MasterCard to stop processing payments on Pornhub, cites unlawful content
reuters.com
reuters.com
They are certainly free to do business with whomever they please, but with MC/Visa being a more-or-less global duopoly, these seemingly arbitrary decisions can be extremely impactful.
I’ve long hated money laundering and “know your customer” laws for many reasons. They’re a giant privacy violation. And for what? These laws measurably don’t work to stop big banks from financing terrorism and human trafficking. There are several reasons they don’t work. One is that, the DOJ will come down hard on small American businesses but refuses to actually investigate or prosecute large, offshore companies. They also can’t work because the vast majority of money laundering happens with cash. Even if these laws could meaningfully reduce money laundering, who does that benefit? The vast majority of money laundering is for victimless crimes, including the consensual adult sales of drugs, gambling, porn, and prostitution. These laws simply work to give large incumbents a regulatory advantage over their competitors.
Honest question: can the US goverent stop anyone from launching their banking/payment services?
Can you explain that? How do I take my illegal gained cash and convert it into enough clean money to buy a house? And why can't anti-money-laundering laws and agencies stop that?
> The vast majority of money laundering is for victimless crimes, including the consensual adult sales of drugs, gambling, porn, and prostitution
There's two things here. There is not believing that these crimes should be crimes- and in that, you and I likely agree. But the other thing is whether criminals should be allowed to make money for doing things that are against the law. And I don't agree.
If you think the laws should be changed, vote for that, fight for that, protest for that. But don't tell me that all criminals should be allowed to clean their money because some laws aren't just.
Most money that people make illegally (selling drugs, etc.) is cash, because you can’t trace cash transactions. The problem is that it’s hard to use cash, and just depositing vast sums of money in the bank raises the obvious question of where the money came from. At some point, even if they can’t prove that the money came from anything illicit, they can prove that you aren’t paying income taxes on it, which is a federal felony by itself.
So you need to operate a business that also deals largely in cash, slip your illicit cash into the businesses’ revenue, cook the books and make it look like the money came from your legitimate business and not your illegitimate one, and Bob’s your uncle, at least in theory. In practice, legitimate cash businesses are more and more rare as time goes on, and investigators are really good at noticing when some random nail salon or bar has a lot more revenue than they should.
Also, don’t be stupid enough to operate your illegal business out of your legal, money-laundering front. Seattle used to have an extremely sketchy but extremely good cash-only teriyaki joint downtown, but they got busted for fencing stolen iPads after hours. Which explains a lot about why they never accepted credit cards, I guess, but they were a thriving teriyaki joint and I kind of miss them.
I actually worked for 8 months as an intern at Fintrac, Canada's financial intel agency. This was 14 years ago now, but back then they were actually pretty good at what they did, for a group with ~300 people. They just had analysts going through vast amounts of data manually, but with plans to improve the tooling, automate more. I can only guess at how far along they've come now.
The reality is, if you're moving more money than you should you'll get it caught eventually. And the more you're moving, the more likely you are to be noticed.
(This is not advice.)
The amount of money you can launder in a given period of time is ultimately limited by how much real business you have. So if you need to launder an excessive amount of money eventually you’ll have to start metaphorically or literally pouring alcohol down the drain.
(According to a bar manager I once knew, bars inherently have higher shrinkage than other businesses anyway; in bartending, you don’t get fired for stealing the occasional bottle or giving away free drinks to your friends because every bartender will do one of those, but if you do both you will get fired. I don’t consider this guy a reliable source, but it seems plausible; stevedores were notorious for liquor theft prior to the invention of shipping containers, so why not bartenders?)
Every time you move more than $10,000 into or out of a bank account in a 24 hour period (presuming Canada or the US) your bank will report it to your country's financial intel agency.
They notice when a cafe is pulling in far more money than it ought to. Then they hand what they have over to the IRS/CRA, FBI/RCMP, and let them investigate further.
If you're moving any significant sum of money, you're on their radar. And they aren't stupid.
The real money in is stuff like real estate, which is pretty shady even when legit and much easier to buy and sell
This isn't a hunch, this is entire purpose of KYC and AML. Even something as simple as making a large deposit at the bank is enough to trigger reports going to places that might cause you concern.
You have a lot of claims there, do you have sources?
AML regulations do plenty, and they start with banks checking for sketchy transactions and not executing them. You can also look up several cases of very large penalties for breaking these laws. The US crushed a couple of Swiss banks a few years back, the longest operating bank which had been going for hundreds of years was effectively shut down by money laundering judgements.
It seems you want to have small financial businesses not be responsible for people using their services to commit crimes... well too bad, I say. You don't get a free pass to aid and abet crime because you're small. Like many things, the business of facilitating financial transactions isn't just keeping a ledger and presenting a nice interface to it... the real meat of the business is accurately keeping transactions on par with regulation and resolving disputes. The obvious part of the business is the easy part, the hard part is what you get paid for.
Here are billions in fines for HSBC. You can say financial regulators aren’t doing enough, but you can’t say they’re doing nothing.
Where did I say anything about fairness?
There is a problem where prosecutors are rated by success and they only take slam dunk cases. That problem really has nothing to do with the laws themselves,
The fact that vast swaths of victimless, consensual activity is criminalized is exactly the problem. When enough laws exist to make enforcement an impossibility, selective enforcement becomes the law.
Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime.
So financial processors who process payments indiscriminately can find themselves in court for the sins of their clients.
Most financial institutions are not willing to bear the expense of legal defense for questionable clientele.
Update: This is similar in a lot of ways to the issues Marijuana retailers have with banking: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...
Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it.
Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal.
I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity.
That doesn't seem to be a problem for payment processors, though.
Neither is a problem that some funky stuff shows on Youtube from time to time which is promptly taken down when somebody reports it.
The question is whether PH did this knowingly and whether it is Mastercard's responsibility to act on it and how much of this is realy up to Mastercard to judge.
If PH is taking down any content that is reported and deactivating accounts then that is basically the same thing as Youtube does and we are now in gray territory when PH is being punished for not being to Mastercard's liking for some reason.
Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal.
Normally what will happen is if the assistance in money laundering or funding criminal activity is incidental or the organization didn't know there was a problem and couldn't be reasonably expected to know, then it's not a crime. But if the organization knows or should have known, then it is. MasterCard is now in the knows or should have known state, so continuing to fund illegal activity could reasonably be considered a crime, at least based on the typical patterns of these laws.
If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube is likewise liable and Mastercard should stop serving Youtube knowing that at any point in time Youtube has some users that have illegal content.
It is different to stop payments for illegal activity and stopping payments to a large corporation that has huge user base that has some users engaging in illegal activity.
If it is ok to do that then practically no current large company that has large user base could be served by payment organizations.
You are missing the point here.
MasterCard doesn't care.
They have zero interest in fighting legal battles to retain PornHub's business.
> If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube
YouTube spends a ton of money building extensive controls to catch illegal content and remove it from their platform as quickly as possible. So much so a lot of should be legal content gets sucked up and blocked/ removed.
From the sounds of it, PornHub doesn't have similar controls even as they are in a business which neck deep in potential legal/ ethical challenges.
If this rule was enforced equally, it could be a good thing overall. Yes, it would probably destroy for example YT as it is now and I'm ok with that.
The real question (for a business) is whether the profit of doing business with a company is worth the potential liability. In this case, PornHub has a rather high profile legal overhang which makes the liability potentially very high.
> I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity.
Look at how quickly Google pulls content from YouTube based on the first sniff of a DMCA claim. Businesses have zero interest in fighting a legal battle for a third party.
Waiting to get conviction is not good way to live or business to operate.
Yes, but they don't fund crime. They just allow transactions between customers and sellers.
Especially in this case I think it's more appropriate if:
- the payment provider reports to the police
- the police is properly founded and equipped to handle such cases (hint it isn't in most countries I'm aware of).
- If after a initial short "check" the police believes a deeper investigation is adequate the payment provider might have to suspend service (temporary with time limited and telling the porn company why).
I thing this would be much more appropriate.
Furthermore: Requiring manual review of pron material and reasonable proof of consent/age if it's not obvious from the video.
No, they are not funding it, my wording was far from perfect.
This is very very similar to why Marijuana retailers have trouble with banking. There are a lot of laws around banking and criminal activity which make banks very averse to dealing with anything that remotely smells criminal.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...
Depends on what you mean by funding. If payment processor like Mastercard is considered 'funding', so does the 'treasury' if cash is used. the factory that printed the currency bill too? how far do you really want to go with this?
I posted a link above which helps explain it above since a few people had questions about this. Fundamentally, if you perform banking activities for criminal activities you open yourself up to a landslide of legal bullshit. Banks want to be as far from that as possible.
In your example, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check, as they're doing to pornhub.
MasterCard should stay out of it, as they do in other situations.
I was explaining why banks stay well clear of anything which might be criminal. Whether that is how things should be from an ethical or societal standpoint is a separate question.
Pornhub itself could use a similar defense to what you suggest. Is it their job to police the content instead of the police? If they were hosting content with minors and rape (and it seems highly likely they were), they were profiting from illegal activities.
I'm on the fence. At some point the law should hold people who profit from hurting people liable. While Master Card (or PornHub) were not necessarily active participants here, they both profited from criminal activity.
Where you draw the line is tough.
But, if you are aware of a customer using your service to perform illegal activities you can't claim plausible deniability.
It's not reasonable to expect police to be watching everyone all the time.
(Ignoring, for a second, KYC-type laws that can make MC criminally liable for not policing their own platform... laws I think are mostly garbage.)
Your analogy doesn't fit, because the current scenario (MC kicking PH off their platform) would be like if a daycare discovered criminal activity involving one of the kids they watch and then refused to watch the kid anymore. (Which would be a bad thing that might make the kid less safe!)
Regulating what happens on your own private platform to ensure compliance with applicable laws is, and always has been, the job of the platform owner. It is not realistic to expect law enforcement to check every platform for compliance under every law.
Even if MC would ultimately win in court, litigation is not cheap and the brand damage alone would be massive.
MC is a massive, trusted financial household name. They would be very publicly fighting for their right to knowingly process payments for a company that is serving illegal sex videos on the largest porn website in the world.
I do not envy the PR agency that would be tasked to spin that one.
If you want a company to not have this option, you need to 1) absolve them of the responsibility to know their clients 2) prevent them from arbitrarily cutting off access. If you don't absolve them, it doesn't make sense to prevent them from cutting off access - how else can they comply with their legal responsibilities?
You don't!
That's where it all gets weird.
There is beyond a doubt a massive amount of illegal activity that flows through MasterCard transactions, but MasterCard can't reasonably detect all of it. But when there is a case like this where your dirty laundry is big public news, suddenly MC can't hide behind plausible deniability.
Which is why banks won't do businesses with legal cannabis dispensaries since on a federal level, its still illegal.
Legalizing cannabis at the federal level would give a large number of dispensaries some relief from this federal oversight of the banking laws.
Is processing payments between two entities equivalent to funding them?
For example, is the post office funding someone if he sends them a letter with cash or a check?
I agree, but this is another problem even if there is a link, and both are not mutually exclusive
> businesses should be allowed to act ethically (within the bounds of the law)
I don't get your point there. Who forces PornHub to act like they do?
But should they really? Because I am completely with you in that this is increasingly problematic in a world where certain services are so core to our lives, taking part is increasingly unavoidable and being shut out is actullay a disturbance to ones social or economic life. Considering how lopsided the power balance is, I do not think it is okay for companies to be allowed to in essence randomly terminate accounts and services that are vital for other businesses or private people to function, no matter what is stated in the ToS.
Surely here it's a case of people rolling the two into one - "people who look at/work with porn must be sleazy" - rather than objectively seeing PH as a business that doesn't want illegal content on its platform anymore than FB does?
But what if their diligent efforts failed or proved to be inadequate, and they still kept their site up?
If there's a fundamental flaw in their model that allowed horrible things to persist despite their efforts, they can't just throw up their hands and continue with the excuse that "they tried." That's a situation where the right thing to do is shut the whole thing down.
Encryption has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing terrorists to communicate freely. Should a back door be installed everywhere?
PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content.
I’m not saying PH is definitely doing enough; I can’t possibly know that. But whether their effort is enough should be judged in the court. If they aren’t doing what the law requires them to do, they should be prosecuted.
> Cash also has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing criminal activity to be funded. Should the government stop printing cash?
Your comparisons are apples and oranges to this PornHub situation. It's not a rebuttal to mechanically list other things that might have some associated negative tradeoffs. You have weigh both the severity of the problem, the benefits, and the alternatives.
> PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content.
PornHub has taken a "laissez faire with cleanup" model for their porn uploads, which frankly invites abuse that's difficult to clean up (as the Kristof outlined). That might work for a site like Facebook, which bans porn outright, so it doesn't have to worry so much about the distinction between underage and of-age porn, since it's all forbidden. PornHub's a porn site, however, so their moderation already starts at a disadvantage. A preclearance model (with identity verification), while more expensive, doesn't have the abuse potential of laissez faire; and given the severity of abuse here, is for more appropriate.
It's unfortunate but the reality is that every advancement in society can and will be used for illegal and immoral activity. It is a matter of the greater good.
Regardless... it depends. Are they making a good-faith effort to remove that content from their platform, but sometimes come up short? That's to be expected, but I'd want some commitment that they're working to improve. Did they email me and say "hey, we like child porn and making money off of it"? Ok, yeah, then I'd cut them off.
If I suspected something fishy was going on but wasn't sure? I'd report what I knew to the police and let them do a proper investigation. I wouldn't want to destroy someone's business based only on my suspicions. It's not ok for the legal system to do that, so why would it be ok for me to do that? The burden of proof should still be "beyond a reasonable doubt", and the best place to determine that is still the courts, as imperfect as they can be at times.
And regardless, my questions still stand: was PornHub removing those videos promptly when made aware of them, and making a good-faith effort to ensure they didn't get re-uploaded? Article doesn't dive into those details. If they were, I think a private entity taking an action that could cripple their business would be akin to law enforcement shutting them down without due process or the ability to appeal.
Again, it seems "child porn" is just being used as the "can't argue with our actions because think of the children" conversation-ender it's usually used as.
Edit: Re-reading my response, I'm not sure where I got the bit about how we're talking about copyright infringement. Possible I was reading HN a lot that day and got my wires crossed between articles. But I think the rest of my comment stands on its own.
That said, the issue here is a "fishing expedition". I'm sure Pornhub makes some effort to screen content for illegality but the problem is some still gets through 'cause of scale and costs. I don't know if Pornhub has safe harbor protections or not but I suspect the main target is effectively porn in general.
Access to a reliable payments network (of which there are very few in the world, and even fewer in the western world) is required for doing any kind of online business. Whether or not to destroy a business based on their -- alleged! -- illegal activity should be decided by a court, not a corporate legal department.
Unfortunately, there are garbage laws around financial transactions that make MC liable if they don't do their own policing. IMO those laws need to go.
This is true. But the standards applied to financial transactions are way more stringent than other businesses. KYC/AML laws basically create an affirmative obligation for financial institutions to proactively determine whether each and every customer is engaged in illegal activity.
Unlike in other businesses, it's not enough to just say that you weren't aware of your customers intentions. Unless you've taken efforts to affirm that all their activity is legal, you can be criminally liable.
If some guy walks into a bakers and asks, "What's the best cannoli to bring alone to a mob hit", then the baker is obligated not to do business with him. But the equivalent of KYC/AML would require the baker to verify and document that none of the pastries are being used for illegal activity.
Would you risk your massive global business for one client? I wouldn’t. I agree that it would be nice to see due process happen first, but I don’t blame companies like MasterCard from proverbially yeeting this stuff away.
Money moves quickly, often between non-co-operative jurisdictions, often irretrievably. Money laundering activities exploit the points in the payments system where enforcement and traceability are slower and more difficult. Filing suspicious activity reports is all well and good, but enforcement is always a tradeoff between the expense of the prosecution and the prospect of obtaining a conviction.
Meanwhile more than a trillion dollars leaks into the global money laundry annually under the status quo[0]. That’s _with_ the threat of prosecution - and thousands of people working in AML/CTF prevention worldwide.
MC and Visa (JCB, UnionPay...) have to walk an awkward line between consumers’ and businesses’ demands for instantaneous global payments and countervailing demands that consumers be protected from deception, bad business practices and other forms of abuse. The policy is almost always to opt for the ounce of prevention, because most individuals can’t afford a pound of lawsuit.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/desa/tax-abuse-money-laundering-and-co...
Sometimes the only way to force a company to change is to use the market to force them to change. Attack their advertisers or payment processors and force them to do something.
> Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.
I'm usually on the same page. But it is really hard to feel sorry for Pornhub, they're not Good Guys. The whole normalisation of porn is not a net win for our civilisation. OnlyFans is a relationship simulator for lonely men and as such exploitative. Using the gray corporate term "sex work" mis-characterises the soul-sucking debasedness of it all. It turns everyone into a consumer along its path, and the effects it has on gender relations and family formation are devastating. But I'm fully aware this is a minority opinion on HN.
What PH is really bad at is content moderation. Should they improve that? Absolutely. Is this grounds for legal action? Maybe it is. Is this a good reason to boycott them as an individual? Go for it! But is this a reason for a payment processor to get involved? I think it's not. But you're free to disagree.
As for "soul-sucking debasedness", please stop imposing your sense of morality onto others. Yes, there are some people who are forced into porn for various reasons, and we as a society should try to prevent that -- just like we should try to prevent all kinds of abuses. But there are many people who enjoy working as porn stars. Don't judge them.
If tolerance is the highest value, you have arrived at the end of values itself, because everything must be acceptable. I do not subscribe to that point of view. I do not applaud that which I find to be destructive for a world worth living in.
And more importantly, it doesn't have to be any of those negative things. Sex work and pornography can be enjoyable for people on all sides of the equation. The fact that it often isn't is a problem to fix, not a reason to brutally narrow our perspective on what's acceptable in the realm of sex and sexuality.
Yes. This is not the limit of my criticism, far from it. There is a world of difference between sleeping with 15 truckers a night, ie physical prostitution, and a middle-class student selling nudes on OnlyFans. The problems with the middle-class version of prostitution are the second order effects. I briefly touched on those in another reply in this thread.
1. They don't feel "tremendous shame and grief about it", you're just projecting. They wouldn't be doing it in the first place if that was the case, at least for the middle-class ones that I'm talking about.
2. The "significant harm later in life" does not stem from the (imaginary) shame & grief, it comes from the discovery when they inevitably hit The Wall that no high-quality mate wants to marry them, and that they have tarnished their reputation forever for a short-lived boost in income and attention that is guaranteed to fade one day. The progressive culture and their friends will tell them about "sex positivity" and that prostitution is just "sex work" like any other work, which it isn't. You will not agree to that of course, "I don't own her body haha".
If there is one thing to take away, let it be this: look at the people around you and their relationships, and observe what works and what doesn't. Don't theorize, don't moralize, don't judge, just observe and make up your own mind.
It doesn't matter.
Or rather, if the only idea you have for solution to the situation is repression, it doesn't matter what you think of the impact of porn because you're not going to stop it, you're just going to create "porn and repression, together" just like the war on drugs created drugs and repression together.
Guns and small pox weren't net wins for a lot of societies they were introduced in but once things start with certain processes, you kind of need to find mitigation, not a heavy handed repression.
And sure, a better for people to relate together than exists currently would be great but shoving the genie back in the bottle isn't going to it.
You also paint the picture of a new porn-DEA. I don't know what to say to that, except that I don't favour Sharia Law.
I posit that the ever expanding scope of liberalism with regards to intra-sex dynamics is the (or, at one of the) causes of much despair and grief, because they inhibit pair-bonding, family formation and are deeply non-lindy for various reasons. We see this in the number of older women taking anti-depressives, we see this in levels of male celibacy unprecedent since the middle ages, and collapsing populations all over the western world. None of these questions and dilemmas are new, they are as old as time. The idea that the rules have suddenly become invalid is naive at best, and destructive at worst. This will be non-obvious if you approach this from the viewpoint of enlightenment philosophy. It will become quite obvious if take the historical perspective on human behaviour and how societies function.
Is porn/sex work really being "normalized" in a historically contextual way? Outside of about the last seventy years (maybe less), prostitution and sex work were extremely common, and, compared with the modern era, basically not criminalized. I'm not aware of a body of research that demonstrates a causal relationship between the consumption of porn and any social ill. I'm also not sure if I feel like I'm in a position to decide if OnlyFans customers would be better off without that outlet.
There’s also a dynamic where people quickly get bored with porn and start consuming increasingly extreme or fringe porn to get the same satisfaction which I think is new. To clarify, kinks aren’t new, but just like political extremism, the internet is much better at radicalizing people into them.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, and I’m somewhat libertarian on the issue if only out of resignation, but I think that online pornography is extremely new and unprecedented and may indeed be very detrimental to society.
Sources?
Also you seem to let's assume unintentionally mixing porn with its production modes, its ecosystem, all of its problems, plus the mental health problems of rich men, and so on.
It boils down to the fact that you're wanting to let opinions on "how things should be" steer availability of core economic infrastructure, rather than relying on the legal system which is more properly setup to come to these conclusions.
EDIT Oh PornHub is now implementing the following measures:
a.) allow uploads only from verified users;
b.) no downloads;
c.) improvements in moderation
Maybe I'm actually for this then. Apparently this is what it takes.
https://fightthenewdrug.org has the data. I'd be curious to understand data or reasoning that makes a compelling argument for the contrary ("porn is great or neutral for society").
Your actions on the ledger are mostly permanent, and one opsec mistake and you're screwed.
This simply means that the government will double down on making life for crypto holders more and more difficult, like KYC on non-hosted wallets
Which is precisely what's motivating the ongoing rapid development of various privacy preservation strategies (Monero, Zcash, Wasabi Wallet, ...).
Pornography is hard, it's on the interface of liberty where if you want to maximize freedom, it isn't just a simple action. You need to be careful to protect people in their freedom to express themselves, and you need to protect people from being abused.
>these seemingly arbitrary decisions can be extremely impactful
One would hope that they are impactful. An enormously profitable industry has not been doing enough to protect people from the abuses the business encourages and is thus threatened with losing the ability to sell its product. I really don't see a problem with that.
But when it comes to porn...oh NO! NOT MY PORN!
I suspect Mastercard will pull processing on many adult platforms now. I wonder what this means for Twitter and Reddit that allow UGC adult content.
If it was about some "religious anti-sex work movement," then the credit card companies wouldn't still process payments for the legal brothels in Nevada. Which they do.
> Internet Watch Foundations number of 118 cases of CSAM over 3 years
If there is millions of them, I'm sure you can do better than 118 cases over 3 years...
That's called deflection. Or in HN-speak: "Whataboutism."
Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram:
I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly. https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973...
And this is called a “straw man”!
Pointing out that the actor listed is applying their standards here unequally and therefore the standard might not be what's publicly said isn't deflection or whataboutism.
The amount the term "whataboutism" is used in an attempt to not have to address an empirical counterargument is getting old.
Don't know about brothels, but even in the strip clubs I went to years ago they didn't process cards. Instead you had to go to the corner ATM with ridiculous fees to withdraw some cash.
I am also aware of many other businesses that refuse to take credit cards, and work cash-only.
It's an article. It just happens to be an article you disagree with.
written by a known agitator not a journalist
That's why it's in the Editorial section, not the News section. Also, "agitator" is a loaded term that is in the eye of the beholder. Some people might use "activist" or "hero."
at a time when the religious anti PH movement is at it's crescendo.
If you believe this is true, nobody on the planet change your mind. But I will tell you it comes out like hysterical raving.
As for it being religiously motivated, I don't believe that it is exclusively religious. I think that regular, average people and people with religious convictions can both be against rape videos and child pornography. If you're not, then I suggest you seek mental health counseling.
I wonder how consistent most HNers are wrt this statement about The New York Times.
1. Nicholas Kristof to have a tenuous grasp on reality and to launch unfounded moral panics, and
2. PornHub has a lot of serious issues that should be dealt with.
You know the sayings about broken clocks...
(And for that matter, while I trust The NY Times more than the average newspaper on some topics, like science reporting, it has SERIOUS issues with being driven by political access rather than journalism, doing "both sides" too much, and not being willing to question Trump very much. That and their massive support for pretty much any war, to the point of open lying about stuff. I have cancelled my subscription in the past and will not subscribe again.)
We can’t let the abuse that happens on platforms like pornhub become a partisan issue. It’s grotesque and tortuous to the people who are affected by it. This has zero to do with being sex positive.
And, maybe there is a little bit of child porn on PornHub, it is bound to happen since users can upload anything. I could probably upload child porn on YouTube if I wanted to, that would be short lived and it would get me into trouble but I can probably get a few hundred views before it gets caught. But the thing is, I never stumbled upon it. In fact, I pretty much only get illegally uploaded content from legitimate studios or "PornHub originals".
That anti-sex work groups attack PornHub is ironic. It would be like being against the record industry and attacking The Pirate Bay.
Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram:
I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly. https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation...
2257 requirements even on primary producers have been struck down on First Amendment grounds for material containing a wide class of performers; Free Speech Coalition vs. Attorney General of the United States (3d Cir. 2020.) And, serious Constitutional issues have been raised about the application of 2257 to “secondary producers” like individual users.
And, even under 2257, covered “secondary producers” aren’t required to provide their ID, they are required to have specific information about the maintenance of records related to the perfomers age affixed to the content.
Edit: The comment I replied to has been edited and originally explained the owner was Canadian but serves US customers and so should abide by US law.
I don't want to claim to agree or disagree, I'm just not sure how to work out what's right.
To be fair, MindGeek has an office in the US. Now, if they closed that office, the argument that they were subject to US law would be weaker.
EDIT: I edited my comment as I'm not willing to argue the merits of cross border law enforcement actions in this thread.
In this case, MasterCard no longer has plausible deniability. This increases their liability.
Imagine someone at a liquor store sells beer to someone. Then, they learn the ID is fake and the person is lying about their age. Once they know someone is doing something illegal they can be held liable if they continue to sell the person beer.
Note, I'm not getting into right an wrong here. I'm getting into legal liabilities. Large companies like MasterCard are conservative (legally speaking) in how they handle this stuff.
That is factually untrue (as I also pointed out in the other sub-thread where you made the same claim): they do fact check their opinion section:
The below quote is from a previous NYT Op-ed editor that describes their editorial process. Emphasis is mine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.htm...:
> What happens when your article is accepted? First, you’ll get a contract giving us the right to publish it and laying out some of your responsibilities. The most important ones have to do with originality and truthfulness. You can’t plagiarize yourself, or someone else, and we won’t run something that has appeared in another publication, either print or digital. We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise: Did you invest in a company that you praise in passing? Did you once work with a public official you mention in flattering or critical terms? Could you or an organization or company you represent benefit from the stance you take in an Op-Ed? We need to know. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.
[1] https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta...
I also hope you're not saying that the US should allow child sexual assault which is the issue in this case.
In cases such as this where you break no laws, but your payment processor refuses to process payments ... well, at some point you'll have to convert your crypto cash into real cash - so all you did was kick the ball downstream and fixed nothing. If MasterCard refuses to process your payments, they can also refuse to process payments for the crypto exchange if they do business with you.
Thanks to protections enacted by "Section 230" of the 1996 Communications Descent Act [1]:
Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
The exception for this type of case had bi-partisan support.
And Section 230 will be gutted more thoroughly or retired entirely in the coming decade. A lot of internet marketing is going into protecting it from tech companies whose bad behavior relies on it, but both political parties in the US agree it's time is over.
There are factions within both parties that agree that Section 230 should be repealed or replaced with something significantly different, but there are factions in both parties that disagree and, perhaps more importantly, there is a lack of consensus on whether it should be simply repealed or modified/replaced, and if the latter on what the replacement/modification should be, and many of the people that agree that there is a problem view the status quo as better than other faction’s preferred end-state.
So, while I think there will be a lot of noise about 230 over the next few years, I’m a lot less confident than you seem to be that there will be any successful action to repeal or massively modify it.
However, in the eyes of the leftist cesspool twitter is, if you say you want to remove article 240 to hold twitter accountable for distributing illegal content via tweets, then suddenly you're a Trump supporting alt right conspiracy theorist.
In May of 2019, 500 hours of content were uploaded to YouTube every minute. How could a platform possibly be held accountable for that sheer volume of content? YouTube already tries to do this, but AI is only so good and hiring that many humans to both watch the content and report on it is a massive undertaking.
It would make sense to pursue Twitter if they are in fact acting in _bad faith_, but not being able to read all 9255 tweets posted _every second_ doesn't seem like a reason to punish Twitter.
> suddenly you're a Trump supporting alt right conspiracy theorist.
Maybe it's how you use language and not the idea?
Saying that Twitter should be held accountable for illegal content is fairly agreeable, even if it's a huge burden.
Kristof's piece is a classic "moral panic" article. It could have been written basically at any time in the last 100 years (at least). What is different this time is that the focus is on a modern delivery medium, the internet. But scandalized reporting about the wide distribution and availability of child pornography is nothing new. I remember being a kid and seeing headlines in the newspaper about "internet pedophile porn web rings" being taken in by the police, that was in the 1990s.
As for the motivations behind the people pushing the narrative, they're diverse. Some are religious, some are political, some have nefarious motives. Ultimately these things always distract from the thing no-one ever wants to do: hear from the victims and find real ways to prevent the abuse.
Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25301913
Either the writer is one of the few people on earth who believes that porn is real, or he's somebody who lies to push their ideology. Hard to believe that it's the first.
If so, I find the stance of "either the author is an idiot or there's a conspiracy" to be an interesting dichotomy that excludes a third possibility.
Considering that porn simulates reality (to various degrees), touching somebody else's eye doesn't prove anything. Also a title "very young teen" doesn't prove anything (it's pretty much standard for videos of this genre).
If you want to find abusive videos, you can also find them on YouTube, which has been criticized as well, for the same reasons.
The legal/moral issue is how the hosting company handles them. The author of the article mentions a low report rate, but he did not investigate the possibility that PornHub makes reporting difficult or ineffective.
Ultimately, the article is intentionally ideological, and not factual, because a real investigation may hurt the point. Here's how disconnected from reality the author is:
> The problem goes far beyond one company. Indeed, a rival of Pornhub, XVideos, which arguably has even fewer scruples, may attract more visitors. Depictions of child abuse also appear on mainstream sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. And Google supports the business models of companies that thrive on child molestation.
A lot of the content out there is indeed real, and a lot of what is “staged” is still abuse. Please try to expand your horizons.
I believe this for Pornhub but I also believe it for Youtube and Facebook or whoever else. It doesn't really matter if your site is a porn site or a family pictures site. You should be allowed to have user-generated content with some reasonably high-sensitivity auto-detector coupled with human reports that are passed on to law enforcement and be indemnified.
I bet :)
“We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network,” pending the completion of its investigation, Visa said in a separate statement.
(source: https://twitter.com/VisaNews/status/1337133093031841792)
1. Yes, pornhub has frequently unlaful content. Under german law it literally contains child pornography (hentai containing children) to just name one example.
2. I'm supper annoyed how payment providers discriminate (and by law often have to discriminate) against pornographic content platforms. IMHO this will just push/benefit platforms which operate on a less legal basis and in turn have much less motivation to hinder problematic content (like child pornography, revenge porn uploads, etc.)
So if you draw a hentai image of someone who is 18, or 20, or 25, but could also be seen as younger, that's illegal. If you've seen hentai, you'll know that virtually all of it belongs in this category.
Two 17yo vampires having consensual sex would be legal in Germany, but writing a fanfiction about them would be child porn.
If you think that's batshit crazy, you are right.
IIUC there is a fraud component to this as well. As a generalization these businesses have an above average fraud rate. This does make it more expensive to support these and it is within they payment processor's rights to avoid doing business for that reason alone.
I think the bigger issue is that these payment processors have a sort of monopoly. Most businesses can't afford to not accept MasterCard or Visa since many North American customers (IDK about globally) will only have these cards, and possibly only one of them.
I'd imagine some government friendly investor is already spinning up his own porn video site, or investing into competition.
What's that saying? When the product is free you are the product? Something like that applies here.
Sure they got to this position by allowing the free upload of copyrighted content, but they don't do it now because they're now part of the establishment that others try to disrupt.
Don’t like Standard Oil? Just heat your home and cook your food with someone else’s oil!
I’m tired of hearing this argument to defend technology monopolies and duopolies. If you have no legal reason to deny services to someone, don’t.
That would mean baking cakes for gay weddings if you’re a baker open to the public and processing credit card payments for pornography if you’re a payment processor.
I'm pretty sure you can still use MasterCard to fund a PayPal account, which can be used to buy any manner of thing, so it's not purely that Mastercard doesn't want their money being used to buy illegal things. They just don't want to be associated with it.
Google Pay also has an explicit ban on pornography. As does Apple Pay. As does Samsung Pay. In fact, I don't think any balance-carrying service available to Americans even theoretically allows paying for porn.
The company was aware of it's CP problem and didn't do much to stop it. Now they have a very strong incentive to police their site.
Congressional testimony, civil suits, reputational risk and damage. These are the pitfalls you are attempting to avoid by deplatforming Mindgeek through their payment processor.
So the angle is basically preventative PR? Business lost based on future outrage outweighs business lost to porn subscribers, sort of thing?
Yeah. See exileration's comment about the NY Times piece. Pornhub looked the other way on verified users and safety/trust (content moderation and the like) to generate more users/views and they got burned.
Gist of the original comment: As other commenters point out, your go to option should be to alert authorities and have them investigate.
And then continue processing payments for what you sincerely believe to be child abuse and rape until the justice system finally gets around to dealing with it?
I see it as a less clear situation for an entity that has so much control other everyone’s life. Phrasing it in a “innocent until proven guilty” would be too much, as they are not governing bodies, but there is a line somewhere that should be set in my opinion, and crossing it should be backed by something legal happening on with it (basically PornHub having an injunction to stop doing business until due trial), and not just the processor acting on its principles.
Like PornHub - pornographic content isn't allowed.
Maybe they just saw this as an opportunity to get out of business with PornHub and not look like they are unfairly denying service?
No, this is driven by public and media pressure. There was a really blunt expose about PornHub a week ago by a prominent NYT columnist.
2) The whole point is that Pornhub isn't operating a completely legal business
Perhaps if the sending address has been linked to an IRL identity you could prosecute. But then you could just use Monero or other anonymous currencies instead.
When a business screws me over, Visa takes my payment back.
You can argue that the core activity of processing payments is a commodity (and it isn't, because building a merchant network as big as Visa's is incredibly difficult), but you can't argue that they don't add any value on top of that.
It's also worth noting that MindGeek, Pornhub's parent companys other holdings are, consisting of the majority of other free sites (redtube, youporn, xtube gaytube etc)[1,2] and even production studios (Brazzers, Reality Kings) the Playboy site, but don't seem to be affected.
[1] https://twitter.com/rosekalemba/status/1274593099445153795
I agree that Pornhub should have to follow the same rules as American porn companies as far as ID requirements and copyright rules.
But let's not pretend that any other part of this is about protecting children. Tech companies sent the DOJ more than 45 million instances of CSAM in 2019 alone, most of which they never investigated.
This is about the DOJ pressuring Pornhub into allowing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a DOJ subsidiary, to censor their content. Which they agreed to.
There’s an inherent risk in payment processing which needs to be evaluated before taking on a customer. You’d end up with loads of chargeback fraud if you took everyone on. It’s fair enough saying that clients should only be denied once they’ve broken the law, but often the payment processor is the enabler & it’d be too late waiting for illegalities to be detected and prosecuted accordingly. Best to stop it before!
But it seems like AI may be able to help. Also it might really be necessary for uploaders to identify themselves because who really doubts that a small percentage of it is actually quite heinous?
Also if we really are concerned about the age of people in respect to laws then we probably need better ID systems and a way to tie that into AI and databases.
I guess this story explains why Pornhub decided to change their policies a few days ago & banned uploads by unverified users. See this Vice story: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7m7k8/pornhub-banned-upload...
Too little, too late.
https://www.inclusivecapitalism.com/organization/mastercard/
That said, curious if others have any thoughts about the externalities of this.
How come?
i have never met an extremely online anti-pedo person who wasn't the most specious kind of kony2012 virtue signaller.
Read the NY Times article that sparked this.
pornhub is not the only user upload powered adult site out there, they just happened to be one of the few that actually has and enforced rules against extreme content like rape, so i don't know why they got targeted other then they are #1.
This is an absolute inditement of the "let anyone upload anything and police it later" model that YouTube and Pornhub depend on.
I think it's long overdue.
It's absolutely true that the death of anonymous upload on Pornhub will be a massive boon to commercial and professional adult performers, who will find piracy of their content evaporate overnight. This may actually bring on a renaissance for the adult industry, given how much harm Pornhub has had to the revenues of many studios. Users are going to have a harder time finding that content outside of torrents or the like, so I'm not sure I'd call it a straight upside for them.
Hard to have strong feelings about it.
If you are a sociopath that is a highly motivating example. I thought about tipping a journo, but knowing current media I thought better and just let them be.
It's not about the legal status, I just don't want to see young girls exploited. Even 18-20 year olds are too young and are often naive and exploited. Look at Mia Khalifa as an example. Young and impressionable, she did a few porn shoots at a young age over some months and now it's the defining point of her life and something she'd love to leave behind.
One of cryptocurrencies' core use cases is uncensorable payments for vendors shut out of the mainstream financial system.
Why was Mastercard even allowing PH to process payments at all?
I understand the different angles people will take on this. Yet, it looks like the issue at hand in this case is illegal activity surrounding children. If MasterCard is aware of this illegal activity and is complacent with it... what does that mean ethically and legally? Some people have to deal with that.
youtube-dl still work great..