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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

No verification will be bulletproof, and persistent people will occasionally get around it. I'm not sure what responsibility OnlyFans has beyond taking reasonable measures to prevent circumventing verification. The article mentions someone using their older sister's license as verification. Presumably they look similar. And that's somehow OnlyFan's fault? There's no reason why the executives would have any sort of personal liability.

The anti-vice authoritarians will always come after any lucrative porn enterprise with these sensationalized stories. I'm surprised there are still people out there that eat it up.

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In the case of child pornography the law - in many countries - explicitly makes it the platforms responsibility.

Read your comment again and realize what you are saying. This thread has more than 800 comments on the different online billing strategies and payment providers...Here you have an extensive well researched article of the BBC, with two different law enforcement officers confirming this is happening and you are arguing its not their responsibility? Who is the enabler here?

If you have a point to make, just make it. I have no interest in trying to anticipate your argument.

My point is that they are subject to this:

https://definitions.uslegal.com/t/the-child-protection-and-o...

Try to use the excuse under a judge that the children are the ones fooling your obvious flawed registration system to see how that will go.

The question of liability for the site given reasonable verification measures is still an open question. For example, Tracy Lords was a popular porn star of the 80s until she outed herself as having been underage in her films. The FBI investigated the porn industry and no one was found liable as she used a fake ID and the producers had it on file. The idea that there is endless liability for producers when someone circumvents their verification just isn't true.

> The FBI investigated the porn industry and no one was found liable as she used a fake ID and the producers had it on file.

WHOA! That's not true.

At least one of her fellow "actors" went to jail for it and I think some of the staff only avoided jail by cutting plea bargains but still wound up with felonies.

There is a reason why so many people were angry when Traci Lords started getting "legitimate" roles after having destroyed a lot of people's lives.

Child porn is a strict liability crime in most cases of the US. Yeah, the justice system generally applies some common sense (ie. not convicting two 16 year olds sending each other selfies), but that is completely at the whim of the system and doesn't always hold true.

This doesn't seem accurate according to a cursory search. While I was incorrect that no one was prosecuted for it, it seems that charged were eventually dropped after the court ruled that strict liability in this case would violate the first amendment[1]

>Our reading of the relevant Supreme Court opinions, particularly Smith v. California, suggests that the first amendment does not permit the imposition of criminal sanctions on the basis of strict liability where doing so would seriously chill protected speech. While Congress may take steps to punish severely those who knowingly subject minors to sexual exploitation, and even those who commit such abuse recklessly or negligently, it may not impose very serious criminal sanctions on those who have diligently investigated the matter and formed a reasonable good-faith belief that they are engaged in activities protected by the first amendment.

[1]https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/858...

1996: Producer conviction upheld https://www.upi.com/Archives/1996/01/05/Conviction-upheld-in...

> Gottesman was found guilty of violating the 1977 Child Sexual Exploitation Act, but appealed the lower court verdict all the way to U. S. Supreme Court, claiming that he should not be held liable for using underage girls if they lied about their age.

Yet this is also commented from 2011:

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/a-short-history-of-undera...

> No one, including Lords or her scene partners, ever went to jail over the scandal, but it led to several court cases and tougher laws regulating the adult industry.

"Never went to jail" does not exclude "Cut a deal but still wound up with a felony conviction". However, apparently my memory was faulty about someone going to jail.

Unfortunately, everything about the case is old enough that it doesn't appear well in search engines. And that's without the fact that everything is going to be drowned out in search engines by being proximate to "traci lords".

"The guidelines for enforcing these laws require producers of sexually explicit material to obtain proof of age for every model they shoot, and retain those records. Federal inspectors may at any time launch inspections of these records and prosecute any infraction."

> Here you have an extensive well researched article of the BBC, with two different law enforcement officers confirming this is happening

Why would the BBC or the police be worthy of trust? It’s ironic to trust their word when the article goes over the ways the site tries to verify identity and hence age, and they seem reasonable, far more reasonable than trusting the police because they’re the police.

I’m not going to post up my passport but I didn’t come down in the last shower.

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