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Comment by tomwill656 | Hacker News Reader

This article explains the originals of the NYT opinion article and the anti-sex work campaigns behind it: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war... Millions of VERY illegal child abuse are uploaded to Facebook, Twitter and all UGC platforms. In the NYT article, the journalist dismisses the (non religious) Internet Watch Foundations number of 118 cases of CSAM on Pornhub over 3 years. He asks IWF why the number is so low and says they couldn't explain it. Maybe because it is.

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> Millions of VERY illegal child abuse are uploaded to

> 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...

So because there are illegal videos on other platforms, they should be allowed on PH, and the credit card companies should process those charges.

That's called deflection. Or in HN-speak: "Whataboutism."

No, I wonder why Mastercard does process charges on those platforms and what it means especially for Twitter and Reddit that allow UGC adult content.

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...

If someone was pointing to behavior of another payment processor it'd maybe be deflection or whataboutism.

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.

It's called targeted enforcement where your friends don't get in trouble. Facebook has so much more clout than PH they can never get cut off from payment processors.

> So because there are illegal videos on other platforms, they should be allowed on PH

And this is called a “straw man”!

No, this is why they should stop processing payments for those other platforms too.

But why don't they? That's the point, it seems aimed at sex work in general, with illegal content as an excuse.

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