost too
| much. Uber are 'not an employer', because proper benefits
| cost too much..etc ad infinitum
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Doesn't make it OK
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Not to be snarky, but isn't [that] the SV business
| model. Facebook 'are not a publisher', because editors
| cost too much. Uber are 'not an employer', because proper
| benefits cost too much..etc ad infinitum
|
| I totally agree with you, it is. Responsibility is a
| barrier to scaling and other selfish goals, so their
| "clever hack" is to try to be as irresponsible as they
| can get away with.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| For the second time, out of the tens of millions of
| videos on the platform critics found illegal content
| numbering in the dozens. Their enforcement was sufficient
| to drive down illegal content to literally one in a
| million rate of occurrence. Weighted by number of views
| on videos, it's probably an even smaller fraction of
| that. The filter was sufficient to make illegal content
| something that the overwhelming majority of people -
| almost everyone - will never see when using their
| platform.
|
| By comparison, critics described pornhub as:
|
| > Human beings of all ages, races, genders, and
| sexualities are being abused while Pornhub pockets
| profits from selling said abuse and exploitation online.
| It's nearly impossible to stress strongly enough the fact
| that these cases are far from anomalies.
|
| https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-
| Inclusion.pdf
|
| This is utterly disingenuous. If dozens of instances out
| of tens of millions isn't an anomaly, what is?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > For the second time, out of the tens of millions of
| videos on the platform critics found illegal content
| numbering in the dozens.
|
| Can you say that was all of it? Frankly, I don't see how
| anyone can have any confidence that PornHub's previous
| moderation practices were effective. Some of the stuff
| they have to remove is too hard to detect without context
| which is not present in the content itself. Also, those
| practices put the onus _on the wrong party_ (e.g. forcing
| someone who had illegal or otherwise improper videos of
| themselves uploaded to find them and play whack-a-mole as
| they got reuploaded).
|
| > The filter was sufficient to make illegal content
| something that the overwhelming majority of people -
| almost everyone - will never see when using their
| platform.
|
| And now they have an _even more effective_ filter.
|
| And you're twisting the goalposts: "the overwhelming
| majority of people" aren't going to seek out illegal
| content, so talking about what the "majority sees" is
| actually ignoring the problem.
| smsm42 wrote:
| In a perfect world where all people are rational, and the
| media is largely truthful and professional, politicians are
| incorruptible and bound by laws, and businesses love to
| take care of their clients - sure, it may work that way.
|
| In a real world, where people are prone to moral panics,
| the press is driven by clicks and agendas, politicians are
| corrupt and routinely abuse power, and businesses love to
| cover their asses - a single accusation in anything sex-
| related could cause a lot of damage to any business,
| whether truthful or not.
| crdrost wrote:
| Thank you. Hearing these stories I always feel like
| commenters treat the companies involved as having no real
| agency.
|
| "Of course the New York Times article came out, so even if
| the information was sensationalized or whatever, MasterCard
| had to cut them off... It was out of MasterCard's hands..."
| No, they made a political-humanitarian choice to use their
| gatekeeping to influence the world. Same with Apple
| choosing to go to war with CSAM, we can talk about worries
| about their methods or whatever but these big companies are
| making their own choices and they could choose to just
| ignore the problems with marketing spend, do like Amazon
| does and purchase ads about how green they are and how they
| improve local communities and whatever. They chose to
| instead take their own moral stances and act accordingly,
| they weren't forced to by some article. And as far as I can
| tell it's not a purely calculated profit move either.
|
| For that better OnlyFans and PornHub also have agency. So
| yes MasterCard is making a decision to put financial
| pressure on a sleazy industry overall, but then PornHub is
| making their own choices to screw over indie creators and
| bank on their bigger porn producers. They could instead
| say, "hey, the indie porn market is about to face this
| stressor, we could lean into it and become their main ally
| and then we will basically corner the market on the
| indie/amateur stuff as others flee." The business case is
| not at all open-and-shut you-must-screw-over-the-indie-
| producers. The story link above acts like this decision was
| forced; that decision is not forced upon them either.
| OnlyFans doesn't _have to_ stop doing adult content. They
| are _choosing_ to pivot away, we 'll see if their choice is
| successful.
| antattack wrote:
| "If a journalist blows a story out of proportion, then
| usually nothing happens and the story is forgotten after a
| few months."
|
| This heavily depends on the audience. For example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) or
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
| pc86 wrote:
| What exactly is the dog whistle here?
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| It's easy to criticise the article in general terms, but what
| specifically did you find problematic with the article
| itself?
|
| Go ahead and have a read, I'll wait.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-
| ra...
| neolog wrote:
| The article uses innuendo to suggest that nonconsensual
| videos were extremely popular on the platform and that its
| proposed policies will improve performers' conditions.
| These questions are not seriously examined, but the article
| is focused on sensational stories and big numbers while
| skipping context and consequences.
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-
| war...
| arp242 wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with the article (from memory, I
| read it some time ago), the problem is going from "there is
| a small minority of users who abuse user-generated content
| platforms" to "zomg, this platform is a horrible and
| encouraging all sorts of illegal things!" One does not
| follow from the other. The problem with the article isn't
| that it exposed a problem, that part was excellent
| journalism, the problem is also that it advocated for all
| sorts of companies to boycot PornHub, as well as being
| laced with a kind of accusatory attitude towards PornHub I
| don't much care for, almost as if PornHub themselves
| uploaded the videos.
|
| The same problem exists on YouTube, Twitter, reddit, and
| even Hacker News to some degree. Of course, being a text-
| only platform makes the scope a lot less dramatic, but I've
| seen some people advocate for violence against certain
| groups and the like. I'm sure dang can tell you about some
| of the horrible things he's had to ban people for.
|
| This is a difficult problem to solve, I don't really have a
| good solution for this, I'm not sure if anyone does. I do
| know that private companies acting solely in their own
| interest acting as custodians of what is and isn't allowed
| based on what does and doesn't generate "negative
| publicity" is most definitely not a good solution.
|
| How often do we see "{YouTube,Apple,Google,...} blocked my
| account and is threatening by business and I don't have a
| good recourse"-stories on HN? Too often, and those are just
| the ones that manage to get publicity. There is often no
| good recourse to address mistakes or really get a good
| impartial judgement on things that might be on the border.
|
| You might say "these are private companies and can reject
| the customers they want, you don't have a right to do
| business with them", well, fundamentally I don't really
| disagree with that, but a lot of these companies are
| monopolies or duopolies they can really have a big impact
| and even make basic participation incredibly hard or even
| impossible. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, but again, it
| doesn't seem to me that we really want to leave it up to
| private companies acting in their own interest to make
| these kind of decisions.
| bjourne wrote:
| You don't seem to be talking about the article that was
| linked to in the comment you replied to.
| [deleted]
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I don't disagree with the article overall, but it is very
| sensationalized. Statements like this
|
| > It is monetizing video compilations with titles like
| "Screaming Teen," "Degraded Teen" and "Extreme Choking."
| Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching
| for "She Can't Breathe."
|
| imply Pornhub is going out of it's way to specifically
| monetize rape or child videos, when the truth is they
| monetize every single video on their platform. If it was as
| easy as creating some sort of child or rape filter and de-
| monetizing those videos as the sentence seems to imply they
| should be doing, they would just remove the videos
| entirely, not de-monetize them.
|
| And the bit about related suggestions sort of implies to a
| non-techie that Pornhub employees are generating these
| suggestions, and it's not the only place in the article
| they make this point.
|
| The reality isn't an evil mustache-twirling Pornhub
| employee sitting at a desk and brainstorming "Ah yes, if
| they searched for 'Young Asian' they probably want to
| search for 'young tiny teen. The reality is an algorithm
| detecting patterns in user searches, and some of those
| users are sick people, and there's basically no level of
| human moderation of videos or search terms happening at the
| scale of usage Pornhub gets.
|
| Sentences like
|
| > Mindgeek's moderators are charged with filtering out
| videos of children, but its business model profits from sex
| videos starring young people.
|
| Implies that Pornhub is getting a substantial amount of
| it's profit from illegal porn, which I highly doubt is the
| case and the article provides no evidence of.
|
| Again, I agree overall with the content of the article, and
| approve of Pornhub's reaction to only allow verified videos
| (which was suggested by the article). I'm not angry at
| Nicholas Kristof for sensationalizing some things, as it
| appears that is what it took to actually make something
| happen. But the article is definitely skewing towards
| misleading in some sections to get more reach.
| afavour wrote:
| This all seems extremely hand-wavey to me.
|
| > the bit about related suggestions sort of implies to a
| non-techie that Pornhub employees are generating these
| suggestions
|
| They are, in a sense. They're not actively doing it in
| person but the code they wrote is generating those
| suggestions. Changing the code is within their power, yet
| they don't. If the code processing payments accidentally
| started charging everyone $0 you can bet it would get
| fixed pretty quickly. Why not fix the code that suggests
| rape videos?
|
| > The reality isn't an evil mustache-twirling Pornhub
| employee sitting at a desk and brainstorming "Ah yes, if
| they searched for 'Young Asian' they probably want to
| search for 'young tiny teen. The reality is an algorithm
| detecting patterns in user searches, and some of those
| users are sick people, and there's basically no level of
| human moderation of videos or search terms happening at
| the scale of usage Pornhub gets.
|
| "We created a feature that can be actively harmful, but
| there's no way for us to moderate it. Oh well!". Wouldn't
| it be better to just... not have that feature? Why isn't
| it an option to just turn it off?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > Why not fix the code that suggests rape videos?
|
| None of those titles say rape or child in them, and the
| article already covered that they have a blacklist of
| search terms. Ever played a videogame with a censored
| wordlist for profanity? People will still find a way to
| call you a racial slur, even if it involves some really
| creative uses of text to get around the filter.
|
| > Wouldn't it be better to just... not have that feature?
| Why isn't it an option to just turn it off?
|
| Related searches in a search engine is a pretty core
| feature, and it's not like it prevents people from just
| coming up with related searches with their own mind and
| typing them in manually. And your statement sort of
| applies to every facet of Pornhub. Uploading user
| submitted videos can be actively harmful. Comments can be
| actively harmful.
|
| Edit to respond to this bit:
|
| > Changing the code is within their power, yet they
| don't.
|
| I'm pretty certain it's not just taking search term and
| running it through a thesaurus or something like that. It
| likely correlates searches from users that make similar
| search terms. The code isn't really generating any
| suggestions, just aggregating correlated search terms. I
| don't have hard proof of this of course, but it's a very
| common implementation for related searches.
| twic wrote:
| > Why not fix the code that suggests rape videos?
|
| Deciding what is and isn't rape is an AI-hard problem.
| afavour wrote:
| So it being difficult is enough to absolve the company of
| responsibility?
| 55555 wrote:
| Pornhub literally hasn't even let you search "rape" in
| years. Go ahead and search it. 0 results. This precedes
| the now infamous editorial. Same with "forced" and
| "brutal".
| PastaMonster wrote:
| The problem is real amateur porn were kicked out because
| many feared to get verified which means people seek other
| less reputable sites to upload their videos on. Sites
| which some don't care about if it's legal or not like
| pornhub did and of course people will flock to sites that
| provide what pornhub destroyed. So many shady porn sites
| will get an income boost from what pornhub did in panic.
| Would you consider that a win since you agree with the
| verified only move? I definitely don't. It was a very bad
| move without any consideration of the consequences.
| You're supposed to support good sites. What pornhub was.
| Now it's just filled with professional garbage. I've been
| on these sites and stumbled upon illegal stuff. I never
| did that on pornhub. Nicholas Kristof only made the
| problem much worse. Journalists never consider the
| consequences. They only care about writing hit pieces.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Pardon the editorial / rant but we need to all mitigate our
| promotion of newspeak (read: language abuse).
|
| Point here being, anyone doing this is not a journalist; the
| scenerio described is not journalism. In using the word it
| belittles and compromises the trust in legit journalism. And
| it gives the violators the privilege of the label without
| actually doing anything to live up to the definition of the
| word.
|
| If your pet barks, do you call it a cat? It's not fair nor
| honest to call this type of schlock journalism.
|
| While not bulletproof, this filter is handy.
|
| https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| How is it HN can be relentless about accuracy and
| completeness but constantly allows newspeak to be
| normalized?
|
| Yes. It does matter. Words matter. We can't giving a free
| pass to deceptive language and then expect change.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Before you wrote this manifesto, did you read the entire
| article by Kristof? I didn't think it came off as anti-sex,
| and I disagree with some of the points made by the OP.
|
| I think that the MC and Visa duopoly that effectively governs
| what kinds of goods and services are permitted in society is
| immoral and concerning. I think the Kristof article and the
| Visa/MC issues need to be talked about separately.
| justinator wrote:
| That's quite the axe to grind against journalists. Especially
| since their job is to ask questions. To think they're a part
| of this mass conspiracy to take powerful entities down is
| laughable.
|
| My partner, a journalist, has gotten death threats just by
| being at peaceful protests against certain groups that have
| wealth and pull in the community - just because members of
| that org were certain the journalist was the main
| provocateur. It's just absolute paranoia. But it is a tell
| isn't it? Maybe the rich and powerful should be worried about
| the common people learning about some truth that they invest
| a lot of resources to keep secret?
|
| Also I think you may have to look and see how much
| journalists make. To be so entrenched in a mass conspiracy
| that takes down whole networks of industry, I'd negotiate a
| better salary then the equivalent of $20/hour.
| antattack wrote:
| Right, we should blame people who actually decide what gets
| published, not the messenger.
|
| It's the publisher and owners who make that choice. In fact
| on occasion some publishers acquire exclusive rights to a
| story just to bury it:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/national-
| enqui...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Also I think you may have to look and see how much
| journalists make. To be so entrenched in a mass conspiracy
| that takes down whole networks of industry, I'd negotiate a
| better salary then the equivalent of $20/hour.
|
| This is like arguing that hooligans engaged in vandalism
| are virtuous because they're not millionaires.
|
| You're failing to distinguish between journalists
| publishing a balanced truthful article in which the truth
| makes someone look bad, vs. "nice business you've got
| there, shame if someone were to publish a hit piece in a
| major media outlet."
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > Especially since their job is to ask questions.
|
| That's a stretch. What else will you have us believe? That
| the New York Times intends to be a politically neutral
| voice of reason? No, sir. Maybe in the 1950s, maybe before
| the Internet, in those halcyon days when newspapers had a
| good slice of the nation's ad money and lots of competitors
| and earned money by attracting from a broad swath of
| readers to earn money from ads -- instead of reliably
| enticing specific kinds of readers to pay for their
| content. [2]
|
| The job description of contemporary journalists, and
| _especially_ journalists at the New York Times, is to build
| narratives(tm) and use them to influence the world. That 's
| what you'll learn about pursuing a modern journalism
| degree, and that's what will get you career success at the
| Grey Lady -- doubly so since the Trump election. This is
| not a conspiracy theory against "the media" or even a
| secret; the Times has overtly published opinion articles to
| this effect [1], declaring this approach to journalism
| righteous and good, the appropriate approach for our times.
|
| Maybe they're even right, and even if they're not, at least
| they're not Fox! But we're a long way from just "ask[ing]
| questions."
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-
| fairness... to start with; one can find others, see also
| general coverage of the trends in pieces like
| https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-
| report...
|
| [2] From the City Journal piece above: "The intent of post-
| journalism was never to represent reality or inform the
| public but to arouse enough political fervor in readers
| that they wished to enter the paywall in support of the
| cause. This was ideology by the numbers--and the numbers
| were striking. Digital subscriptions to the New York Times,
| which had been stagnant, nearly doubled in the first year
| of Trump's presidency."
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The job description of contemporary journalists, and
| especially journalists at the New York Times, is to build
| narratives(tm) and use them to influence the world.
| That's what you'll learn about pursuing a modern
| journalism degree, and that's what will get you career
| success at the Grey Lady -- doubly so since the Trump
| election.
|
| No, you're conflating different things. That's the job of
| an op-ed columnist, _which is what Nicholas Kristof is._
| And frankly, that isn 't new. It's been true since the
| invention of newspapers. An op-ed columnist the
| equivalent of a modern-day pamphleteer.
|
| The news section is different, and it's job is to report
| facts. The news and opinion sections are run as totally
| different organizations in well-run newspapers, because
| their objectives are so different.
|
| Also, City Journal is even more ideological and biased
| than the New York Times.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > The news section is different, and it's job is to
| report facts. The news and opinion sections are run as
| totally different organizations in well-run newspapers.
|
| You have definitely described an ideal. It's a reasonable
| ideal, even when those who follow it fall short. But do
| you actually contend that this ideal is shared by those
| at the _New York Times_ and do you feel your words
| describe their newsroom accurately? That is the specific
| paper before us, after all.
|
| > Also, City Journal is even more ideological and biased
| than the New York Times.
|
| Perhaps so! Sometimes this is a positive feature; those
| who are biased do have an incentive to investigate facts,
| and uncover the truths their enemies would prefer to
| remain hidden. No doubt that this has been a major reason
| for the New York Times' success with their coverage on
| Trump, which contains many damning facts.
|
| Is this a positive feature insofar as this article on
| OnlyFans is concerned?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Perhaps so! Sometimes this is a positive feature; those
| who are biased do have an incentive to investigate facts,
| and uncover the truths their enemies would prefer to
| remain hidden. No doubt that this has been a major reason
| for the New York Times' success with their coverage on
| Trump, which contains many damning facts.
|
| It's an interesting observation that the people who have
| an axe to grind about, say, the New York Times being
| "biased" very frequently do not live up to their own
| purported ideals of neutrality nearly as well as the NYT
| does (i.e. the critics are hypocrites who are salty that
| someone dares to speak a different opinion than them).
| ditonal wrote:
| Thanks for saying the hard things others are afraid of
| saying. It's difficult to watch gems of American
| journalism flushes down the toilet in the name of
| activism such as the NYTimes. You're right, its not a
| financial conspiracy, it's an ideological one.
| Journalistic standards used to be about getting facts
| straight. Now it's about narrative building.
|
| The NYTimes fired an editor for publishing an opinion
| piece by a sitting US Congress person because that
| opinion upset people. And this is supposed to be the
| crown jewel of journalism and has turned into Huffington
| Post. Your downvotes and others defending modern
| "journalists" are delusional.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It doesn't require a conspiracy, the parent postulates a
| single journalist at a prestigious publication.
| mcphage wrote:
| Well, in this case, it was an opinion piece, not a
| journalist. And they definitely do have an axe to grind.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| If a specific journalist has an axe to grind they don't
| need to be part of a larger conspiracy to ask damaging
| questions.
|
| There are some people that enjoy the power trip of forcing
| the hand of large companies, and there are others that will
| get behind a cause dogmatically and are capable of
| inflicting extreme damage -- no conspiracy required.
|
| That is what I suspect happened with that NYT piece,
| because its depictions of PornHub were distorted and off-
| base. And the damage stretches far and wide.
|
| And judging by the Twitter thread this seems to be the
| case.
| [deleted]
| throwaway306744 wrote:
| > My partner, a journalist, has gotten death threats
|
| Sorry that happened to your partner.
|
| I am surprised that death threats are still around. Is it
| not actually a crime or is anonymity so good that law
| enforcement can't trace them or do the recipients or police
| just not bother following up?
| jfengel wrote:
| It's the latter two. It's generally out of the
| jurisdiction of local police departments, and the FBI
| doesn't have anywhere near the manpower to take every
| threat seriously.
|
| Personally, I'd really like to see them put at least a
| little effort into it, to send the message that it is in
| fact illegal and you take at least some risk. As it is,
| people often make no real effort to disguise themselves,
| but get away with it because no authority cares enough as
| long as they don't commit actual violence. So they can
| shut down speech with impunity.
| mbesto wrote:
| > To think they're a part of this mass conspiracy to take
| powerful entities down is laughable.
|
| I agree with your overall sentiment, but the fact that a
| journalist may make $20/hr is all the more reason for
| motivating them, _individually_ , towards uncovering mass
| conspiracies. In other words, a large scandal no matter how
| true or not that garners a lot of attention is sure to lead
| to potential writing prizes, more compensation, bonuses,
| etc. So while I don't think every media company has some
| grand Murdoch-like figure that can play individual
| journalists like puppets, I do think there is a lot to be
| gained by an individual journalist leaning towards being
| overly harsh.
| barnacled wrote:
| >huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the
| basis of newspaper columns.
|
| The same newspaper ran similar tactics against YouTube which
| resulted in colossal changes. These kinds of stories have an
| enormous impact, magnified I think by company's (in the case of
| YouTube, advertisers, in the case of OF, payment providers and
| investors) being terrified of snowballing bad PR in social
| media.
|
| It's strange but in the modern world yes, 'old media' can have
| transformative impact on corporations.
| hulitu wrote:
| it has nothing to do with media. They just use the media to
| justify their strategy.
| varelse wrote:
| All it took was one useful billionaire...
|
| https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr...
| throwawayay02 wrote:
| Insane.
| ectopod wrote:
| That's the problem with wealth inequality: outsize wealth
| comes with outsize political power. The money doesn't matter.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Mickelwait, however, says there was a "fatal flaw in that
| they put a download button on every video." Under current
| law, any site that transfers pornographic content is
| responsible for verifying the age of the people in it.
|
| > "Because they had a download button that actually transfers
| from their servers onto the devices of millions -- I think it
| was up to 130 million a day in 2020 -- of visitors to the
| site, they have been responsible this whole time for record
| keeping. So what that means is they violated the criminal
| code of the United States millions of times, tens of millions
| of times," she says.
|
| Is this actually true? How is streaming not transferring
| under the law?
|
| Edit: This article is also interesting in that it
| characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without
| mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry,
| which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > How is streaming not transferring under the law?
|
| I'm not sure if this has been tested in courts, but there
| seems to be a legal theory that a streaming function
| corresponds to broadcasting (only creating transient
| copies, if any, by default) while a download function
| corresponds to publication (creating a permanent copy by
| default). I'm not sure which definitions apply to 2257, but
| US copyright law says that _copies_ are "material objects
| [...] in which a work is fixed". So if your system is only
| designed to transfer into volatile/transient storage, you
| can apparently argue that you're not responsible for
| creating _copies_. I suspect a similar distinction is being
| made here.
|
| > Edit: This article is also interesting in that it
| characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist"
| without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of
| Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among
| other things.
|
| This kind of laundering is common in opinionated outlets,
| and ostensibly neutral ones aren't immune either. Keep an
| eye out for sources being described with phrases like
| "concerned parent" or "concerned resident", for example.
| shrimpx wrote:
| This is straight out of Silicon Valley the show, when
| they're giddy to see their daily active users skyrocket,
| only to realize that it's become a pedophile haven and
| they're liable for billions of dollars in back fines.
| webkike wrote:
| According to the thread
|
| > Which, to be clear, they kinda were. PornHub was notoriously
| bad among the tube sites for its reckless lack of content
| moderation and exploitation of the people whose videos ended up
| there. Because of the story, Visa and MasterCard both cut
| PornHub off.
|
| This should be fairly easy to verify and would corroborate the
| thread
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| NYT article came out on Friday, December 4.
|
| By Thursday of the next week, December 10th, Visa and MC had
| cut them off. Discover had followed the next day, the 11th.
| The Washington Post article linked below includes a statement
| from MC which reads:
|
| "Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed
| violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on
| their site. As a result, and in accordance with our policies,
| we instructed the financial institutions that connect the
| site to our network to terminate acceptance."
|
| See: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/pornhub-
| crack... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/
| 10/pornhub-m...
| dqv wrote:
| Rumor has it that OF is the next target of Exodus Cry
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry
|
| " Exodus Cry is a non-profit advocacy organization seeking
| the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including
| pornography, strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex
| trafficking. The organization originally developed out of a
| weekly prayer group founded in 2007 by Benjamin Nolot, a
| filmmaker and member of the charismatic Christian
| International House of Prayer."
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| As an interesting aside, the Christian International House
| of Prayer was a substantial mover behind the proposed
| Ugandan law to execute LGBTQIA+ people.
| sschueller wrote:
| Maybe we should get a law passed making it illegal to fund
| any non-profit church with a credit card...
| hulitu wrote:
| You cannot abolish the church.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| In the churches of which I've been a member, most tithes
| and donations come in cash. More orthodox Christians
| won't even have credit cards because the consumerist
| nature is contrary to scripture.
| sschueller wrote:
| OK, we pass strict money laundry requirements for non
| profit churches.
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes, there was funded pressure; see the tweet thread.
| ballenf wrote:
| I'd never heard of Exodus Cry mentioned in the thread, so
| looked at their website. They seem to have made themselves a
| target of accusations from Pornhub as a result of the NYT
| article. Here is their statement on the site that addresses
| some of the things presented as fact in the Twitter thread:
|
| https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf
|
| I'm sure there's much more to the story, but thought it worth
| at least looking at the vision, etc. from this company given
| the accusations made against them.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| You could say that the NYT piece was the spark that eventually
| led to the rule change. I doubt someone read the column and
| made the rule change immediately, but it probably sparked
| dialog within MasterCard that eventually led to the rule
| change.
| hulitu wrote:
| Or was paid by these people to justify the purge.
| ehsankia wrote:
| The tweet that comes right after is much more relevant imo:
|
| > One of the primary sources in Kristof's article is
| Traffickinghub founder Laila Mickelwait. She also works for
| the group Exodus Cry, a Christian group that is among other
| things anti-sex, anti-homosexuality and, naturally, anti-
| semitic.
|
| While the article itself was a spark, this group has been
| lobbying for years and pushing from every imaginable
| direction, including lobbying payment processors and suing
| companies left and right. So yes, the article was just one
| tiny piece of the puzzle, but Exodus Cry is the real puppet
| master.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Are they anti-semitic, or is it just ad hominem?
| profgerm wrote:
| I'm not terribly familiar with the group, but that whole
| list appears to be ad-hominems demanding absolute purity.
| Or at the very least should be taken with a _large_ grain
| of salt.
|
| I suspect the "anti-Semitic" bit comes from the founder
| comparing abortion to the Holocaust [0], which is... a
| deeply stretched interpretation.
|
| As far as anti-LGBT goes... yeah, they're a conservative
| Christian organization, they're not likely to have a
| Pride float. But it's not a common "anti-" group that
| goes out of their way to have a Statement of Inclusion
| [1] included in their FAQs, in my opinion.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry
|
| [1]: https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-
| Inclusion.pdf
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Child sexual exploitation is pretty much the worst thing you
| can do as far as society is concerned. Such people are
| considered low in prison.
|
| So I think the possible brand damage alone could have caused a
| panic, simply because this particular type of damage could be
| absolutely horrendous.
| relax88 wrote:
| This is how:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Trafficker...
| plusbryan wrote:
| Agreed. Onlyfans is probably large enough that if they told
| their customers they could only accept visa or crypto payments
| that they would lose a lot less business than if they
| jettisoned their (core?) business.
|
| In fact, MasterCard might lose enough business that they might
| reconsider. So this can't be the full story.
| jarcane wrote:
| It's not entirely _just_ because of the NYT article, but the
| article was the big PR victory for a massive and almost
| entirely fabricated campaign against Pornhub run by a religious
| wingnut masquerading as a human rights activist.
|
| Kristof's piece wasn't the first I'd heard of the
| "Traffickinghub" campaign but it seemed to be the first time a
| _lot_ of people around me did.
|
| What wasn't widely known at the time was that basically all
| their "data" was either exaggerated or outright fabrication,
| with near-zero sources, and backed by religious
| fundamentalists. That didn't start coming out until the damage
| had already been done.
|
| "Won't somebody think of the children?!" works every fucking
| time though.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| There's more money to be made as an acceptable platform that
| isn't seen as a porn site. Many women on Twitch already do
| sexualized streams. Twitch is not seen as taboo.
|
| It's just a bigger market when people can feel like they aren't
| a complete sex worker, and can actually share that they are on
| OnlyFans, same way they can share their Twitch.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The not being seen as a porn site ship has sailed for
| OnlyFans.
| cm277 wrote:
| Genuine question: are the payment processors legally exposed
| because of the _purpose_ of transactions going on in their
| system? If so, this seems to be the main problem --I mean if
| social media platforms can absolve responsibility for content,
| Mastercard /Visa absolutely should as well....
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The issue is that EU and Australia have regulated interchange
| fees for MasterCard/Visa, costing them gobs of money and
| value.
|
| The US doesn't need to fine or litigate them if they want to
| penalize them heavily, they can just pass a "consumer
| protection bill" (so Walmart and others can pay <1% instead
| of ~2% on _all_ credit card payments).
| hocuspocus wrote:
| The interchange goes to the card issuer, not to the scheme.
| Visa and MasterCard fees are the smallest part of the
| overall fee charged by the payment processor. (That said it
| might be higher in the US, I don't know).
| JackFaker wrote:
| Works mostly the same in the US
| Scoundreller wrote:
| A lot of the incentive to pay by card evaporates if the
| vendor pushes the fee to the customer.
|
| The incentive to issue cards evaporates when there's less
| fee to collect.
|
| Both would be bad upstream for visa/Mc/Amex.
| masklinn wrote:
| > How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to
| 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company
| changes its rules'? In my experience, huge companies do not
| make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper
| columns.
|
| The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are
| concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid
| governments getting up their grill.
|
| By acting "proactively" on anything which smells of
| controversial or bad PR (and nothing does that more than
| accusations of child trafficking, not even actual child
| trafficking), regulators see "self regulation" and go look at
| something else.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i think what they were really afraid of was a grass roots
| boycott. It's very easy for a consumer to cut up a mastercard
| and just use their visa. It's virtually impossible for a
| business to say "we accept all cc's except mastercard".
| aerosmile wrote:
| Very insightful comment. When you run a gazillion dollar
| company, you don't care about a billion here or there from
| porn sites, you care about not losing your gazillion dollar
| business. There are plenty of examples where CEOs were not
| conservative enough and it cost them big time - just look at
| Facebook's loosey goosey approach to political advertising,
| which in the end turned the entire country against them. From
| a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial
| hit but continue to run your business without any additional
| regulatory oversight.
| masklinn wrote:
| > From a business perspective, it's better to take a small
| financial hit but continue to run your business without any
| additional regulatory oversight.
|
| Indeed, staying on the down low and out of regulator minds
| (and crosshairs) is one of those "cost of doing business"
| things older companies do.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are
| concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid
| governments getting up their grill.
|
| The actual profit in this specific case might be small but
| there are lot of money in things related to adult content.
| They are all now looking for a trustworthy processor. Also
| even for non adult content lot of people will prefer having
| payment processing partner who will not kick you out based on
| some newspaper image. There are lot of grey area in most of
| the business, specially the biggest ones.
| vlunkr wrote:
| That's the first leap in logic, the second is this:
|
| > The new MasterCard rules are a direct result of this, which
| basically means an overwrought Christian anti-sex fever dream
| is now dictating sexual content online.
|
| That's right, the state of everything was "dictated" by a guy
| writing an article.
| ehsankia wrote:
| The article itself was also a side-effect, not the source.
| Exodus Cry has been lobbying everyone such as payment
| processors, rich donors, advertisers, as well as NYT (getting
| them to write the article).
|
| So article wasn't the source, it was just another piece in
| the path of Exodus Cry's rampage. They have a huge legal team
| and they've been attacking this from every imaginable angle.
| hulitu wrote:
| So the article was paid and that in itself is no problem ?
| ehsankia wrote:
| I didn't claim it was necessarily paid, just that they
| were convinced or tricked into it. The piece itself isn't
| problematic at the surface, putting an end to human
| trafficking is a good thing, it issue is the people
| behind the organization and their motives, which NYT
| either didn't know or ignored.
| tootie wrote:
| I understand the thread, but if Kristof's reporting is
| accurate, then you can hardly blame him. He's not responsible
| if payment providers decide to freak out over potential
| liability. Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their
| creators.
| neogodless wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428584131835748359.html
| zucker42 wrote:
| I can't even read the whole page without logging in. I wish
| people would stop using Twitter as a long-form blogging
| platform.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It would be great if people could submit tweet threads in
| threaderapp, or the mods could have a policy of threadifying
| tween threads by default the way they fix titles and so forth.
| ianai wrote:
| Agree. Twitter threads are pretty illegible and supposedly
| communicating well is in this sites objective.
| gammarator wrote:
| Thanks. Twitter has apparently taken a page from Reddit's
| playbook and won't let me view the whole thread on mobile
| without downloading their app.
| partido3619463 wrote:
| Switch to any other mobile browser (even on iOS) and the
| prompt goes away.
| raoa wrote:
| This is a country where it's practically illegal to hire 13 year
| olds to work in flower shops, which is the sort of gig apt to
| teach a whole lot of commercially useful stuff. This is with or
| without parental consent. Maybe that is the sort of freedom
| people should get worked up over first?
| rendall wrote:
| I've never heard a good argument against prostitution. The
| arguments that I hear are against trafficking, rape, child
| molestation; which are all non-sequiturs: true and valid
| statements that do not support the argument itself.
|
| Can anyone here argue against prostitution per se? I'll listen.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| A generic argument: prostitution allows woman without any
| skills to earn plenty of money which might convince women do go
| this way even if they don't really enjoy it.
|
| The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell
| their private parts, programmers sell their brains.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Earning money without enjoying it is what coalminers and
| rubbish-collectors do. People who enjoy their jobs are the
| lucky ones.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Having an intellectually stimulating job and enjoying it is
| a real luxury.
| daptaq wrote:
| One aspect I find frightening about interpreting prositution
| as a "real job" is that women could be denied unemployment
| benifits if they reject a job that would involve them selling
| their body and their consent.
|
| > The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell
| their private parts, programmers sell their brains.
|
| I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to
| "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just
| providing their body to be used. They are competing with
| puppets and animals (e.g.
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpdnp7/yo1-v14n10), and are
| as such reduced to objects potentially beyond human dignety.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| This is a great argument for Universal Basic Income, or
| some other system that allows people to choose not to work.
|
| It's naive to think that there aren't people being
| pressured into "selling their body and their consent" to
| work that is generally considered moral.
|
| > I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool"
| used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually
| just providing their body to be used.
|
| GP's argument was poorly stated. It's more genuine to
| compare sex work to hard labor. There is the risk of
| physical harm (STDs/injuries), a low barrier to entry
| (attractive and have a camera/in decent shape and can get
| to/from work), is considered by many as demoralizing (gross
| prostitute/dumb factory worker) but also glorified by many
| (high-class escort/blue collar backbone of our country).
|
| In what ways is it truly different for someone to be denied
| unemployment benefits for rejecting a hard labor job than
| it is for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for
| refusing to be a sex worker (prostitute)?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > One aspect I find frightening about interpreting
| prositution as a "real job" is that women could be denied
| unemployment benifits if they reject a job that would
| involve them selling their body and their consent.
|
| Imagine vegan denying butcher work. It's not wildly
| different, I guess? I think that laws should allow some
| flexibility in choosing work, when it comes to unemployment
| benefits. And questionable jobs should not even be offered.
| hulitu wrote:
| As an enginer you are sometimes reduced below human
| dignity.
| [deleted]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > true and valid statements that do not support the argument
| itself
|
| How about the argument that if prostitution is legal, it's
| possible for an illegally coercive (trafficked) business to
| pose as legitimate; whereas if prostitution is not legal, any
| appearance of prostitution can warrant scrutiny.
| nybble41 wrote:
| Too broad. "If selling jewelry is legal, it's possibly for a
| fence to pose as legitimate; whereas if selling jewelry is
| not legal, any appearance of selling jewelry can warrant
| scrutiny."
|
| Some people offer things for sale which they don't have any
| right to sell. That doesn't imply that those who _do_ have
| that right should be prevented from exercising it just to
| make things easier for law enforcement. You do more direct
| harm by unjustly prohibiting the activity than you stand to
| (possibly) prevent.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It's said to objectify women. More specifically, the Johns are
| treating women's bodies as something that can be traded
| commercially. The more that is normalised, the more it damages
| all women - not just prostitutes.
|
| If you don't think objectifying women harms them, then that's
| not a "good" argument, I guess.
|
| FTR, I'm against laws controlling consensual sex. Not all
| harmful behaviour should be criminalised.
| neolog wrote:
| Bodies are used commercially all the time, such as in manual
| labor, physical therapy, disability care, security, policing,
| military service, athletics, dancing, commercial modeling,
| ...
|
| The problem that's particular to sex work is legal systems
| that fail to prevent coercion. This is exacerbated by
| religious advocacy groups that try to make sex work harder
| without making it safer.
| wruza wrote:
| It seems that you equate sex to manual labour, when it is
| one of our important biosocial functions (if not the
| central) that involves much more complex reactions and
| distortions at all sides (a prostitute, a client, an aware
| neighborhood/society) than kicking a shovel into the dirt
| or massaging a muscle. It's always baffling how some people
| try to render it as just a mechanical process akin to
| workout and/or blowing a nose. If it's kind of the same,
| why hiding it from kids and not serving clients right on
| the squares, like hotdog stands do.
|
| gp: _The more that is normalised, the more it damages all
| women - not just prostitutes_
|
| I'd argue it damages society as a whole. Even if
| prostitutes and all women could be fine and safe by some
| magic mean, distorted concepts of a "succesful social
| woman" hit men back as well.
| neolog wrote:
| I don't equate sex to manual labor, they are of course
| different. But it won't do to reduce manual labor or
| disability care to "kicking a shovel into the dirt"
| either. Each of the physical occupations I listed plays a
| critical social role and involves the mind and body of
| its occupants in a unique and significant way. See
| Metaspencer's critique on this point, "what is a
| knowledge worker".[1]
|
| Much of the criticism of normalizing sex work seems to be
| masking a motivation based in religious morality which
| considers sex shameful. I believe that adequately
| protected professionals can be successful in sex work,
| just as they can in other fields.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDXPkor-Wxk
| slippery_bridge wrote:
| Paying somebody to do something physical and paying
| somebody to physically use their body are two completely
| different things
| [deleted]
| neolog wrote:
| I don't think that distinction is useful on this
| question. Lots of non-sex physical work involves just
| being present, and lots of sex work involves skill.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Prostitution leads to higher rates of STDs. Even with STD
| testing, you cannot wait between each client, get a test, wait
| for the results to get back, and then get a new client. That
| would take days and you'd make no money.
| throw_awa123 wrote:
| This is just an opinion from a real world example:
|
| I've done some stripping when I was young. I did it because my
| gf was doing it and was making a lot of money. This was the
| only way we could make good money without breaking the law.
|
| I've met the most broken and scummy people there is during that
| time. It ultimately broke our 7 year relationship. You pay an
| emotional price for making easy money. You have to be very
| stable to be able to endure that kind of work over time as you
| deal with a lot of broken people doing very intimate work.
| Drugs are very accessible and an easy fix to deal with the
| emotional toll.
|
| People who can work in this industry for more than a year and
| leave unhurt probably belong in the 1% IMO.
| lishzen wrote:
| Yours is a short question to make, but it requires a very long
| answer, not fit for a comment box. The negative consequences of
| prostitution are deeply personal because the effects of sex on
| the participants go deeper and last longer than the effects of
| the act of copulation. If you want a good argument against
| prostitution one route could be to understand the link between
| sexual expression and: intimacy, self esteem, love,
| relationships...
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| "I've never heard a good argument against injecting heroin. The
| arguments that I hear are against overdose, shared needles
| leading to infectious disease, and destitution and poverty;
| which are all non-sequiturs."
|
| You've completely removed all the main "negatives" of
| prostitution, saying those aren't "real arguments."
|
| While it's possible that heroin injection and prostitution may
| be done in a safe and clean way, the reality is extremely far
| from that in both cases.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I've heard plenty of good arguments against using heroin.
| It's extremely (and immediately) addictive. Recovering from
| that addiction is nearly impossible for most people.
|
| Even if a person safely uses it, and can safely and legally
| maintain their addiction, heroin is inherently harmful to
| that person.
|
| Is sex work (prostitution) inherently harmful? I don't think
| so. Sure, there are plenty of closely related things that
| _are_ inherently harmful, but sex work can be done without
| them.
|
| There is the idea that because heroin use often involves
| second-order effects like shared needles, overdose, etc. that
| it should be prevented. The reality is that most efforts to
| _prevent_ heroin use tend to make these second-order effects
| more prevalent.
|
| Recently there has been a movement to decriminalize drug use,
| including heroin. The idea is to replace measures that work
| to _prevent_ heroin use with measures that work to help
| people overcome heroin addiction, and safely use heroin in
| the mean time. This way, we fight the second-order effects
| directly, which is much more effective.
|
| It's a similar story with sex work. Many efforts to
| decriminalize sex work still have the end goal of getting
| people to stop engaging in it. This is in contrast to
| legalization, which would _promote_ sex work while working to
| minimize the second-order problems that are common to black
| market sex work.
|
| This is the crux of GP's question: Is there any good reason
| _outside second-order effects_ to get people to stop doing
| sex work? I personally am convinced there are none, though my
| conservative Christian parents disagree.
| hume_annoyed wrote:
| You act as if heroin and sexwork are in two different
| universes. They are in the same universe and they overlap
| quite a lot. You can be pro-sex without being a Pollyanna
| about it across the board. Things happen in both domains
| that don't fit either the happy model or the doomful one.
|
| Edit: you say recovering from heroin addiction and second-
| order effects are all negative as if sexwork has no impact
| on, for example, human relationships, and while I like some
| of the thought that went into your post, it still reads as
| a bit absurd.
| detcader wrote:
| The best argument "against prostitution" is the moral argument
| against consuming it: you don't and _can't_ know if the person
| you're paying for is too poor or too wasted to be able to
| choose to participate, or if they're being threatened with
| violence into participating by a pimp, for example. Coerced
| sexual activity with another person is r-pe (as opposed to,
| say, working at Burger King, which might be coerced by the need
| to survive but is not r-pe.) Enjoying r-pe is wrong.
|
| If you don't think coerced sexual activity is r-pe, or you
| don't think that enjoying r-pe is wrong, the argument falls
| apart, of course, which is why this comment section is the way
| it is.
| neolog wrote:
| Do you think enjoying the product of all coerced labor is
| wrong, or only sexual coerced labor?
| neutronicus wrote:
| The usual argument relies on:
|
| "On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a
| greater incidence of human trafficking inflows."[1]
|
| The increased demand for sex work in the wake of legalization
| results in more people forced into involuntary sex work,
| despite the presence of legally-protected sex workers.
|
| [1] https://papers.ssrn.co/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065
| draw_down wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude but this is hopelessly naive. This
| isn't MasterCard engaging in a marketplace-of-ideas good faith
| debate. This is using whichever tactics work to score points
| against whatever you're trying to defeat. Thus the junk about
| CP, trafficking etc.
|
| I would hesitate to even describe this as politics 101, it's
| more like what students understand before they walk in the door
| of politics 101.
|
| If someone says "your mom is so fat she sits around the house",
| you don't retort with an accurate measure of your mother's BMI
| paired with a series of astute points about how it's impossible
| to compare an adipose human body with the size of a dwelling.
| Like... seriously
| cblconfederate wrote:
| how is onlyfans prostitution?
| hhsub wrote:
| Saying that the evangelists are anti-Semitic is laughable. If it
| wasn't for the evangelists in America, Israel would not have the
| billions in military aid they get from the US every year and the
| country wouldn't exist today. Not to mention how insane it is to
| bring up anti-Semitism for absolutely no reason at all. Being
| "against sex" may be stupid, but... anti-Semitic?
| thepasswordis wrote:
| MasterCard doesn't want to process payments for child pornography
| which only fans hosts.
|
| The argument for payment processors having too much power was had
| over a decade ago when they everybody stopped allowing donations
| to Wikileaks.
|
| No, they shouldn't have that power, it should be the courts who
| shut down only fans by jailing the people who work there. But I'm
| also not going to shed any tears over some people who willfully
| exploit children losing their ability to make money from it.
| GDC7 wrote:
| By the same token we should shut down the internet, the USD and
| also credit cards because CP use them.
|
| CP also breath air, time to make it illegal?
|
| There is no point foregoing privacy if authorities don't even
| try to precisely target bad actors but decide to nuke the whole
| area with a 100 Megaton Tsar Atomic Bomb instead
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Philosophers and legal theorists over the centuries have have
| come up with the concept of "proximate cause"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause) for these
| types of discussions.
|
| Essentially, there was recognition that ALL kinds of things
| could be seen as connected to a bad thing. But for the
| miners, we would not have extracted the iron ore that was
| used to make the steel that was used to make the firearm that
| was used to shoot the victim, etc. So "proximate cause" is a
| discussion of whether or not the _degree_ of connection is
| close enough to make the blame ridiculous or not.
|
| Not really taking a side in this debate here. Simply pointing
| out that just coming up with a slew of "but for" causes is
| not a libertarian trump card for everything. Societies and
| systems can rightfully draw the line somewhere more
| reasonable.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| wikileaks the terrorists who hate me and their entire
| contribution to journalism is "did you know people die in
| wars??? or did i blow your mind please give me more money" give
| me a break.
| imperistan wrote:
| Postcultrev says the rules about proving consent etc make it a
| lot harder for small indie producers. But is it really that hard
| for them to prove consent and identity for a small number of
| performers? I suspect that's a lot harder for a bigger platform,
| right?
| detcader wrote:
| "Think of the suffering, destitute indie producers!" is sex-
| positive activsts' way of turning liberals, usually sympathetic
| to the exploited, into pro-capitalist libertarians on the topic
| of porn/prostitution specifically
| tablespoon wrote:
| > "Think of the suffering, destitute indie producers!" is
| sex-positive activsts' way of turning liberals, usually
| sympathetic to the exploited, into pro-capitalist
| libertarians on the topic of porn/prostitution specifically
|
| That propaganda tactic is probably more effective in that
| area than any other, but it's not exclusive to it. It's
| basically an attempt to hide a large system of exploitation
| in the shadow behind a very narrow sympathetic story, and
| that's standard operating procedure for people who create
| those exploitative systems (see also: gig work, child labor,
| etc.).
| throwawayswede wrote:
| I'm not knocking down anyone's decision for how to earn money or
| spend their time, but the porn industry in general (corporate or
| indie) is notorious for exploitative attitudes and behavior,
| whether it's Pornhub exploiting unverifiable nature of some
| videos and favoring turning a blind eye to the whole thing until
| tension mounted, or a someone being in a relationship with
| someone else and doing videos together because god knows how much
| fucked up shit they've been through by the time they became 18.
|
| I'm not in favor of big corporations, but in this case, the rules
| made by Mastercard seem sensible to me, and I'm not surprised
| that the Pornhub/Onlyfans are gonna position themselves as "being
| forced by the big companies to abandon the creators they
| support".
| cataphract wrote:
| Aren't the payment processors not abusing their dominant
| position, like what happened a decade ago with Wikileaks? At
| least at that time they had the excuse they were pressured by the
| US government. What's motivating them this time? Do we need some
| sort of liability safe-harbor for payment processors?
| gadders wrote:
| Payment processors have been doing this for a while with anyone
| politically controversial as well. Now people have realised
| they fold to public pressure, you just need to start
| complaining about your own pet cause to make it happen.
| elmo2you wrote:
| These large international payment processors, with their almost
| mafia/cartel-like rules and influence, have a long history of
| being used by powerful entities do enforce policies that would
| otherwise be (and in many cases actually are) illegal.
|
| Their behavior certainly goes way beyond their legal mandate,
| if not in the USA then for in other countries. Certainly
| arbitrary, within international context all but certainly
| illegal. Considering the impact that have had around the globe
| with their abuses, arguable even covert state terrorism.
|
| However, they are essentially untouchable. Any substantial
| threat to these companies will have several huge economies
| instantly through all their persuading power at whomever may
| cause pose that threat. I don't see that changing as long as
| these companies are such a convenient tool, in a system where
| literally everything is ruled by capital (how conveniently).
|
| But the system will erode itself, step by step. Until it does
| come to a collapse. Good luck with that day, for I hope to not
| live to see it happen (it won't be pretty).
| thrower123 wrote:
| Regardless of any legal safeguard you might legislate into
| place, it's radioactive PR to be associated in any way with sex
| trafficking and child porn.
| cataphract wrote:
| I'm not sure it is. When people hear "PornHub is
| disseminating / profiting off revenge porn", does anyone
| think "shame on their payment processors"? I think the
| outrage is directed at the operators of the websites
| themselves.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| People with only outrage won't think about their payment
| processors. Those with outrage who think through their
| options to enact change will think of their payment
| processors, and direct group pressure on them.
| jandrese wrote:
| Has anybody in history ever said "I'm cutting up my
| MasterCard because this porn site takes it!"
|
| Organizing a boycott like that seems almost impossible.
| There just isn't enough realistic competition and going
| back to paper checks is just not happening, especially
| online.
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| I'm very skeptical that anyone would think through this
| scenario and arrive at boycotting an entire payment
| network. Not just PornHubs bank, or payment processor,
| but an entire credit card network. And of those that did,
| I doubt it would be a big enough group for Mastercard to
| even notice. Unless that 'someone' is a major institution
| like Bank of America, or the federal government.
| thrower123 wrote:
| It doesn't take many people to agitate, if they are
| sufficiently unpleasant and noisy and can't be easily
| written off as cranks.
| emaginniss wrote:
| Some of this is going to come down to legal liability.
| Someone who suffers because of child or revenge porn at OF
| or PH might realize that there isn't enough money at those
| companies and will instead direct lawsuits at "the
| companies that enabled the behavior." Even if unsuccessful,
| the legal fees could be enormous.
| [deleted]
| foodjinn wrote:
| They did the same to Cody Wilson's patreon alternative and Dick
| Masterson's NewProject2 using the exact same verbiage too.
| jmull wrote:
| I'm sorry, but blaming all this on a NYT opinion piece is
| idiotic.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| The payment processors banned MindGeek soon after that NYT
| article. Do you think that was a coincidence? MasterCard's new
| rules appear to be a direct response to the concerns the
| article raised. Is that coincidental?
| throwaway444590 wrote:
| while that is true mindgeek sites still take mastercard. if i
| am not mistaken mastercard never left them just asked for
| stricter control.
| jmull wrote:
| And your theory is that a progressive journalist is calling
| the shots as Mastercard? I'm pretty sure MC would look a lot
| different if that were true.
| dboreham wrote:
| The BBC is claiming responsibility:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58273914
| [deleted]
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I believe his argumentation that this is a push by Christian
| organizations might be correct, but I believe he's deluded in
| that he appears to think that he's speaking for the majority.
|
| "65% of adults in the United States identified themselves as
| Christians."
| InTheArena wrote:
| His entire argument seems to be "because people who are
| involved in this are christian, it's evil". Or alternatively,
| this one guy at the NYT, wrote a article that I claim to be
| opinion (and ignoring the role played by the BBC and others).
|
| Pornhub was actually peddling in CSAM and revenge porn, and
| rape being sold to consumers. They are cracking down on
| payments, because of the reputation risk, and plain old
| morality. This has the risk of pushing some sex-workers into
| less safe avenues. We can debate this - and there is a healthy
| debate about that.
|
| But in modern media, you don't just need facts to make a
| opinion, a group that is a outgroup that you can attack is also
| necessary. Hence this article.
|
| hence this article.
| retrac wrote:
| It's more complex than that. For one thing the current porn
| industry does have some ethical issues. Even people not opposed
| to pornography per se have issues. But beyond that, the
| zealously anti-porn crowd isn't just Christians. It's something
| of an unholy alliance -- you have more than a few ultra-woke, a
| smattering of the Q crowd type, and of course the good ol'
| fashioned core of Catholic and Baptist types. Plus no doubt
| some others.
| soupbowl wrote:
| I love that every time Christianity is brought up on HN
| someone throws out the Q crowd. I have chatted with a number
| of Q people and they were not Christians and non of them were
| for restricting porn, that is out of their 'scope'.
|
| Q on your side is the antifa of the other side, just a name
| for an nondescript group you disagree with.
| retrac wrote:
| I did not think they were. I do think the Q types are a
| moral-religious movement, or moral reference framework, of
| some kind in many ways. Perhaps sucked up by the void
| caused by the decline of mainstream Christianity in
| America. Just as the far-left progressive equality crowd
| (antifa, if you will) can be at times. That's why I made
| the comparisons.
| hulitu wrote:
| The thing that the "christian" industry does also has ethical
| issues. In a lot of countries church has engaged in raping of
| children and child abuse.
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| You're right, I've read numerous articles and editorials in
| the NYTimes about this issue.
| umanwizard wrote:
| You can freely buy alcohol in Turkey, a 90% Muslim country.
|
| 65% of people saying they're Christian in a survey doesn't mean
| 65% of people are part of the most strict faction.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > Americans' membership in houses of worship continued to
| decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in
| Gallup's eight-decade trend. [1]
|
| That Pew survey suggesting 65% are Christian seems vulnerable
| to the halo effect - a little irony is present in the name.
| People who were conditioned as children to believe they ought
| to believe in Christianity (which is different from believing
| in Christianity) will answer 'yes' to such a survey question
| even if their measurable actions like church/mosque/synagogue
| attendance or OnlyFans donations indicate differently.
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-
| falls-...
| swiley wrote:
| Most Christians I know are against legislating morality because
| that could result in the government being involved in the
| church.
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| Where is the demarcation line between "legislating morality"
| and simply "legislating"? Murder is morally wrong, aren't
| laws against murder thus legislating morality? I don't claim
| to know many christians, but the phrase "legislating
| morality" isn't in the common vernacular of those I know.
| They advocate for what they believe in, and advocate against
| that which they oppose, the same as anybody else.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Most Christians I know are way more myopic than that.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| There are many Christians, and the people you know are not
| an adequate random sample for statistical inference in
| general.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The concern that various kinds of legal sex work might be a de-
| facto haven for human trafficking is at least many decades old,
| does not solely or even mainly originate from people identifying
| as Christians, and seems to have a pretty solid factual basis -
| at the very least, there is a consensus on the broad argument if
| not the details. The Twitter thread does not even attempt to
| fairly acknowledge these facts. Very sad and disappointing.
| watwut wrote:
| I was looking at it and it honestly does not seem to me so well
| founded. The human trafficking's claims are often ridiculously
| inflated. Or simply every prostitute is counted as trafficking
| victim. The claims are made, articles written and then it all
| dies as no charges are dropped. On more crazy side, humans are
| supposed to be trafficked in cupboards and what not.
|
| And those claims are in fact used to crack down on prostitution
| and sex work in general - like a backpage crackdown.
| paulgb wrote:
| I looked into the history of anti-trafficking movements when I
| was deciding what I thought of SESTA/FOSTA, and I came to the
| conclusion that "true" anti-trafficking movements have been
| hijacked by moral crusaders who realized that attaching "anti-
| trafficking" to a law was a way to make it palatable to
| legislators beyond just a smaller group. Human trafficking is
| not a made-up issue, but these groups do nothing but harm to
| the real anti-trafficking cause.
|
| I agree that it is not just the Christian right who has engaged
| in this, though. Famously, boxer Jack Johnson was charged for
| human trafficking for driving his girlfriend across the border.
| Their consensual relationship fell into the "immoral" bucket by
| the standards of the time because it was interracial.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It's also worth calling out specific instances like
| FightTheNewDrug and Operation Underground Railroad who have
| deep ties to Conservative Christian (Mormon) ideology, and
| are often called out by sex positive groups.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| Is it worth continuing to push sex workers into illegality,
| thereby putting them in danger?
|
| Put another way, do we have a right to sacrifice one population
| to protect another? Allow me to doubt it.
| pcbro141 wrote:
| Is it really the case that most OnlyFans girls would turn to
| more dangerous things like prostitution?
|
| It kinda feels like OnlyFans has somewhat
| normalized/popularized young women going from Instagram
| 'influencer' (sometimes starting underage unfortunately, HS
| kids use it) to pornstar, for young women who otherwise
| probably wouldn't have entered the world of porn if it
| weren't for the fact that the hot Instagram girl -> monetize
| IG popularity via OnlyFans porn pipeline hasn't become so
| normalized.
| dmantis wrote:
| I think those are young women, going from webcam and porn
| studios to their own indie production, receiving more money
| from their work and removing shady guys who organized porn
| studios both from production and their cut.
|
| Everybody won there.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Think of it the other way around. Sex workers can finally
| go "legit" via OF and can stop fucking random people.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| On the street, sex workers compete with the local
| availability and even the most expensive workers are
| limited by time alone. On the internet, the have (had?)
| to compete with the prettiest and best people in the
| business and these people can have far more customers. So
| I honestly doubt that there is much mobility between
| these two jobs.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| I have personal experience: the fan base starts with ex
| clients and there all sorts of promotional techniques.
|
| A friend of mine did exactly that. She isn't rich but she
| can pay her bills.
| wruza wrote:
| Most of them can't do nearly as much as of when fucking
| people full time, and most of that part can't even make a
| living on OF. It is unlikely "the other way around",
| considering insights available out there.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| See my comment above. I think your comment is pure
| speculation.
|
| It's true the money is less but they begin paying taxes
| and generally go down a road of self improvement, getting
| off drugs, etc.
| giantrobot wrote:
| If a girl goes from Instagram to OnlyFans willingly and is
| getting paid...why should anyone judge her or care? How is
| that any different from her making videos about video games
| or revising books and making money?
| pcbro141 wrote:
| You are asking the difference if my 18 year old daughter
| posts pics of her butthole that will be on the internet
| for life, versus making videos about video games?
|
| I think she is more likely to potentially regret the
| butthole pics vs the video game videos being out there on
| the web for life.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| And she might say something homophobic in her video game
| video. Which is more embarrassing?
|
| Have you considered that she might live a full life
| _without_ regretting the decision?
|
| The fact that someone is likely to have regrets after
| doing something is no reason to outlaw that thing.
| giantrobot wrote:
| If your 18 year old daughter posts pictures of her
| butthole that's her choice. My question was why is porn
| somehow worse than videos about video games or book
| reviews. What if your daughter makes videos about games
| while wearing skimpy clothes? What if her book reviews
| are about trashy lurid romance novels? Where's your line
| for prudishness? Individually you may not want your
| daughter doing it but if she chooses to, or more
| importantly someone else's daughter chooses to, who are
| you, I, or other random people to shame them for doing
| so? It's their buttholes (and bodies) and they can do
| what they like with them.
| didibus wrote:
| The reason she'd regret the latter is because society
| would shame and bully her for it.
|
| Sometimes morals are the devil, and it is so in this
| case. Logically, there is no physical or mental harm,
| unless others choose to inflict it as a result of doing
| something they consider immoral and want punished.
|
| Even in the case of CSAM I read this is often used to
| blackmail the child into continued exploitation. They'll
| get one photo out of pretending to be someone of the same
| age and all that, and then they'll get more by
| blackmailing the child that if they don't they'll send
| the photo to their parents, friends, and all that. The
| child has already learned that what they did was wrong
| and that people will make a big deal out of it. They fear
| the moral repercussions more than to continue along with
| the exploiter. That's messed up.
|
| In my opinion, this same morality is also responsible for
| the illegal market around sex work and its bad
| conditions. Because it puts the workers and/or the
| exploited into a corner, with everyone against them, on
| one side there's the exploiter, and on the other side the
| moral police. That makes it that sex workers have no way
| out.
|
| If sex work wasn't moralized, and was just work like any
| other, you'd be able to see the clientele improve, since
| more normal people would pay for the service, where as
| now it's only people willing to break through the morals
| that do so which tend to be sleezier. And you'd see the
| work conditions improve, as workers could mobilize,
| freely hop from one employer to another, go to the police
| when they need to report bad conduct or abuse, file a
| lawsuit against their employer, etc.
|
| But it would take more than legalization, it would need
| to become morally inconspicuous and accepted as just
| another normal thing. Until that happens, well, yes,
| you're totally right, it would be regrettable to post a
| photo of your butthole online, as society will shame you
| for it big time. In fact, it doesn't care if you post it
| yourself voluntarily, or if you are exploited into
| posting it, or if your ex-boyfriend posts it out of
| revenge, you'll get shamed and punished by society
| equally on all cases for it. That's where I feel society
| is responsible, we create the opportunity for harm by
| making it shameful.
| mola wrote:
| Human psychology
| pcbro141 wrote:
| It's natural to not want your 18 year old daughter
| posting butthole pics on the internet. She could very
| well come to regret doing that later in life.
| hulitu wrote:
| Then you should educate your daughter. At 18 years old is
| a bit late. And last but not least at 18 years old is her
| life (age of maturity/consent) in a lot of (european)
| countries.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| >do we have a right to sacrifice one population to protect
| another?
|
| You're doing that one way or the other. The question is
| merely which one should be protected and which sacrificed.
| relax88 wrote:
| I think it's more about whether shutting down adult content
| on sites like OnlyFans actually does anything to reduce sex
| trafficking or abuse.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| We know this is the case because there are some
| documented cases. It's just a matter of whether this
| groups size and weight is worth sacrificing the other.
| thendrill wrote:
| Problem is that sex work is a very wierd exempt from current
| social norms. We do not like meritocracy but we do agree that
| hot young women can make a lot of money just because they
| were born this way.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Is it worth continuing to push sex workers into illegality
|
| If that's the price to pay in order to rescue vulnerable
| people who are being exploited and trafficked, very much so.
| Sex work is a decadent luxury at best; human freedom and
| agency are worth so much more.
|
| > thereby putting them in danger?
|
| There's no proof that legitimate sex workers are being "put
| in danger". They might be de-facto forbidden from engaging in
| that line of work, but there's a solid rationale for such a
| policy; it might just be the best we can do given our broader
| circumstances.
| Jcowell wrote:
| The question is, is criminal regulation better than legal
| regulation? Are sexually trafficked victims truly helped
| when this work is criminalized rather than heavily
| regulated ?
|
| To me it's like how some states try to combat Teen
| pregnancy and abortion by teaching abstinence instead of
| proper health education and provide accessible resources.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's no known way at present to regulate sex work in a
| way that keeps traffickers from coercing their victims to
| work for their benefit. Many countries outside the U.S.
| have tried and failed to do this. Maybe you can make the
| case for a teeny tiny niche of specialty services, too
| specialized to ever appeal to the traffickers; but even
| if that was in fact viable it's extremely hard
| politically to argue for such a thing.
| relax88 wrote:
| Companies can barely be expected to protect your personal
| data.
|
| Now imagine you're a cam girl who has provided your drivers
| license picture to a website and now it has leaked and
| thousands of thirsty lonely men have your home address.
|
| This isn't even a made up scenario, it has happened with
| multiple cam sites.
| subpixel wrote:
| > Is it worth continuing to push sex workers into
| illegality
|
| I find this argument perfectly compelling with regard to
| 'traditional' definitions of sex work. Legalize and
| regulate prostitution, just like the Dutch.
|
| But I also have no problem with strict regulation of
| platforms for user-generated explicit content. The argument
| that Onlyfans performers constitute a group that needs
| protecting from regulation holds less water than the
| argument that kids need protection from exploitation. And I
| don't just mean trafficking - I consider a platform that
| attracts minors and enables them to monetize sexual images
| of themselves to be exploitative.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| The author lost me when they started the Christian bashing. The
| author lumped all Christians in with the organization cited in
| the original NYT article, which is just as prejudice as those
| for which they're claiming to defend (prostitutes).
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I agree that lumping Christians in is a problem, as is
| ignoring secular influence in anti-sex lobbying groups.
|
| How might you edit the article to remove the "Christian
| bashing" while also being clear about the influence of
| Christian conservatism on the topic?
|
| How can we make a clear distinction while also being clear
| about the anti-sex ideologies that come directly from
| Christian conservatism?
|
| Is there a specific secular influence that is worth pointing
| out here that the article missed or glossed over?
| throw3849 wrote:
| Every US porn site needs to keep record of models, release forms
| etc.. This has been problem for a long time, for example old VHS
| tapes do not usually comply.
|
| OnlyFans and other sites were in violation of these rules for
| very long time.
|
| Edit: fix typo
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > OnlyFans and other sites very in violation of these rules for
| very long time.
|
| I think the big problem is actually with fairly recent changes
| in how the rules are applied (and maybe to the rules
| themselves, not just application) to intermediate distributors
| between the producer and the consumer which has _caused_
| existing sites to have compliance issues.
| throw3849 wrote:
| OnlyFans is still a pornsite and should comply. Pornhub has
| the same producer/subscribers model and is doing fine.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Pornhub has the same producer/subscribers model and is
| doing fine.
|
| Pornhub is, from what I understand, very much _not_ doing
| fine. For reasons directly related to the same kind of
| verification issues.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Regardless of the CSAM issue, regardless of the "revenge porn"
| issue, even for fully legitimate performers these publishers such
| as OnlyFans and Pornhub are acting as digital pimps skimming
| billions of dollars from the value provided by their users. We
| should be promoting FOSS alternatives that allow performers to
| truly own their own content and control who profits from it. Not
| crying over the takedown of another walled garden big tech
| aggregator. They are no different than the sleazy strip club
| owner who takes a cut of his dancer's tips.
| busymom0 wrote:
| This might be a good time to discuss whether payment processors
| should have the ability to restrict legal trades (CP is a few bad
| apples). This applies to things like sex work and porn but also
| censorship of political views.
|
| I think it's stupid to pay for porn when there's so much
| available for free but who am I to judge what people do with
| their money and body as long as it's consensual adults? Plus if
| we are to enjoy the free stuff, we also gotta make sure the
| content creators get paid. Cuties was allowed but onlyfans isn't
| okay?
|
| Also this tweet thread doesn't seem honest imo. It seems more
| like a political attack against christians. The author wants to
| lump all christians as one but doesn't want that to be done to
| all sex workers? As someone who's lived in both Hindu and Muslim
| majority country, the whole anti sex work and anti porn thing
| isn't a Christian exclusive thing. Anecdotal but my Christian
| side of friends and family are very tolerant of gay and porn
| unlike my Hindu and Muslim ones back home.
|
| The Tweet author thinks Nick Kristof is right wing? I can't take
| this thread seriously if the author can be so blatantly wrong for
| political purposes.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| > I think it's stupid to pay for porn when there's so much
| available for free
|
| > if we are to enjoy the free stuff, we also gotta make sure
| the content creators get paid
|
| What do you mean by "paying for porn" versus "make sure the
| content creators get paid"? Do you mean pay content creators as
| directly as possible, rather than paying
| distribution/publication platforms?
| smhenderson wrote:
| I read that as "I'm not going to pay for it but we need to
| make sure some people have the ability to pay so I can
| continue to enjoy it for free"
| nszceta wrote:
| There is no room for discussion. Your civil liberties are being
| eroded with this measure.
| krapp wrote:
| Don't say "there is no room for discussion" on a discussion
| forum, it's obnoxious.
| deegles wrote:
| I recently learned the term "thought-terminating cliche"
| and this is one! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-
| terminating_clich%C3%A...
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| This is a recurring theme...the twitterverse clings to the notion
| that any oversight of the adult industry will drive sex workers
| underground. What's not being said is that the young, white male
| userbase of twitter are the primary consumers of onlyfans and are
| just hiding their prurient tastes behind the unassailable shield
| of civil liberties.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| after_care wrote:
| How far away is crypto from being a viable alternative payment
| processor? The problems I see are the translation layer between
| fiat and crypto, the fluctuation of value of tokens, the long
| confirmation process of many tokens, the environmental impact,
| and the physical infrastructure (atms, etc). Each individual
| problems seems solvable, and it would be a significant historical
| event if banking was moved to these decentralized platforms.
| treebot wrote:
| We are mostly there.
|
| Environmental impact is mitigated by newer proof of stake
| tokens. Cardano, Solano, Polkadot. Also, Ethereum is moving to
| proof of stake eventually as well.
|
| Slow confirmation times are also solved by these same coins.
| Even ETH with proof of work has a quick confirmation time.
| Also, for payments over the internet, confirmation time is not
| a big deal. It's more an issue when buying something in person.
|
| Price fluctuation is an issue, but we do have stablecoins.
| However, there are only a few.
|
| We do need ATMs, but that also does not matter for online
| payments.
|
| Fiat to crypto translation layer is probably the main issue in
| regards to online payments. However, setting up an account on
| Coinbase or Binance is pretty similar to setting up a PayPal
| account. Then you can pay any merchant with a QR code or
| address or whatever, using any of the coins Coinbase supports.
| lottin wrote:
| Banking is already decentralised. There is more than one bank.
| I think you might be thinking about "central banking", but
| central banks don't provide banking services.
| shmel wrote:
| Yeah, but how does it help with essentially duopoly of
| payment processors? How does it help with the US finance
| industry exporting their rules under ultimatum "either you
| comply or you will be excluded from the world financial
| system"?
|
| We saw how it played out with funding of WikiLeaks for
| example. We need cryptocurrency to avoid this happening
| again.
| lottin wrote:
| I'm sceptical about the ability of cryptocurrencies to
| solve problems. I think in order to solve a problem, first
| you need to spend some time understanding the problem, then
| come up with a solution. The crypto community doesn't seem
| much interested in thinking about problems. They think they
| have a solution that will fix a whole lot of problems, but
| in this case, like in many others, I don't think the
| solution would work, or even make sense.
| retrac wrote:
| Volatility and exchange with fiat are the main issues. In terms
| of simply effecting a payment Bitcoin has worked since launch
| (aside from a few times when transaction fees got pretty
| silly). The scaling problem can at least temporarily gotten
| around with multiple currencies. (Which seems to have been
| adopted in practice when Bitcoin hit its txn soft cap a while
| back.)
|
| IMO here in Canada it's near-feasible. Most people can purchase
| Bitcoin near-immediately with a bank transfer. Slightly more
| complicated than linking your PayPal account to your bank.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Open Question. Why don't more places accept stablecoin like
| USDC and USDT? The number of places that accept crypto is
| exceedingly low but even those that do usually only accept
| BTC. I wonder why stablecoins aren't used more for these
| sorts of transactions? Is it just that BTC is the most well
| known? Or are the underlying technical differences that
| prevent that from happening.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The root of money as a medium of exchange is trust.
|
| Most people don't even know what USDC or USDT are, so
| there's no trust there. Among those who do, there's concern
| that they're too unproven; there may be not-yet-identified
| attack vectors on the stack of technologies they depend
| upon that could some day allow one attacker to crash the
| coin. BTC has withstood a test of time that lets people who
| can't walk all the way through the implementation details
| to sanity-check them for themselves trust it.
|
| Money is a lot more like a social network than a standalone
| technology.
| retrac wrote:
| Most places which accept Bitcoin don't plan on holding it
| as cryptocurrency; it's converted quickly to USD (or
| whatever). They would do the same with ETH or USDC, convert
| directly to USD, or Bitcoin then USD. In short most USDC
| purchases would probably be fiat -> ETH -> USDC -> ETH ->
| fiat anyway. But fiat -> BTC -> fiat is a more established
| channel, and with lower txn fees at the moment.
| ridaj wrote:
| And, if those problems were solved and it became more of an
| everyday form of payment, there's the problem that government
| would start regulating it like other money anyway...
| danuker wrote:
| Yes, but it's harder to "herd cats" than to control an
| oligopoly (Visa & MasterCard).
|
| There are crypto enthusiasts in every jurisdiction, with
| various motivations, including legitimate ones. They will
| speak out for any undue burden.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| It's the translation layer between fiat and crypto which will
| be the problem. That's the layer that will get sued for the
| same reasons MasterCard is changing their ToS.
| dboreham wrote:
| There have been many attempts. So far none have succeeded. The
| main problem is fiat exchange, which ends up being tied into
| some country's regulatory regime.
| chitowneats wrote:
| _" So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York
| Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller "The
| Children of Pornhub" that accused the site and its parent company
| of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex
| trafficking....which, to be clear, they kinda were."_
|
| Kinda, huh? Of course the more important point, according the
| thread's author, is that:
|
| _" Kristof's story might have been correct on some of PornHub's
| abuses but it was deeply manipulative and painfully wrongheaded
| about sex trafficking in porn and, like almost anything he writes
| about sex, a filtered version of Christian dominionist
| propaganda"_
|
| Sure, okay. In the future maybe these sites shouldn't sexually
| exploit children. Then they won't be exposed to such right-wing
| attacks.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| My right-wing friends would be very surprised to learn that the
| New York Times and Nick Kristof now represent them.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Yep. The Tweet thread is so easily proven wrong. Nick Kristof
| is not right wing by any means based on his articles:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof
| chitowneats wrote:
| Yeah I should have put "right-wing" in scare quotes.
| Vaslo wrote:
| It was informative and then it started stuff like this:
|
| > Almost the entire anti-trafficking movement is an Evangelical
| project to get liberal supporters to sign off on a laundry list
| of Christian anti-sex policies. It's been one of their most
| successful propaganda projects. It's also likely gotten a lot of
| sex workers killed.
|
| I'm libertarian, do what you want with your body or money but
| know the risks. That said, someone could also argue that making
| it more difficult to sell your porn or get involved in the
| seedier parts of this PROBABLY stopped some people from ruining
| their lives, staying off drugs, etc.
|
| Again, don't like either argument, but there are two "probably"
| sides to this.
| detcader wrote:
| It's also source-free. Love the flourish at the end with the
| typical third-wave male feminist line of "this has [probably]
| gotten sex workers killed" when what really kills sex workers
| is violent men and poverty/drugs.
| neolog wrote:
| I agree the perpetrators are to blame for violence and the
| poverty/abuse to blame for victims' inability to obtain
| redress. But the legal system has a role to play in ensuring
| noncoercion and empowering workers, which it's currently
| failing at.
|
| That said, OP's claims on the concealed religious motivation
| and the negative effects of current sex work policies on
| consenting workers are essentially true.[1]
|
| The president of the Adult Performance Artist Guild has
| written about the negative consequences of MasterCard's
| restrictive policies for performers ("I have received
| numerous reports of workers being removed and having no way
| to pay the bills because their income was taken away").[2]
|
| Unfortunately sex work research shows that closing sites like
| Backpage does reduce the capabilities of sex workers: "the
| financial situation of the vast majority of research
| participants has deteriorated, as has their ability to access
| community and screen clients".[3]
|
| Groups seeking to eliminate sex work often present misleading
| information and advocate policies that make sex work harder
| but not safer. There are policies that can improve safety and
| consent without harming consenting sex workers, but those
| policies need to be created with context and measurable
| consequences in mind, not sensationalism.
|
| [1] https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-
| war...
|
| [2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/porn-world-we-are-sick-of-
| mast...
|
| [3] https://antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/ar
| tic...
| [deleted]
| PastaMonster wrote:
| I've read through the comments. Pornhub debacle is mentioned
| often. No one here is mentioning that many people have fantasies
| like a rape fantasy, a teenage fantasy, etc. A good search
| algorithm picks up on that and will make suggestions based on
| your previous searches/watched videos and the videos other people
| with similar interests have watched. This should be obvious. The
| videos have bad unspecified titles because it's easier to find.
| People are unspecified in their search terms. They don't search
| for "rape fantasy" they search for "rape". They don't search for
| "feet fetish" they search for "feet". What is it people don't get
| about this?
|
| I think people should just mind their own business and stop
| policing what other people do. "If you don't like it don't watch
| it". As long as it's not illegal leave people alone with their
| fantasies. Don't be so damn judgmental. It's just sad how
| sexually repressed some people are and that they think they have
| the right to control other people. It feels like we are one step
| from starting to burn "witches" and books again.
| shrimpx wrote:
| > As long as it's not illegal
|
| Isn't this the crux of the issue? That's what Mastercard is
| saying, too. As long as you've super duper verified that this
| video is legit consenting adults, you're good.
| cbg0 wrote:
| If you want to read the thread more easily:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428587369867792392.html
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| The world really needs an alternative to these tweet serials.
| They're extremely annoying to read.
| Method-X wrote:
| Like an article or blog post.
| davikrr wrote:
| These comments about Twitter are really getting tiring. See any
| Foone thread and you'll almost always realize it's getting
| derailed by a huge comment thread complaining about Twitter.
| certnlyuncertn wrote:
| 'Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button
| breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be
| interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then
| friendly feedback might be helpful.'
| vbezhenar wrote:
| The world has an alternative since the web was born. Just host
| HTML page somewhere. Those who use twitter just don't care
| about their readers convenience. That's why I generally avoid
| any twitter links.
| [deleted]
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| Here's the entire Twitter thread in one page:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428584131835748359.html
|
| I hate that we seem to have come full circle:
|
| 1. Write coherent, long-form articles which require sustained
| attention to write and read, but unfortunately can't be easily
| discovered or nonverbally reacted to by people sitting on
| toilets.
|
| 2. Write intentionally length-limited microblog posts or
| "tweets" as a cute experiment in brevity by design and
| creativity under constraints. There's no room for nuance and
| multi-person conversations are abysmal, but at least your
| stream-of-consciousness musings have the potential to be
| "liked" by toilet-bound readers across the world jonesing for
| buttery-smooth exploding-heart animations.
|
| 3. Write coherent, long-form articles, but then break them up
| into snippets of at most 280 characters, tweet the first one,
| then reply to yourself dozens of times to reconstruct the
| original article, forcing readers to scroll past dozens of
| redundant copies of your profile pic (which of course doesn't
| depict you) and your clever-only-the-first-two-times pseudonym,
| truncated over and over, only to invoke a third-party article
| reconstruction service by replying "@threadreaderapp unroll
| please."
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Blogs exist, but due to network effect any given blog post is
| less likely to be auto-surfaced by an algorithm into people's
| field of vision than a stream of dozens of individual Twitter
| posts.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Just more evidence that effective != better
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Agreed. Throughout its history, the story demonstrated by
| Twitter is that network effect is more important than
| technical competence. From their scaling- pains failwhale
| era through to this week where they accidentally de-
| verified Danny DeVito, the site continues to be extremely
| popular in spite of, not because of, its technical design
| and competent implementation.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| Part of the advantage to tweet threads like this is that other
| users can reply directly to any one of the n tweets in the
| thread, rather than commenting on the thread as a whole.
|
| Agreed that it can be clunky to read depending on the platform,
| but there's a reason lots of prominent personalities and
| bloggers still use them.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > Part of the advantage to tweet threads like this is that
| other users can reply directly to any one of the n tweets in
| the thread, rather than commenting on the thread as a whole.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_styl.
| ..
|
| Too bad the inline reply style got lost in email culture, but
| it's good to know it's alive and well on Twitter!
| neutronicus wrote:
| Personally, I'm glad it's mostly dead, at least in a forum
| context.
|
| To me, at least, the inline replies were always a signal
| that a conversation was about to degenerate into an
| interminable running battle over minutiae.
| d0100 wrote:
| So in Brazil the government blocked WhatsApp payments until they
| launched the central bank's own easy payment method called PIX
|
| PIX is so good because there is no middle men, no transaction
| cost(for now), just an easy money transfer
|
| Solutions like PIX would remove completely the pressure that
| credit card providers have on companies and individuals,
| especially when it comes to sex work
| Jcowell wrote:
| Will it ? My question is is PIX our money or the banks ? The
| point Of credit cards, aside from the ability to use money not
| immediately on hand, is the ability to shift the liability off
| of oneself and onto another who has interest in getting their
| money back. If fraud occurs , the bank more incentivized to get
| their money back and the debtors money is protected.
| d0100 wrote:
| PIX is only for one-off payments, it is essentially a bank
| transfer, you can't setup recurring payments. So that should
| lower user fraud and subsequent chargebacks (because the
| client can't)
|
| On the other hand, because of fraud (social engineering), the
| central bank is looking to allow for cancelling payments, but
| afaik there is still nothing planned
| sureglymop wrote:
| Twitter boggles my mind... One large thread of information broken
| up into tiny pieces that can easily be taken out of context by
| retweeting or even worse by quote tweeting. Truly the pinnacle of
| how we should report/publish information. Luckily no important
| institution or politicians use this as their official information
| channel, am I right?
|
| We don't even have to dive into content
| aggregation/recommendation algorithms to realize how terrible
| this is.
| swiley wrote:
| Don't like crypto currency? Stop making it necessary.
| e-clinton wrote:
| I see the move by OnlyFans as simply trying to appeal to a much
| broader and larger market. There's more money to be made outside
| of porn than there is in it.
| thow16161 wrote:
| What is going to happen to cam sites, like MyFreeCams,
| Chaturbate, etc..?
|
| I assume these rules will make accepting paymets impossible for
| any adult site with live-streaming, and for Cam sites, that's
| their core business.
|
| Potential answers include a move to cryptocurrency to avoid
| payment processors, or a move to strictly non-explicit content to
| appease them.
|
| In the near term, either would decimate these sites. In the long
| term, crypto might be better for performers, as the cam sites
| could take a far smaller cut of payments.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Opinion - NYT and any credible newspaper should run a conflict-
| of-interest statement on every "opinion" piece they accept. It
| should be 1 paragraph giving the name of the person who chose to
| run the story, a 2-sentence justification, and a formal statement
| that they had no financial, personal, or self-interest motive or
| connection to this piece/author/topic.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| There is a lot of money on the line in the porn industry, they
| should take hard stance against that nutjob.
| Miner49er wrote:
| So the timing of this, and the Apple's CSAM is interesting. Are
| companies facing a legal liability or afraid of facing one in the
| future? Are they worried that they could potentially be liable
| under FOSTA-SESTA?
| relax88 wrote:
| I think this is highly likely to be the thing causing these
| changes in the porn industry.
|
| I'm skeptical that we would be seeing the large scale changes
| to sites like Craigslist, Pornhub, and OnlyFans just because of
| a NYT article and some prude Christian activists.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > and some prude Christian activists
|
| And where do you think FOSTA-SESTA, the legal troubles and
| the sudden shift of mind from payment processors comes from?
| Do you think they randomly started to care out of nowhere?
|
| At a high level, yes companies are being forced by payment
| processors and legal troubles, but if you dig a bit deeper,
| it almost always trace back to christian fundamentalist
| lobbyists such as Exodus Cry
| prestigious wrote:
| Feels like switching to crypto payments would be far more likely
| to keep the site alive than whatever it is they are planning on
| doing.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| Isn't it pretty difficult to have recurring payments with
| crypto, without some payment processor in the middle?
| jandrese wrote:
| Plus the technical difficulties with crypto in general. There
| is a higher bar for getting someone to set up a crypto
| account than it is to take a credit card number. A lot of
| people would just go "screw this, I can find porn on the
| Internet without this nonsense".
| dr-detroit wrote:
| I have to log in to read this? Society is crumbling around me!
| rattray wrote:
| I hadn't been aware of the onlyfans change:
| https://www.xbiz.com/news/261183/onlyfans-releases-official-...
|
| Sounds like they're still allowing nudity but disallowing
| "sexually explicit conduct" and will clarify what they mean by
| that soon...
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Probably falls under "I know it when I see it"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
| MBCook wrote:
| There was also a recent BBC investigation into OnlyFans that
| found they constantly bent their rules for popular content makers
| and had a real problem with sub-18 people on the platform.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865
| dijit wrote:
| The content they're talking about is reprehensible.
| (Beastiality, incest, prostitution) but I'm wary of things
| being labelled "illegal" since in the UK, facesitting, spanking
| and "water sports" are illegal.
|
| So it's easy to cite 1 case of beastiality and later say there
| are "200,000 illegal articles" when 199,999 could be spanking.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Obscenity is famously subjective:
|
| "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of
| material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand
| description; and perhaps I could never succeed in
| intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the
| motion picture involved in this case is not that."
|
| - http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/obscenity-case-
| files/ob...
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| > _" in the UK, facesitting, spanking and "water sports" are
| illegal."_
|
| In what sense are those things illegal?
| dijit wrote:
| Porn of those things is illegal since 2014.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-30454773
| SmileyJames wrote:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-30454773
|
| Interesting article about a protest in 2003
| inetknght wrote:
| > _prostitution_
|
| I argue: prostitution is illegal but not reprehensible.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's not even illegal in large parts of the world.
|
| I can understand wanting to fight revenge porn, child porn,
| human traficing and exploitation, but we're also making it
| unreasonable for prostitutes, porn stars and cam girls to
| do their job. And I kinda doubt that these rules makes much
| difference to the unlawful actors in those businesses.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Why don't people understand that these aren't jobs any
| sane government wants to sanction? Those which do in
| large parts of the world, do so because enforcing its
| illegality is extremely costly and difficult. Western
| governments can do this and so they largely do.
| barrkel wrote:
| It's not illegal where OF was founded, the UK.
| dijit wrote:
| I agree, actually. I guess what I mean is that it's outside
| the intended purpose of the site and makes the site owner
| look a bit more brothelesque which has seedy undertones.
|
| I was mainly pointing at the fact it's "more obviously"
| illegal than, say, facesitting or spanking.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| If there really are minors on there, I'm glad they're being
| forced to clean up their act.
|
| Downvote me all you want for feeling that way.
| detcader wrote:
| How old does a person have to be to start deserving blame for
| their choices of sexual activity? Can you come off anonymous
| and let me know?
| afrodc_ wrote:
| 18 for consensual actions, barring abuse and trafficking
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| This is off topic, but this actually does seem like one of the
| few areas where crypto could make a difference. Why hasn't there
| been a good implementation of an onlyfans style platform that
| lets someone transfer funds direct from a linked coinbase account
| or something instead of depending on a Mastercard/Visa for
| payment processing?
| bruceb wrote:
| The winner here might actually be the majority of NSFW content
| makers on OF who are mortgaging their future reputations for very
| small payouts.
|
| (not a judgment on what they do but the reality of the situation
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| You post this exact comment on every recent thread about OF.
| bruceb wrote:
| It absolutely is. Because its true. All this talk about free
| market and puritanical this and that, when the reality of the
| situation should be pointed out.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Net... uhm.. payment-processors-neutrality!
|
| I have no idea why payment processors get to choose and pick what
| they want to process and what they don't.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Never gonna happen. Controlling the money flow is basically how
| power has always worked. Unless you have nukes, you can't
| enforce it
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| ...and then they wonder why cryptocurrencies are getting more
| and more popular.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| ...and more and more centralized.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| atleast the barrier of entry for a new cryptocurrency is
| very cheap, compared to opening a new bank.
| mchusma wrote:
| This.
|
| If you are going to be a legal dualolopy, then you can't cut
| off payments like you can't cut off power or water.
|
| Personally I breaking thei anti-trust behavior entirely, so
| people have options.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| It's the high chargeback rate.
| detaro wrote:
| That's always the excuse why the payment processors don't
| like it (payment networks will ban them if their customers
| cause to many chargebacks), but the payment networks
| themselves clearly have control over those rules and can
| put requirements in place to compensate (e.g. require
| insurance, delay payouts, ...) without full-on banning
| business types.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| They could simply automatically raise fees depending on
| chargeback rate. It's not a particularly hard problem to
| solve.
| rattray wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Looking forward to when (aptly-named) MasterCard will ban those
| other networks that put young girls often less than 13 in a
| behavioral treadmill of entertaining other users with their
| photos for pithy "likes" that don't even translate to monetary
| rewards. Should I hold my breath?
| detcader wrote:
| Being r-ped is as normal and consequential as posing for an
| advertisement or dancing in a TikTok, is what you're saying?
| neolog wrote:
| Controlling children's social environment to direct them into
| emotional dependence on corporate stimulation is really
| harmful. Unfortunately MasterCard doesn't seem to be working
| on that problem.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Why isn't it viable to just accept Visa, if only MasterCard has
| new rules? Does not seem to justify scrapping the entire
| business.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Most news sites speculate that Visa is likely to follow. OF
| probably has industry connections that are giving them a heads
| up.
|
| It's in Visa's PR interest for these high visibility events
| (like OF's ToS Change) to happen before Visa announces their
| ToS changes.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Probably because visa will be enforcing similar to rules soon
| too.
| dageshi wrote:
| They expect VISA will follow suit.
| Aachen wrote:
| Source? Or are you just assuming?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| There's a fair amount of precedent. Recently it's what
| happened to pornhub... these evangelical groups put general
| pressure on the industry and when one company folds the
| focus on the others ramp up. Mastercard and Visa compete
| pretty closely so neither wants to be "the one that's ok
| with sex trafficking" (total bs, but how it's framed) and
| end up with more regulatory scrutiny than the other.
| altendo wrote:
| I believe that it's an assumption for now, but a reasonable
| one to make. I think it's unlikely that Visa exposes itself
| to legal risks where MasterCard is not - why give your
| competitor an edge like that?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| That assumes that there actually are legal risks, and
| that there isn't more money to be made by continuing to
| process these payments.
| dageshi wrote:
| For Mastercard and Visa the money to be made is a
| rounding error on a rounding error, there are lots of
| other industries that don't have the same PR risks as
| adult content does.
| [deleted]
| angry_octet wrote:
| Another good thread explaining the leverage Visa/MC and banking
| generally have in companies, and impact of vague FOSTA/SESTA
| legislation in the US.
|
| Puritanical and evangelical lobby groups pushed these laws
| through Congress, and now they are reaping the rewards. It's
| unfortunate that the rest of the world has to suffer for this
| failure.
|
| https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1428442523001831425?s=19
| dmamills wrote:
| > These rules will basically require that OnlyFans (and every
| other site that accepts MasterCard payments) not only fully
| verify every user and every person who appears in every adult
| video, but review all posted content before publication,
| including real-time review of livestreams
|
| It became extremely difficult to prove that there are not naked
| children on our platform. So we've decided to take our money and
| run.
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