Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk
bbc.com
bbc.com
A sex worker union [1] who can negotiate with distribution companies and platforms, lobby legislators and payment facilitators (who should not be prohibiting payments for legal business transactions), and ensure quality working conditions and anti-exploitation controls are in place.
[1] https://www.iusw.org/ (just an example, not familiar with them specifically, just demonstrating the existence of such an org)
[1] https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/Declaration_bookle...
I've literally never seen a functioning union anywhere I went (I live in Europe). Everyone I met in my life, in a bar, etc is angry at their unions.
Incidentally, I personally think the limit for communist societies is around 50 people or so.
Another issue is that people have unrealistic idea about what can and should be done in a day/week/month. They don't care about their own work nearly that much, and will forgive themselves a lot, but will expect others to upheld that unrealistic standard.
On the flip side, as a native Scandinavian I have many colleagues from outside of Scandinavia that moved here because of many of the things unions have accomplished - 25 days of paid vacation, a culture of working your 8 hours a day and not more than that, and a child care system that allows you to spend more time with your kids.
Not all of them are, but it does not seem like the issue has been solved.
"Exploitable people are pushed into sex work" is closer to being true than "sex workers are exploited," only because almost no one starts out as a sex worker if they have better opportunities.
"It's estimated that internationally there are between 20 million and 40 million people in modern slavery today."
"Human trafficking earns global profits of roughly $150 billion a year for traffickers, $99 billion of which comes from commercial sexual exploitation"
"Estimates suggest that about 50,000 people are trafficked into the US each year, most often from Mexico and the Philippines. "
>Society provides resources allowing the person to have the opportunity to not be leveraged into exploitation as their only option.
"In 2018, over half (51.6%) of the criminal human trafficking cases active in the US were sex trafficking cases involving only children"
https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-human-tr....
But even without being able to answer it, restricting sex workers' choices via deplatforming and criminalisation invariably makes them less safe, so I'd argue that we should stop doing that anyway.
Letting them actually report exploitation to the police would be a start (and no, swedish model bullshit doesn't achieve that, if you criminalise any part of the transaction they realistically can't take full advantage of the existing protections under law).
IMHO, the "right" way to fix these issues is to make sure people have a choice.
Many girls get into sex work because it's either sex or starve. We need to (as a society), give these people a third alternative. Ideally, this would result in only people who WANT to be sex workers to go down that path (pretty much like only people who WANT to be CEOs are CEOs).
E.g. abilities like hiring bodygourds, platforms that allow them to vet customers etc.
you don't have to think "porn is good" or "prostitution is good" to acknowledge that it is something that a large % of men consume and protect workers and consumers. we know that alcohol and drugs are bad, but they're legal and regulators do try to educate and protect the public. why not have the same for sex work?
And you're saying people in ancient Rome saw everyone in their "tribe" going at it? You do realize that humans weren't cavemen 2000 years ago, right? Ancient Rome/China/etc. had prostitutes and brothels 2000 years ago.
Back in Rome, life was again one room, all share 1 bed etc for most people. Add to that a few examples from their public activity: The poisoner Locusta (the world's first serial killer supposedly) was executed by being raped to death by a specially trained giraffe. Half their pottery is people being killed, the other half is sex scenes. Seriously. You think kids there didn't know what sex looked like?
I don't know why people are shocked by this. It was the Victorians that brought in both the idea of privacy and the idea that sex was sinful and people should hide it.
If you're going to argue for more restrictions on porn, you need to argue from first principles and evidence. You can't harken back to an imaginary time when no one knew where babies came from until the priest told them on their wedding night...
Christans have always had the idea of sexual privacy, something they inherited from the Jews. We have plenty of writing from early Christians that make it clear that they objected to how open the Romans were.
The Victorians might have invented the idea that sex is sinful, but no religion surrives long if there are no children, so I'm not sure how common that belief was. (The shakers of course did have that belief and did well for a few years. I'm not aware of other groups with such beliefs, though I'd be surprised if they were alone)
I would like to add more to this. With the fall of Roman Empire, the early Dark and Middle Ages changed perspectives on nudity because of paganism. Most ruins and statues were seen as symbols of idolatry. This view slowly changed with the Renaissance period, as the Catholic Church embraced perspective that man is the image of God. Many famous sculptures and paintings were made in this period.
These artistic works then became censored because of the Council of Trent. The Catholic Church had to implement changes because of Protestant Reformation. This is why many classical works of art have fig leaves. Michelangelo had to come back to his Sistine Chapel painting to censor it, for example.
Both the video for interviews and the bibliography links in the description.
100% serious.
> Is this person a sex worker?
He's a philosopher with an acting day job.
Did you miss where I said "the video for interviews"? The video contains an interview with a sex worker and many short comments by people working in various parts of the sex industry.
> Or do they have any qualifications to speak on the subject of sex work?
He has a degree in philosophy, which is why he mainly discusses the logical implications of various topics. For actual opinions on sex work, he interviews people with first hand knowledge. I also mentioned the presence of a bibliography in the video description.
> seems like a channel dedicated to alt-right/far-right talking points
Where did you get that idea? Philosophy Tube is very strongly on the left. The most popular video on the channel is a very good introduction to antifa.
> a Steve Bannon superfan
LOL - The 2nd most popular video on the channel[1] - which I recommend watching - focuses on explaining how Steve Bannon lies, and a warning about how Bannon's rhetoric will eventually lead people into fascism.
Exactly. Law making isn't about philosophical discussions of good vs evil. It should be about "what's the best way to improve life for people in the real world".
And frankly it seems to me like it's still trivial to go on there and find what seems to me to be a lot of content that has dubious consent or related issues.
These performers would be better off with a platform that was highly moderated, something Pornhub and the sites similar to it don't seem to be able to (or want to) properly do.
Verify the creator, provide a way to get payments to them without you acting as the intermediary, charge reasonable fees for your tech stack to organize and distribute digital content, and keep a paper trail when regulators, legislators, and law enforcement knock.
I want to really stress as a financial infra and payments system armchair enthusiast and scholar that crypto payments don't fix this. The law just comes for you if you try to subvert the law with crypto. You have to drive home the point (lobbying, marketing) that consenting adults adhering to the law should not be in fear when exchanging value in a transactional business and should not have their payments intercepted.
Then they'll go after the platform infrastructure (AWS), or any other fundamental aspect. Peer pressure.
We've been warning for ages: the Cancel Everyone game the NYT and others with very loud voices are playing is a dangerous one.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5e7dad06-c48d-4509-b3...
But there's a dark side: the documentary found evidence of the age verification process being circumvented, meaning under-18s were able to illegally sell explicit content of themselves on the site.
It's because this is the wrong way to deal with that issue.
The fairly obviously correct way to do it is that you have law enforcement investigate instances of child pornography, arrest the creators for it, and then issue a court order to the hosting sites to remove the specific instances that they've found.
The content gets removed. The correct people to go jail. If there was a mistake, the site and the uploader have standing to challenge the order.
Who ever thought it was a good idea to turn websites into the police? It's not their job, they're bad at it, don't do that.
However, according to the article, it was really hard to get Pornhub to remove illegal videos. And since videos could be downloaded and uploaded by anyone, removed videos quickly showed up on the website again and again.
Sex abuse victims have been fighting for years to keep their videos off Pornhub, yet they show up again and again.
Pornhub is the only one making money from the videos, so I do think it's their job to keep rape videos off the site. The police can't spend all their time making sure no anonymous users reupload illegal videos again and again.
You're saying that if you go to them with a court order, they don't comply with it? So then have the court find them in contempt. This requires no involvement from Visa or Mastercard.
> And since videos could be downloaded and uploaded by anyone, removed videos quickly showed up on the website again and again.
How are they supposed to know it's the same video? Compare every video to every other one? The uploader would presumably just reencode the video or make whatever other changes to evade an automated system, and a manual system is infeasible. And no matter what Pornhub does, there are six quintillion porn hosting sites on the internet and it would just end up on a different one.
The correct answer is for the police to investigate who is continuing to upload them and impose penalties. Then no more uploads, no more video.
No, I'm saying it's hard for sex abuse victims to get their videos off Pornhub.
> How are they supposed to know it's the same video?
If they can't even prevent re-uploads of known illegal videos, maybe they should never have allowed user uploads at all.
If they go to the police, who have the ability to get a court order, and they don't, isn't your issue with the police?
> If they can't even prevent re-uploads of known illegal videos
How do you propose that they know that it's the same video? Trivial checks like whether it's byte for byte identical are just as trivially bypassed by the uploader, e.g. by reencoding. Anything more complicated than that will fail to match with 100% accuracy, especially when the uploader is trying to cause that to happen. And then you would still have people complaining that the videos are there again.
This isn't a job for the platform. It's a job for the police.
I'm not making money from user uploaded videos of young girls, so I don't need to have an answer to that question.
> This isn't a job for the platform. It's a job for the police.
No, it's not. It's the platforms job to ensure they don't distribute unlawful content. You don't want the police involved, since all they can really do is seize the domain and block the website altogether. (And that's exactly what they do for file sharing websites)
That doesn't follow at all. If you get on a Greyhound bus with the intent to get to a place to commit a sex crime, Greyhound would "help crimes be committed" by carrying you to your destination, but they're not the police and it's not their job to investigate you before allowing you to travel.
> Especially if the website is made aware that such crimes are being committed.
There are two different versions of "made aware" here.
One is that a court has decided that something is illegal and ordered them to take it down. I have a hard time believing that they don't comply with that.
Two is that somebody claims that something is illegal, but the website is neither judge nor jury and has no competence to adjudicate the claim. In this case it's not at all unreasonable to refer you to the actual court system, which will bring you back to number one.
The fact is that all of these alternatives are designed to be an end run around the constitutional protection of speech, by foisting the messy process of determining what's illegal onto a platform that can claim it isn't subject to the First Amendment, instead of a government body that is. Even though it's a government penalty being imposed for not removing what is, in practice, a body of works some of which are lawful speech.
Last thing I saw from sex workers rights groups was roughly "Pornhub are far from perfect, but moderation at scale is hard, and they're actually talking to us and trying to improve, which is far better than most other platforms."
So I suspect what would be ideal, honestly, would be "let the sex workers rights groups lead the way rather than panic articles placed by people who hate sex workers" - and that includes disregarding my opinion just as much as yours ;)
Rather than ones with pre-existing professionally published content who have seen their revenue and livelihoods decimated by the tacit acceptance of illegally pirated material that is essentially Pornhub’s business model.
Anyone who has an issue with what Visa/MC did must also take issue with the others.
Yeah, I totally never did that before at all.
But was it illegal?
Disturbing !== illegal.
If there were no alternatives to Twitter, Android, iOS and AWS then I'd be as unhappy about that as I am about Visa/Mastercard's decision here.
However, it's my judgement that there are alternatives to these technology platforms to do what recently became less easy for some people to do. I don't believe there are any viable alternatives for payment processing.
Show me how I'm wrong.
If you agree that the required ability is "use my portable cell-connected computing device to exchange messages with others on their similar devices", then absolutely, I agree that there's a duopoly there (I'm ignoring the possibility to use alternative app stores on Android, because it doesn't seem particularly central).
But if you instead think the required ability is "be able to exchange messages with others in more or less realtime", then the duopoly in the portable cell-connected computing device world is of much less importance.
For years, because I don't have a cell phone, I was excluded from communications taking place via SMS (there were a few 1-way linux-accessible gateways, but they didn't really change anything there). But I didn't feel that my ability to communicate with others was really particularly impaired, and eventually Telegram (and others came along) that I could use from a desktop, and I was more or less back at parity for "real time communication with others".
So whether or not the android/ios duopoly matters in this sort of instance depends on precisely what functionality it is that you think people have a "right" to ...
That last one, too, is probably a big part of the reason for the classification. There are more Visa/MC debit cards out there than their are credit cards.
2. If you look at transaction, Amex and Discover may have higher processed transaction value of something like 15% in US. But if you look at transition volume, Visa / Master are 90%+.
3. Both are Credit Card only. Debit Card is where the majority are using for Payment.
3. Consider there are no other electronic / digital payment method that is as ubiquitous as Visa / Master payment network ( ignoring Asia ) and they are the baseline method for e-payment, as well as an extreme high level barrier of Entry. The two are considered as Duopoly.
For example my phones use Android, but I do not have a Google account.
There exists no legal action that could be done by Google and that could influence anything that I am using my phone for.
On the other hand, if Visa and Mastercard would decide to not let me buy something, that would be very bad for me, because I buy almost nothing with cash and most things that interest me could not be bought with cash anyway, because they cannot be found in the shops from my close neighborhood.
So the monopoly of Visa and Mastercard really matters and it is very hard to circumvent. That of Apple and Google, much less so.
Society is not math or computer science where existence of one counterexample makes things invalid. Society is a thing of ratios and percentages. If something is almost impossible for most people, we have to treat it as impossible even though it is possible for some - otherwise bad actors get away with terrible stuff on technicalities.
(I for example pay everything with cash or wires which are free and instantaneous in my country - I use card only once in a while to withdraw cash - but it does not invalidate Visa/MC duopoly any more than your special Android that only one in ten thousand people can use either)
I do not need extra apps from the Google Store, because all the phones that I buy do the things that I need, e.g. voice calls, SMS messages, Internet browsing, photo/video recording, document reading, etc., without needing to install anything else. Things like Google Maps can be accessed in the browser, there is no need for an app.
So it is not difficult to avoid Google.
To avoid Visa and MC, one would need exceptional connections, because most online shops do not accept other methods of payment and it would not be easy to convince them to create a special method for you.
I choose wire transfers whenever I can instead of credit cards. For payments within the country there are no fees, but for payments to other countries, the fees are larger than for credit cards and the vendors are less likely to have wire transfers as an alternative method of payment.
This is why personal anecdotes are meaningless for these topics.
Payment is critical infrastructure. It's crazy that most of the world is subject to this duopoly.
That's what everyone's been telling Parler since they started being removed from these platforms.
I also don't know how you can reconcile this comment with the fact that Gab and others were removed from Visa/MC networks, to much fanfare.
To be clear, I'm in favor of Parler going away, but I can't help but notice the double standards.
They just need a hosting service. If they relied heavily on specific services provided by AWS, they would need to either recreate them or reengineer their code to do things differently.
These are on an entirely differently level of "just make your own" from "make your own payment network".
Unless, that is, there is no hosting service that will have them (and maybe no colo facility that will allow them presence). If so, then I would view the situations as essentially equivalent.
I think it’s fair to say you just can’t realistically run a website of the majority of tech corporations are against you.
Yes! It's almost as if Nazis and terrorists are not the same thing as sex workers.
What a puzzling thing.
Furthermore, please review the HN guidelines for posting. Your comment is not substantive nor constructive.
As to your other point, an alternative to Twitter was made. Then it was banned by Google and Apple from devices, and then Amazon from computing infrastructure. It's no longer about an alternative of the primary service but all through the stack and that is much more concerning.
You are right that PayPal/Venmo (same company) may be an alternative for now, although they generally end up applying the same restrictions as Visa/MC.
American Express ... wow, it's been years since I did this but I think it involves actually going to an Amex brick-and-mortar location, and so wouldn't actually count.
Bitcoin is equivalent to paying in a different currency, which while possible, mostly breaks the terms of the comparison, since you could argue for using some other non-crypto-currency to avoid some or all of the limitations of Visa/MC.
Parler failed to meets the ToS set by its chosen platform (picked in all likelihood because its founder was ex-AWS). Had it either met the ToS by providing sufficient moderation, or picked a different hosting service, it would have had a different experience.
As I said in my opening comment, if there is really no alternative hosting service where Parler can allow people to openly discuss violence towards specific individuals, violence towards state actors and generally be as obnoxious and wrong as they feel like, then sure, I'd agree there's a problem.
So now you're moving the goalposts and saying that it being extremely unusual precludes it as an option? Of course any alternative to the Mastercard/VISA duopoly is going to be unusual. By definition, since they are dominant, any other way of payment will have to be outside the norm.
> American Express ... wow, it's been years since I did this but I think it involves actually going to an Amex brick-and-mortar location, and so wouldn't actually count.
It does not require going in person at all. You can get qualified for a card online and they'll ship it to you.
> Bitcoin is equivalent to paying in a different currency, which while possible, mostly breaks the terms of the comparison
Again, by construction of the question, alternative payment schemes will necessarily be different. The other players here are PayPal, Discover, and AMEX.
The alternatives for Parler (going to another hosting provider than AWS, alternate App Store on Android, and no app on iOS) are at least as unusual compared to the alternatives for payment. Just like your Discover card won't be accepted at most places, or Bitcoin or PayPal, most users are not going to accept a modern day service that doesn't have an app. Or even more egregiously, in Stormfront's case, users are absolutely not going to learn how to use Tor just to access a site. Parler isn't there yet, but it may well be soon if their domain registrar drops them. Or even Level3 or BGP providers.
Well, what I should have said was "ACH rarely completes inside 24 hours to a new account", which doesn't move the goalposts.
>(Amex) It does not require going in person at all. You can get qualified for a card online and they'll ship it to you.
Not sure this has anything to do with the ability to pay a 3rd party. They would need to have an Amex merchant account or an equivalent proxy via an intermediate payment processor, and my impression is that when Visa/MC drops you, the 3rd party will too, even if Amex didn't.
> users are absolutely not going to learn how to use Tor just to access a site
Parler had no privacy (and from what I read, very lax security), so I don't think that a Tor-accessed site is a part of the replacement for what they had. They just a hosting site that can run some moderately but not extraordinarily complex backend stack.
The "lack of app" question goes back to a comment I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719115
Anyways my greater point is that illegal actions should be forwarded to the appropriate state department which can investigate and prosecute with appropriate authority and accountability. Private companies are setting a dangerous precedent, especially as they gain superior scale and then collude at multiple layers against the same organization.
As I indicated below, I think it is pretty hard to get paid via Amex if Visa/MC have blocked you (3rd party payment processors such as paypal will likely block you too).
I would agree about the "forward to the government" part if that was part of normal business to find the illegal actions. I read the Visa/MC - Pornhub thing as more as a case of of Visa/MC saying "look, we think its clear that there's illegal stuff happening on your platform; we're not going to play detective here; we don't want to run the risk of being complicit of processing payments for illegal stuff, so we're cutting you off." That is, it's a statement about their desire to (not) take legal risks. They are operating within a legal context where others may do what you are suggesting and then put them in legal jeopardy.
The "we think it's clear" is the dangerous part, especially when applied outside of a few easy targets discussed here. MC/Visa have numerous examples of shutting down completely legitimate businesses, and so do Google and Apple usually with a weekly HN thread highlighting yet another startup/app unceremoniously wiped off the net. Either it's all a problem or none of it is. Do you disagree with this?
If I did care, then perhaps I'd see Google/Apple store bans etc. as more equivalent to Visa/MC payment processing bans.
As it stands, I don't.
Yeah .... no. For a variety of reasons. But for one, it's impossible to do business online if you're not in the good graces of major payment providers (assuming you want to get paid). It might be hard(er) to advertise your business if Twitter bans you, but that's in no way comparable to how essential Visa/MC are to any business.
Providers of critical infrastructure (payments, search, appstores, probably a few other things), when they're big enough to be a monopoly/duopoly, could really use more oversight. If you piss off Google/Apple, your business can be ruined, and you'll have virtually no recourse -- as evidenced by the frequent "google/apple killed my app" threads on HN.
If you feel that monopolistic powers by major tech companies need more oversight then that should apply equally. I don't see why communications networks are any less important than payment networks.
In most cases they are the only existing means for making remote payments. I would have much preferred a world in which the remote payments would not have been done by credit cards, but by wire transfers (with much lower fees than the current fees for wire transfers), but we do not live in such a world.
I am not sure about what weird conditions might be written in the small print of the contracts for credit cards, but certainly when Visa/MC advertise their services, they claim that you should pay for their cards in order to buy anything that you want, they do not invite you to pay them in order to let you buy only what they like.
So I do not believe that it is correct to say that VISA/MC are private companies that can do anything they like.
They have also obligations towards the customers who use their cards and they cannot decide unilaterally to ban some sellers, unless those are selling something illegal, which is not the case with Pornhub (after they took down what was said to be illegal content).
I do not think that making a referendum among Visa/MC customers about whether to ban some vendor or another would be the most appropriate solution, but certainly unilateral decisions taken just by the Visa/MC management are an abuse.
While I have never used Pornhub, so I have no opinion about how correct were their actions, I have paid in the past for a few other sites with erotic content and I would not like to discover one day that Visa or MC has again decided to block such a site without any valid reason.
Whether you consider an individual decision to be a mistake is entirely subjective and irrelevant.
Why? I can agree that someone has a right while also disagreeing with how they exercise that right. I have no idea why you are labeling the specifics irrelevant.
If a company reaches a certain size and has a quasi-monopolistic position so that other people or companies depend on it, it starts to have some degree of responsibility towards society that's beyond value maximization for shareholders.
That said, it's really not equivalent. There are 101 other services if AWS turn you down. You can still access the parler site from an apple/android phone too. On android you can still install the app, just not via the play store.
Censorship is incidious because many people support at least some. So you convince liberals to support banning parler and conservatives to support banning porn payments (or whatever). And they're both poorer for it. We should all be agreeing on this, not being fractional...
We should all be uniting in our call to get Visa , Mastercard, Apple, Google and a dozen others declared utilities. Rather than arguing over which problem is biggest, solve them all.
It's concerning when an alternative no longer just means an alternative of the same service but also the entire infrastructure stack. We've seen similar situations during the digital piracy era of the early 2000s.
This rhetorical trick of categorizing all of these as "private companies denying service," is the same one used by those who opposed anti-discrimination laws. Should an ice-cream store be able to kick out a person pissing on the floor? Should they be able to kick out a black person for being black? In each case, it's simply "a private company doing whatever they want." But, obviously, these two cases are not the same.
Personally, I think it's quite a different thing to kick people who incite violence off your social media platform than it is to ban sex-workers from using you as a payment processor. And, because they are different actions, with different intent and effects, it is, of course, possible to think "Hey, it's good that [x] is happening, but bad that [y] is happening."
Your personal opinion on which decision you support is just that, your personal opinion, and only reinforces my point about the subjectivity and inherent hypocrisy of it all and whether private company action over state prosecution is the correct course of action.
That doesn't follow. Someone can acknowledge that companies have the right to run itself however it wants but disagree with this particular decision. It is possibly incoherent to argue that Twitter may ban people but Visa may not ban anyone; it is perfectly coherent to argue that Twitter should ban certain people and Visa should not ban these particular businesses.
Also, I don't think it's a contradiction even to say that Visa may not ban anyone. Running a website is a form of speech. Every website absolutely must be moderated beyond what is required to remove spam or what is required by law. Telling them what kind of community they are allowed to run is an excessive infringement on their freedom of speech. This is similar to why I support net neutrality but fervently oppose any sort of mandatory neutrality on websites. It would take a tortured argument to claim that routing packets is a form of speech (particularly when these packets are encrypted), while running a website always requires taking an editorial role.
No one would find it strange if a book store decided not to carry a particular book. People would find it very strange if their credit card company refused to process a payment for a particular book.
I neither support nor oppose banning payments to Pornhub since I don't know much about the website. I have no skin flicks in the game.
Visa/MC take the money of their customers, who use their cards, by promising to help them pay for anything they want.
Visa/MC do not have any right to decide unilaterally what their customers might want to buy (as long as no illegal goods are involved), without consulting their customers first.
In most cases the customers are forced to accept these unilateral decisions, because they do not have the power to attempt a legal battle with those companies, e.g. for modifying the fees or the data caps.
Nevertheless, even when we do not want or cannot fight such decisions, we should not say that they are private companies and they can do whatever they want.
Those companies are not independent to do whatever they want, they are in contractual relationships with their paying customers.
They may use their power to unilaterally change the contracts as they want to, but that does not mean that we must accept that might is right.
I would much rather leave such things to the proper authorities instead of massive corporations that control so much without any accountability or transparency.
That's the path forward for adult entertainment content (among other content). It puts the power back in the hands of content creators, and removes a lot of avenues for exploitation.
As long as VISA/MC don't do the same thing there, of course.
I doubt it will be long before the religious lobbies go after Onlyfans.
I would guess for at least some of the public, sex workers leaving the business would be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
> "The real target of these groups is not to help victims or fight illegal content on the internet, but to ban all forms of adult material."
A few years ago I was doing some research to figure out how I felt about SESTA/FOSTA, and one of the things I quickly came to realize is that a lot of groups and politicians who are ostensibly anti-trafficking are actually anti-porn, and use the boogieman of trafficking to build a broader coalition than they could on a purely anti-porn agenda.
I thought the problem was that anyone could make an account and upload whatever they wished like child pornography, hidden cams, etc.
[1] As long as it is legal and it's their own stuff.
Credit card giants Visa, Mastercard and Discover have blocked all payments to Pornhub, after the adult site was accused of being "infested" with child abuse and rape-related videos.
If they’ve found an excuse to not need to work with PornHub, they could easily retain that for perpetuity because credit card companies don’t like being associated with the porn industry.
I’ll be surprised if PornHub ends up working directly with the major credit cards again.
It's generally advisable in cases like this to go find what the sex workers rights advocacy organisations are saying, because mainstream reporting is often puritan trash.
(also, so long as the performers were well compensated, I don't honestly see why we should care about "rape-related" given e.g. 50 Shades of Grey was very much 'written porn for women' and while I don't understand that particular kink I'm unwilling to judge what people want to fap/schlick to)
It was said that after the accusations have been published, Pornhub has reacted by removing the content that was claimed to include illegal parts and they have changed the rules for using the site (e.g. disabling anonymous uploads and downloads) in order to prevent such cases in the future.
Only after the Pornhub reaction, VISA and MC blocked the payments, at a time when there already was not much more that PH could do, except maybe closing the site completely.
So only Visa and MC can change anything now.
I don't own any crypto and never thought I'd be saying this so soon but things have changed a lot in the past 6 months.
Not as long as it continues to have insane electricity demands and bogs down when it receives even a fraction of the transactions in a given period that Visa or Mastercard processes routinely in an identical given period.
Think of all the foundations that have been created because some wealthy celebrity (or a relative of theirs) had a particular medical condition.
Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research
Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation
> Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research
This is a tangent, but I remember a minor news item of Michael J. Fox appearing in an ad soliciting donations for Parkinson's research, Rush Limbaugh (maybe?) criticizing him for "exaggerating his symptoms" in the ad, and then Jon Stewart (definitely) lambasting the criticism on the Daily Show, something along the lines of "How DARE Michael J. Fox appear in an ad trying to fund research into the crippling disease that Michael J. Fox has?!?"
I've been trying to find a clip of that, if anyone knows where to look?
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_fQ3VLSvfI
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