Visa and MasterCard ban Pornhub over abusive videos | Hacker News Reader

Visa and MasterCard ban Pornhub over abusive videos

arstechnica.com

47 pointsadmiralspoo57 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378155

A sad move in the end, a situation that is neither as black nor as white as the participants involved try to frame it.

Yes: Pornhub had a massive problem, not with child depictions, but with "revenge porn" and similar materials. They definitely needed a slap on the wrist for that one.

But... this is not about children, not about "revenge porn". This is part of an organized, fundamentalist-Evangelical-Christian anti-sex-work campaign that goes back many years (https://theconversation.com/evangelical-women-are-shaping-pu...), whose biggest successes to date were FOSTA/SESTA, and (in countries where prostitution is legal) who uses the current Coronavirus crisis to further calls for banning brothels and other sex work indefinitely.

Make no mistake: the ones suffering at the moment are not the people behind Pornhub/Mindgeek. The ones suffering are the countless content creators that already had their lives screwed when Coronavirus restrictions made face-to-face sex work impossible, and now the biggest platform got hit with a payment cutoff. And this is intentional.

> goes back many years

I've sometimes wondered what might have happened if 9/11 had occurred a couple of months later. My fuzzy understanding is that through 2001, US DoJ was working up a major effort, a "War on Porn". Mid September, shortly before kicking off, that focus became an embarrassing liability, and was quietly shelved. So instead of a big explicit declared War, with associated societal reflection, we've had a long quiet shadow war, with misdirection integral. Though hoping for societal political reflection seems increasingly quaint.

Pornhub has always had trouble with payment processors. They even had to make their own stripe.

Porn is so ill viewed that this is hardly a surprise. Plenty of disgusting content is published to most user-generated content platform, yet the easy target is always porn. The old "protect the children" used yet again for some dubious purposes.

Made their own stripe? You mean cut out the middleman? Lots of companies with large processing volume do this. Pretty normal, it saves a lot of money, any gateways or ipsp dealing in high risk take hefty fees.

You're right, but I think since gateways are so hard on non-mainstream content like porn it was made out of necessity rather than cost savings.

Non mainstream? Porn hub has more monthly users than Amazon prime, netflix, Hulu and Disney+ Combined

Perhaps the killer app for cryptocurrency will be paid porn? Might be a stretch, but it's hard content to moderate and the demand for it is huge.

The first killer app is already here: decentralized exchange.

The highest volume DEX, Uniswap, had trading volumes that rivaled those of the largest crypto exchanges, like Coinbase Pro and Kraken, over the summer.

It provides a user experience that in many cases is superior to that provided by traditional exchanges, with nothing more than a MetaMask extension on the browser needed to trade Ethereum-based crypto assets, and with no requirement to hand over custody to a trusted third party.

How much of that is wash trading?

Each Uniswap trade on Ethereum costs several dollars in gas fees, so I'm guessing almost none of it is wash trading, as opposed to traditional exchanges where wash trading can be financially viable.

I'm sure an opaque nonreversable transaction, and nonmodifiable permanent globally-readable transaction ledger will fit that application perfectly, against LEO, blackmail, and fraudsters.

</s>

There are more cryptocurrencies than bitcoin

Would you mind stating your point plainly? Because I don't get what you are trying to say

op is saying that cryprocurrency will allow shady sites to receive payment and not provide a service with no ability to perform a charge back, and that the payment record will be public and _can_ be traced back to the buyer

I see it as fairly unlikely that a website as reputable as Pornhub would pull something like that. But if they do, there is always law enforcement.

no need to disagree with me with the content of op's comment. I was just explaining. although just to comment on your point, it is much easier to get a charge back from a cc company than to sue a company.

Sorry, but I must reject any rules of debate that allows someone to state a point without anyone allowed to reply to it. If you don't hold the opinions yourself that's fine by me, I will still reply.

I agree that it is easier, and consumers prefer this if they have a choice. But now that they don't have a choice anymore, I think it will turn out that it's not a dealbreaker and they will put up with marginally less safety.

The bigger question is if people can be bothered to acquire bitcoin for the purpose of paying pornhub. It may be annoying enough that would-be customers turn to piracy.

Misappropriation might come from sites, content producers, talent, consumers, or any entity capable of interposing themselves between two or more parties, legitimately or otherwise.

Incase you're being genuinely sincere in your query..

> globally-readable transaction ledger

Having which skin flicks i dropped a dime on publicly searchable doesn't seem a good move privacy wise.

If you transfer $20 to pornhub that doesn't say a lot about your tastes.

There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that are designed to be anonymous. Bitcoin isn't the only thing out there

And there's still plenty of Bitcoin ATMs throughout many cities that accept cash and put it onto a wallet. Or other ways to disconnect identity.

But really who the hell is going to go through the very hard work to figure out which porn sites you signed up for (with a random user name not connected to your real identity naturally, which is the first disconnect). No one cares. Especially for a site like pornhub.

Or uploaded, downloaded, produced, etc.

I’ve been convinced for years that the only real use case for crypto currencies is privacy centric transactions.

Meanwhile Bitcoin is now talked about everywhere mainstream so people keep buying Bitcoin as a speculative investment and at the same time Monero barely gets any press coverage.

Bypassing currency controls should be high up there.

Well at least on the first point, nonreversible transactions are extremely desired in the porn market. A constant uphill battle for payment processing is that people spending money on porn sites often have "regret" (or, less charitably, they chargeback when their spouse finds out). I believe this is the reasoning for Stripe not taking adult stores as customers. While it isn't consumer friendly to get rid of chargebacks, it's something that would help out these sites a lot.

Did you read something on crypto about 10 years ago and then stop reading? Strange decision to vocalise that fact on HN.

Nicholas Kristof's NYT article and HN discusion, from 6 days ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25301913

Kristof’s follow-up article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/pornhub-news-chil...

He accomplished a lot in a week!

The article certainly has a kick, yes.

Can someone explain what do payment processors gain by this? Do they gain new clients that were against the banned business? Is it PR related to moral panic? Is it because of chargebacks? What do they risk business wise by not banning them?

Protecting themselves from a legal nightmare.

This is probably true, but I for one would like to see some kind of protection for payment processors. Not because I feel sorry for them, but because an ordinary person's day-to-day life can become massively disrupted or nearly impossible without them, and a company might be essentially punished without trial. Perhaps payment processors could be responsible only for banning customers that are on a government-maintained blacklist (where a customer would only be added after having been found guilty of a relevant crime, obviously).

They do it to avoid both legal and PR consequences.

Is there any examples of people legally going after Visa or Mastercard?

I have a feeling this is just PR by the many examples I've seen of them doing this recently. The legal stuff just sounds like cover.

But this does send shivers to the small business owners who have nothing to do with porn. The fact that they can be de-platformed by Visa on moral or political grounds.

What happened to PH push to accept bitcoin?

Oh no doubt. This is becoming a very scary development as services. Demonetization and deplatforming happens over increasingly harmless activity is a serious problem going forward into the future.

Like all monsters that get created no one cares because it's used against the 'bad guys' so no one cares. And then it just becomes normal.

I don't know if there are examples of regular people going after those monsters (I don't think Visa/Mastercard are even afraid of this) for this or other reasons.

The thing is that any legal action can be used as political lever. As a business you don't want to be in a position where you have to give excuses or negotiate. Hypothetically, the EU or some crazy US senator can say Visa is endorsing CP (even if it's not 100% true, but is good for the senator or EU parliamentary image), that they will engage in a full investigation and there is a possibility of facing sanctions. Now Visa has to activate a PR and legal campaign that can last years.

It's better to just cut off that single website from the customer list.

People pay for porn?

And of course this happens shortly after all those people bought "lifetime" accounts with pornhub premium on Black Friday... Only for Pornhub to essentially have the writing on the wall for going out of business.

I'm guessing that unless they can reverse the decision of Visa and MC, either they'll have to transition to an ad-only model or they'll soon be going out of business.

Maybe porn will be the first business to adopt cryptos. Would love for it to happen and it seems quite easy considering Pornhub already has some infrastructure for fraud detection

They'd probably like it in that light. Less fraud to detect with crypto payments. No charge backs are possible.

Chargebacks are a safety-net on top of payment systems. It gives peace of minds to users.

I don't think they will launch a full-fledged cryptobacked anything, but if they do, chargebacks are a nice thing to support to boost adoption.

I don't disagree, but consider how much more useful is the ability to chargeback in a pull-based system where anyone with a semi-public piece of data (your credit card number) can take money from you, versus a push-based system where every single transaction must be initiated by you.

Whos carding pornhub? Why?

The "under banked"?

You'd be amazed how many guys wives call in to these charges... Claiming "He would never!"

Ohhhhhhhh, 'friendly fraud' nearly.

I mean this in all seriousness: it amazes me that people still pay for pornography these days.

Some people have spare cash that they would like to use on higher quality entertainment. You can (or could) find streaming sites that streamed most tv shows at no cost, provided that you could navigate seedy places on the internet and didn't mind the quality too much.

Yet people still pay for Netflix.

The same thing happened to me, but the only difference was I didn't do anything close to illegal. In the late 90s I made a massively multiplayer online drug dealing game. At its peak there were about 3M daily active users. I went through a few shared hosting companies as I learned to optimize and scale the stack. One of them cut me off, stole all the source code, and launched their own copy of the game. I couldn't afford to bring legal action against them. Eventually I had my own co-located servers in one of google's old datacenters in San Jose, and had everything humming smooth. The game was free, but I charged $1/mo for "premium" features that basically just let you skin your character or start a gang. No "pay to win" stuff... just gravy. I had direct payments from Visa and Mastercard, as well as PayPal that included Discover and AmEx I think.

I got accused of running an actual drug marketplace. The DEA contacted me to let me know they were alerted of the claims, but after an investigation determined (fairly obviously) that it was just a game, and let me know that they enjoyed it, and many of the agents in their office were actively playing. A month later PayPal cut me off, seized all of my funds (that I have still not gotten back), and shortly after that my direct merchant accounts with Visa and MasterCard were cut off. Lesson learned. America's financial institutions are corrupt.

It seems that this should be great cover for new ventures.

Will this lead to the rise of crypto as a proper currency as opposed to a gold-like investment vehicle?

It is possible! We have seen the porn industry adopt many video standards early and push them mainstream. Perhaps this will help propel crypto to the mainstream.

They have been at the forefront for other technologies as well (I think that I saw this first in the sitcom Silicon Valley). A few examples include : VCR, secure online payments, affiliate marketing, streaming services, video conferencing, social media (?) etc. Even today, they are working on virtual reality, sex robots, etc. Ethics aside, it's fascinating to note that porn has had such a disproportionate impact on tech.

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