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Comment by bostonalt | Hacker News Reader

Defending CP and revenge porn is such an odd hill to die on.

Please tell me what was wrong about the NYT's opinion piece? That it painted a visceral picture of a literal child whose exploitations continued to be put on PornHub to profit off of?

You give a lot of generic accusations without anything substantial.

Are you upset that companies now have to answer for their actions? Why is that a bad thing? A private company isn't a government, if MasterCard or Visa doesn't want to do business with certain risk prone sectors why should they be forced to?

Your reason for being upset is frankly odd and extremely dismissive of real issues, that companies are profiting off of CP, but decide to get upset that a news story can effect the public zeitgeist?

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Because MasterCard and Visa are essentially a global duopoly - they most certainly should not be allowed to discriminate against any legal industry, even if it is extremely high risk. Because that leads to very serious harm for people who legitimately work in those industries. It should be as hard for MasterCard or Visa to not serve a company as it is for a utility to turn off the water to a home.

To play the devil's advocate. Let's say a columnist in the WSJ wrote a piece with a bunch of first hand stories of people who were murdered by ex-cons who had been released early. And as a result the decarceration movement was stalled. Would you be okay with that? Anecdote focused reporting is very manipulative. Aggregate statistics matter. Context matters. Knock on effects matter.

> Would you be okay with that?

What does it even mean to be "okay with that" in this context? I certainly think it should be legal for newspapers to publish opeds arguing for harsher sentencing, just as it should be legal for newspapers to publish opeds calling for more lenient sentencing. I am okay with both. If I said it was only okay when I happened to agree with it, that would make me an authoritarian.

All the people hand-wringing about newspapers advocating against causes they believe in should spend less time wishing their opponents didn't exist, or weren't permitted to speak, and spend more time writing advocacy articles of their own. If you think anecdotes are more effective than statistics, then go dig up some anecdotes of your own. You're never going to stop your opponents from using anecdotes.

Nobody is defending CP and revenge porn.

Commenter above isn't defending those things though... And in fact revenge porn, CP and other awful content appear across all social platforms. And just like Pornhub they remove them when notified. Thought experiment, what happened to piracy when Napster shut down? What would adding subscription options and regulating Napster have done. Would it have created spotify a decade earlier and disincenvtised the development of Gnutella, bitorrent etc?

Right now we have a moral panic, fuelled by a microscopic proportion of content on a site, being used to fuel laws and economic exclusion to remove freedom of action from an entire industry. The consequences are, if not obvious, entirely predictable. Porn will balkanise, and what regulation exists (very strict in its production, relatively strict in its dissemination) will disappear. Sites like only fans being shut down - as with backpage, will force sex worker into enormously more dangerous street work, and ultimately lead to a vast amount of exploitation. And all this will happen, in practice not to protect the vanishingly smaller numbers of trafficked women, or children who appear on these platforms. But because an ungodly coalition of rabbidly anti-porn, anti-sexwork Christian fundamentalists, and anti-porn, anti-sexwork radical feminists have undue political influence.

> While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36 million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub, that means that each moderator would have to review hundreds of hours of content each week.

So, this article alleges that MindGeek only hires 80 moderators to monitor million of videos being uploaded each year despite taking in 460 million dollars in revenue? That's pretty damning, if true. It's little wonder so much is getting through.

You refer to the amount of problematic content as "microscopic" and "vanishingly small", but on what basis do you believe that? On one hand we have an article filled with some pretty horrific examples of abuse being broadcast on PornHub, on the other I guess we have your gut feeling about this whole thing?

> Thought experiment, what happened to piracy when Napster shut down? What would adding subscription options and regulating Napster have done. Would it have created spotify a decade earlier and disincenvtised the development of Gnutella, bitorrent etc?

I don't even know what you're trying to say here. Sites like PornHub already adopt a model that fairly closely resembles Spotify when you think about it. In any event, it sounds almost like you're making the argument that a little child abuse is just the price we need to pay for innovation. No thanks.

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

> , this article alleges that MindGeek only hires 80 moderators to monitor million of videos being uploaded each year despite taking in 460 million dollars in revenue?

>there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators).

'In the last three years, Facebook self-reported 84m instances of child sexual abuse material. During that same period, the independent, third-party Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub.'[0]

Facebook's revenue is about 94 billion.

It makes me feel like Facebook should have around 200x the number of mods that pornohub do based on revenue (pretty close, well done ph), or 700k more based on reported instances of CSAM (nowhere near)

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/14/pornhub-p...

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