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Comment by shaftway | Hacker News Reader

I think their point is that Visa and Mastercard are acting as judge, jury, and executioner. If Pornhub is doing something illegal, there's a process for dealing with that, full of judges, juries, and.... well... executioners.

Until PornHub is found guilty by that system, then Visa and Mastercard withdrew their services because of a dislike of the service provided.

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If Visa and MC waited until PornHub was actually found guilty, they'd be right there next to them in the docket. Facilitating payment for illegal activities is itself a crime, and our laws require that payment processors exercise judgement in who they will work with.

A reasonable course of action could have been to temporarily suspend payment processing until PornHub took appropriate corrective action (which they now have), and restoring payments afterward.

Wouldn't this apply to any social media site? Any of them might have illegal activity / content, and they certainly do.

First, there's a huge difference between child pornography and other illegal activities. It will be prosecuted much more aggressively, and rightly so. It is illegal to create, distribute, or possess.

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.

Who defines what constitutes "reasonable effort"? How would you even know without having them go through a legal process like a court? Is it just up to any angry journalist to make this determination?

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.

That’s a fair point. I presume though that there are some legal risks to Visa and MC if they were subsequently found to have been enabling illegal activity.

If Visa/Mastercard and Pornhub were German companies they could be sued for facilitating <insert criminal action>.

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.

Card networks have the same rights to choose who they associate with as YouTube and Twitter do. The fact that both companies have chosen to not do business with a company profiting from human trafficking and pedophilia seems a lot less objectionable than YouTube demonetizing and banning people because of their political views.

"Yes, your honor, I was knowingly buying stolen merchandise from these thieves, but my reasoning was that there is a system to punish thieves and that system had not punished them, ergo, I am completely innocent."

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