Until PornHub is found guilty by that system, then Visa and Mastercard withdrew their services because of a dislike of the service provided.
The basic rule is, these social media sites have to make a reasonable effort to keep that stuff off their sites. Based on the NYTimes report, Pornhub was absolutely not doing that. Visa and MC's lawyers would have given them no choice but to stop working with Pornhub.
I personally wouldn't use PornHub, as I have a negative impression of their moderation standards. Being exposed to child porn could put me at serious legal risk, if I were to inadvertently view the wrong thing. But, that is a simple risk calculation on my part. And I am already surprised so many people would put themselves at risk, of using a website which lets anyone to submit content.
There are investigative articles showing how journalists have directly contacted Pornhub/similar sites because of that and they didn't take down videos in question.
That said, if Pornhub thinks they have a right to get payment processing from Visa/Mastercard, they should probably sue them. Judicature and executive are really fundamentally different from Visa/Mastercard. For instance they don't have any means to force Pornhub to any action apart looking for better customers. I don't see any ambiguity there.
In a way yes. Should the utility stop providing electricity because to someone they think I'd using it to manufacture illegal drugs?
I don't think so. The punishment is for a court to decide, not some of their service providers.
Now, arguably, there should be a fallback payment system with utility-like requirements for universal service that can be cutoff only with due process (certainly, that's needed on the consumer side of banking to deal with the problem of the unbanked, but there's arguably good cause of it on the merchant side of financial exchange as well.) For one thing, an explicit guarantee would make it harder for government officers from using informal pressure on private payment processors as a means to punish targets while evading due process, which it has historically done quite often, with the deniability that it is a free decision.
If a person or firm has a reasonable belief that a business partner is committing crimes or even just behaving unethically, I would say they have an obligation to curb the activity or end the business relationship.
This idea that only the courts should limit or punish crimes pops up here once in a while and I've always found it bizarre.
If child porn was not a crime would you be ok with Visa and MasterCard doing something then? Is it in your view that should they only not do something because it's a crime?
Isn't that the entire point of a court? to have a monopoly on punishing crimes so that people aren't unfairly punished on the basis of gossip or false allegation and so that society doesn't sink into a cycle of vengence where one group punishes the other group for their punishment, and so forth.
That said, punishing a crime is different from refusing to do business with someone because you don't like them. I think the objection is that payment processors are an oligopoly which gives them too much power to behave arbitrarily. If you live in a city and one grocery store doesn't do business with you, that's fine go somewhere else. If there is only one grocery store, then that's akin to starving someone and it should require the evidentiary standard of wrong doing a court would have.
The courts do have a monopoly on certain types of punishment, like prison. Other, informal types, such as declining to do business with somebody, are available to individuals and companies. I don't see that as a contradictory or undesirable situation.
They are doing this to avoid the appearance off having something to do with child porn, not due to legal liability
I am sorry but how are you not understanding that this is one and the same?????
If it were proven in a court of law that
- your associate’s business knowingly trafficked in child pornography - you had reason to believe they were complicit in child pornography - you continued working with that business anyway
then that exposes you to severe criminal liability, the kind that sends you to jail even if you’re a Vice President at VISA. And it should! Child pornography is a heinous crime that goes unpunished far too often. “Gee officer, I’m just a humble MasterCard corporate lawyer, how was I supposed to know?” is a ridiculous excuse.
Payment processors are pretty near a utility at this point. Without access to them it's very hard to do a lot of things in the modern world. They certainly seem more essential than phone and internet service.
That's like saying we should boycott the telephone company because a child molester made a phone call.
If there is evidence that they were aware of child pornography on their platform and did nothing about it that would be different .
It is also not like these issues are new. Pornhub has been criticized for allowing underage pornography since at least 2009, when footage of men raping a 14-year-old girl was uploaded to the site and not removed for 6 months, despite the videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views and the girl’s family repeatedly pleading with PornHub to remove the video. This has been a known problem with PornHub for over a decade. Even if the executives are just profoundly ignorant and bad at their jobs, that is not a good enough excuse in a court of law.
> That's like saying we should boycott the telephone company because a child molester made a phone call.
It is really more like saying that we should boycott the phone company because the child molester ran a nationwide criminal conspiracy around sexual assault using a premium phone service, and the phone company did nothing despite the problem being repeatedly brought to their attention. In which case: yes, boycott the damn phone company and demand a criminal investigation of its executives.
A big part of the problem is people completely trivializing the issue. The EFF doesn’t even mention child exploitation! Pretending this is just about censoring legal pornography, or blowing small instances out of proportion, is completely dishonest and morally despicable.
For example anything related to prositituion. Perfectly legal here and any neighboor countries. Yet the only payment processors available basically refuse to work with startups (i.e. companies that not already charge 100000+ via credit card)
I may be missing something, but right now these few grandfathered sites that exist have the full monopoloy just because nobody else can realistically charge for the service.
Pornhub is an easy target especially for those leftist activists and extortionists who make lots of noises in the "respected" media outlets.
PornHub is just porn. And they've been on notice for years that CP and non-consensual videos are being uploaded to their system yet don't very little to stop it. They claim that they have filters and other systems in place to stop illegal uploads, but those systems are so useless that PH claimed they had 0 illegal porn on their website, when that was demonstrably false prior to them removing all unverified user-uploaded content.
The only reason I can see for not be concerned more about the former than the latter is that the concern about CP/non-consent is feigned and the real concern is about legitimate porn, with the CP/non-consent as merely convenient pretext.
Which is also consistent with those concerns becoming more shrill when the porn site takes drastic action to deal with the problem which removes the pretext.
Seems unlikely. I presume you have a source for that assertion. And anyway, as I said, Visa and Mastercard acted in response to allegations of illegal content not just the fact that there was porn
> leftist activists and extortionists who make lots of noises in the "respected" media outlets
I think that might just be in your head.
PornHub isn't under attack because of child porn, or non-consensual porn, it's under attack by people who think porn is inherently bad, and who have found that they don't need to convince people to agree with them as long as they can make it seem like their targets are particular venues for content that is uncontroversially bad, which inevitably involves distortion and ignoring mainstream venues that are much more significant channels for the problem they want to pretend to be fighting.