The Fight to Hold Pornhub Accountable
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Sorry, but you can't just hold a provider accountable for user uploaded content. Sure, you could argue for further abuse scanning like Google foolishly tries with content ID but the real solution is to go after the uploaders. If Pornhub is required to ask for special validation so is every single service with user postable content.
I imagine the end goal here is to require government ID for every Pornhub account which will definitely not be abused in an inevitable hack. Similarly, Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok and Onlyfans will all follow in requiring ID before being able to do anything. After all, why post revenge porn on Pornhub when you can sell it on Onlyfans? What's stopping you from creating fake Reddit accounts and posting to NSFW subs? Plenty of stolen content on there already!
There's not quick and easy solution. Pornhub is not your problem, your abusive ex or the guy who found your cloud storage password is. Have the police solve these problems instead of forcing the responsibility to uphold the law to a random company that happens to be the biggest distribution of free porn.
I personally hopetthat soon enough we'll be able to move on to a post-blackmail society with the advance of deep fakes. When anybody has the ability to paste any face onto any movie, no video can be trusted (it already can't be, to be fair) and everything should be covered under plausible deniability. Just declaring something a fake by some Facebook creep that wants your money should hopefully be enough to wars off any confrontation from friends or family about leaked explicit content.
It's really the best I can think of to hope for. Banning porn won't help, putting up red tape will only spawn more websites outside enforcing jurisdictions, and the perfect deep fake singularity may be mere years of not months away.
> you can't just hold a provider accountable for user uploaded content.
Can't you hold providers accountable for not verifying user identity? Just ask for verified photo-id and illegal content becomes enforceable. An video-hosting adult site of obviously more sensitive than a web-scraper/search engine, so the extra steps are justified. Then (and only then) can you go after the uploaders.
> require government ID for every Pornhub account
for uploading, yes. Not spectator accounts.
> Plenty of stolen content on there already!
Mostly it's links, not hosting, afaik. If they remove any cached images/videos if the original link goes away then I figure they're covered.
You can definitely hold companies accountable for ID verification. The EU even required Google to verify users are 18+ to view some YouTube videos, either by uploading an ID or by paying a cent through a credit card.
Pornhub already requires ID verification and more, so it should catch abuse of their systems. However, when you have a video of five people going at it in front of a camera with a whole production team, I'm not sure who you're going to verify and how.
viewing isn't the issue - it's uploading, of illegal content meaning users willing to break the law, such as spoofing/faking photo id or credit cards, so for this both these verification methods aren't enough.
> I'm not sure who you're going to verify
Anyone accountable as the copyright holder e.g. if it's a production company a liable director or something. The point is - you need someone to go after if the material turns out to be illegal i.e. non-deniable proof of liability. Incidentally, this rules out any videos originating in countries with legal systems that do not cooperate with the local one.
Content ID actually isn't so foolish. It works reasonably well to target copyrighted material, the problem rather is that it by nature cannot determine "fair use" exceptions and getting an actual human to review false strikes is an unreasonably excessive effort.
When someone notifies Pornhub that a video they host is distributed without the consent of the persons involved, it should be very very easy for Pornhub to scan for other videos containing the same content, even as snippets, and subsequently take these down. The technology exists, both as SaaS (e.g. Amazon Rekognition) or as open-source solution to self-host.
Side note, I always did wonder how PornHub and friends were able to evade the record-keeping requirements of 18 USC § 2257.
I agree that Pornhub should remove and block all related content but finding such content is not a solved problem. The article talks about small snippets being uploaded independently, you're never going to find those.
If proper contextual recognition was a solved problem we'd have self driving cars by now. It's very easy to overestimate image recognition technology. We're getting closer every day, but we're still far from an real AI.
That's mostly because Youtube has allowed the major labels to directly upload stuff to Content ID instead of doing quality control to make sure the content is actually valid and at a quality that allows actual comparisons.
> The article talks about small snippets being uploaded independently, you're never going to find those.
Take each video, create a visual hash of each frame (or at least for each detected scene). When a video is reported, compare its frame hashes with the database, manually examine matches if they are identical, and do the same for all new uploads. Easy enough to get at least a sensible start on the problem and to crack down on the worst abusers.
Identifying all videos of a given person is harder, granted, but seriously, at 97 billion $ of revenue [1] each year it should not be too much of an expectation that Pornhub actually does something beyond requiring victims to scan for their content on their own!
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10058065/Owner-97bn...
However, I don't think the current solutions are feasible yet. Tie someone in a gimp suit to a chair in some sex dungeon and you'll have no idea who's sitting where. In a less extreme example: some people don't like to have their face on camera when filming erotic material. You're working with partial bodies in similar positions making similar noises and movements, I think it'll be one hell of a task to properly identify unique matches in a way that won't lead to content ID abuse like on YouTube.
I'm also not so sure about having a company fingerprint the way people have sex "for their protection" to be honest.
The key thing is to tackle the low hanging fruit, which is the utter utter majority: people dumping the videos and photos of their ex girlfriends, tinder hookups or whatever over and over again unaltered. A ContentID-like system could save a lot of pain for the victims at relatively low cost here. Additionally, it could help to rein in the utter absurd amount of theft going on - pretty much everyone with an Onlyfans or whatever account can tell you more than enough stories about people dumping fresh content in a matter of minutes on imgur, Reddit and tube sites, not to mention catfish accounts.
The more difficult stuff such as content without faces - I'm actually inclined to default for "doesn't need to be removed until there is something like a tattoo or scars that clearly identify a specific person". But again, the key is to tackle the mass offenders.
re: wonder : I believe phub is not a US corp and so they don't need to follow USC anything if they don't want to.
Someone else has managed to get face recognition running in real time on a Raspberry Pi, which is mind-blowing on its own given how lackluster performance was before the Pi 4 came along: https://towardsdatascience.com/real-time-face-recognition-an...
And all of this is from 2018 - hard to imagine a company the scale of Pornhub could not hire a bunch of ten developers and let them google "opencv video face recognition".
For something like Content ID, I'd use ffmpeg to get raw stills of the video, normalize them into 720p resolution and then go with a visual hash implementation (again OpenCV has enough howtos on that topic) over these. Yes it's a ton of data to store but it should not be too difficult to implement at the scale of pornhub.
You absolutely can. Honestly it wouldn't even be that hard. Start with: you need a real name and address to upload.
The problem here, as with many things is the privitization of profits while externalizing the harms onto someone else.
Modern technology now allows this at ruinous scale, and that needs to be prohibited or seriously controlled if we want to continue as a society.
It's often said that my ability to swing my fists in the air ends at the tip of your nose. Similarly, my ability to make profits should end at the point of causing massive harm to others.
Whether it is fossil fuel industry scaling up ecosystem-destroying tech, or tech hubs scaling up ability for any sick rando to ruin lives, it needs to be well controlled.
If you cannot solve the problem of your tech being used for life-ruining purposes, shut down.
One actual solution is to provide easily accessible routes for people whose lives are ruined by the tech platforms to claim recovery. You share all your profits with those whose lives are ruined, in sufficient measure to properly compensate them, and it's still profitable, maybe ok, if the harm is actually compensated.
And no, allowing liability only after massively costly lawsuits with no ability to collect because profits have been offshored is not a solution - it's more like put up a sufficient bond in every jurisdiction. Funny how that is likely to kill the business.
IOW, if we want a civilized society, allowing private profits on the backs of externalizing harm must be well controlled. Otherwise only psychopaths run the place.
Sue over the latter, maybe. Sue over the first? You should be laughed out the room.
It's a tricky issue. I think the measures they've announced to verify identities when uploading are probably the biggest thing they could do without a complete change of business model.
The technology is there, it works reasonably well to at least take down the majority of material, and given the impact that the circulation of non-consensually taken material has it should really be a requirement for Pornhub and friends (aren't they all one and the same holding company anyway these days?) to maintain such systems and offer reasonable turnaround times. For known material or "compilation"-type videos, it should even be possible to implement a content-id like system.
It is absolutely ridiculous to me that any porn tube site is/was allowed to operate without verifying identity, or at least somehow verifying age. If that makes their current business model unviable, then that business model should fail, because enforcing that all parties be verified >18 and consenting seems like the bare minimum for hosting adult content in a civilized society.
Also, the moment HK leaks, your screwed. And the moment anyone leaks, the whole system breaks down: if I can get you're ID, I can open accounts in your name. So then o can upload anything, and the police will come looking for you...
Then that identity data is breached and exploited like Ashley Madison.
This can probably be faked or abused (if your abusive ex is in the video, so is their face scan) so you'd need a proper face scan of everybody in the video attached to the account. That can be tricky as there are plenty of videos where faces are intentionally not visible, but I suppose certain kinks could be sacrificed to get verification going.
You can put weird stuff on YouTube much easier than you can on Pornhub. Tag any sexy poses as "naked yoga", edit some free spiritual music underneath it and you've got yourself a YouTube video.
In most cultures people are raised such a way, the naked body is something "forbidden", "bad", "immoral", "shameful", etc.
That's only part of the issue.
Another part of the issue is that in terms of having sex women have an ultimate monopoly - especially in the Instagram era they've taken the position that if you're born a female you can ultimately get the right to "sell" access to your body to the highest bidder. Nothing needs to be done to claim that, just being born the right sex.
These two things lead to the conclusion that nude pictures/videos first of all, are for sale, second, can cause a lot of drama and moral pain, and as a result can be used for blackmail.
If we had a society where the naked body was not something immoral, where sexes were truly equal (aside from strength and mass) and people were equally worthy of one another, there would be no such issue.
There's no shame in being naked. There's no shame in being seen this way.
I apologize for being graphic, but I’m making a point. Those extreme examples are much more prevalent on these sites than someone who is just embracing their own naked body.
When a 12 year old can access any of these extreme sex videos easier than they access a NYTimes article, then something has to change.
There are several other websites that behave worse, even Twitter or Reddit allows non-consensual (warez) video links.
[1] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a30806689/james-deen...
[2] https://www.news9live.com/art-culture/metoo-france-porn-indu...
It depends on the country. UK and in particular Ireland are very traditional countries. The UK has their renaissance of victorian morals through the conservative party and Ireland has the catholic morals weighing down on it. I remember living in Ireland and a sex shop opened in the town. Not even a cinema/video booth kinda place, but just one selling toys. And pretty suave ones too (think Lelo, not Tarzan), the kind where the actual purpose is not blindingly obvious :) The whole neighbourhood had sit-ins to protest, it was ridiculous to me, to be honest.
The Netherlands and Germany are very liberal with these things. In other countries it differs. In Spain it's frowned upon by the traditionalists and strict catholics but other groups are more free. Other countries I don't have enough experience with to comment.
PS: I assume there is a huge difference in the US between states too. I can't imagine a state like Utah having the same morals as New York.
I agree that the concern of this content shouldn't have the effect that it does for many people, like there should be no consequence towards the victim just because their family or coworkers saw the content without their consent (or at all.) For most people, this is currently an aspirational reality to suggest.
Specifically section 47 U.S. Code § 230 "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"[3]
[0] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46751
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
This is where Pornhub should be sued. There is no recourse for victims if things like this can be re-uploaded.
1) So what?
2) You'll note of course that HN has no user uploaded content, and even comments are regularly moderated.
In practice this means you can't upload anything anywhere safely. Not just to your favourite website, but anything served on your own servers or your home network as well. Imagine the police breaking down your door because a porn bot posted an illegal comment while you were asleep.
> 2)
The moderation of comments actually makes HN responsible for what users type here under certain laws, assuming the moderators fail or choose not to act on illegal content.
If some thread here starts linking and discussing tactics of acquiring child porn then dang needs to act real quick real fast before there's going to be a very unpleasant conversation with some very grumpy police officers, at least in my jurisdiction.
Clearly this is unthinkable on a forum like this, but for any moderator this is a real reason for concern
Beyond that, all roads lead to users can't be trusted with cameras or the ability to upload digital content.
And for standards, that's exactly how it works for cp victims, the doj will take steps to notify the victim anytime they catch someone who posted or possessed it, so there can be civil damages in addition to criminal.
1) I just want to point out the obvious comment that if she found the number of clips impossible to track, maybe video hosting sites would also find it impossible to track. Short of creating a ContentID type of system (with its own host of big problems) that would check each edited clip for this content, it's almost impossible for a platform to police an entire Internet's worth of clips. (and a content checking system for homemade porn would probably be a lot harder than a system for a relatively limited catalog of corporate media)
2) IMO, the flaw here is passing the buck from legislators/prosecutors and outsourcing their job to web apps. If criminal acts are being performed, it's not Pornhub that's the police. It's legislators and prosecutors that need to create laws (and enforce them) against harassment, blackmail, malicious acts, etc. Pornhub's job should be to comply with any court orders with all available information for investigation and prosecution.
3) As a general comment, at the risk of being pilloried for victim-blaming, some big problems would be avoided by teaching more smart thinking to young people. If you're in a community that cares about this kind of thing, don't let your significant other setup the camera in the bedroom and don't send nudes that include your face. Even if everybody followed this advice perfectly, it wouldn't solve every problem, but many bad outcomes may be avoided.
Should such a platform exist then? You aren't off the hook because it's difficult to do.
> It's legislators and prosecutors that need to create laws
I agree. What we have is not working.
> some big problems would be avoided by teaching more smart thinking to young people.
Perhaps. I think society should just get over this sort of thing. People fuck each other- imagine that! But as long as society wants to use evidence of that against you it's still harmful for the victim unfortunately.
IANAL (I am not a lawyer) and I guess the reason for this can be interpreted in different ways, but keeping companies off the hook partially because it's difficult for private companies to be the police is arguably what society has decided to do through Section 230 of the CDA.
> I think society should just get over this sort of thing. People fuck each other-
Perhaps, but this seems like something ingrained into many humans for a variety of reasons on a level that maybe can't be overcome.
This is a charitable description of the organisation. They wish to abolish the sex industry at large, and have questionable reputation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry
https://web.archive.org/web/20210821140435/https://www.nydai...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-are-hbo-and-melissa-mccart...
I see very little difference between these two sentences, and archived links to "reported ties" aren't compelling evidence, nor Melissa McCarthy having an opinion on them.
I'm not personally biased against the sex industry, but I can see how a faith-based group would view the entire sex industry as commercial sexual exploitation.
If you’re willing to sell access to pictures of your naked body because you see it as worthwhile and are not coerced; that’s fine.
If there’s a hint of coercion, (implied, forced economic or abusive (physically or mentally)) then it’s not ok.
Sexual exploitation is not hard to define, let’s not pretend that it is.
There are stories on both sides. Some porn stars say they will quite easily make informed decisions in that situation. But I think that is the minority...
from my experience, we have no way of quantifying that statement because even many “sex work positive” forums will remove and ban any performer talking about their experience in a positive light
this whole discussion is based on bad assumptions partially because everybody with a platform has an angle, so far
Have you tried it not metaphorically?
This seems to be a common trope. The poor porn actress didn't know what was going to happen.... In the real world while some producers are complete scum they are not the majority and the outright criminal ones end up in jail (See GirlsDoPorn) .
Most porn stars have agents looking out for their interests at least partially. Look on something like iafd.com and you can see that the major studios have people returning year after for shoots.
While the work might seem horrible it is the choice of the people involved who have made decisions appropriate for THEM. Working for a full month at minimum wage vs 1 week a month for vastly more money etc.
About half the time they look so messed up that I doubt they even really know where they are.
Yeah no.
And that I know is the situation for many in porn.
Basically, unless it is legal to sustainence farm without paying taxes, all employment is selling your body under duress. Being naked only makes the power disparity more obvious.
It’s tempting to consider it a reduction to absurdity but it’s not really. Society in most places around the world has obligations that require us to do things. It’s coercive. Not in a deliberately malicious way but in an apathetic, conformity sort of way.
It feels that way until it is realized that it is enforced by government monopoly on violence.
And despite this rant, I'm not a libertarian or even an anarchist.
I just need us to be honest about the fact Society can only exist with consent under duress. It tends to get obvious when you talk about sex-work because people feel different about bodily autonomy when it comes to sex vs other types of bodily harm.
My question is, do we say "Yes!" to that, or "No!"?
Some societies are less coercive by providing for people in need, be it through welfare, national healthcare, UBI, housing, free food...
Some societies are more coercing even to the point of imprisoning people for being homeless.
I would, and do. Let's remove that coercive pressure on labor and then see who wants to do sex work. I mean this seriously, I'm sure people will still choose it. But probably in different numbers and different forms than they currently do.
Honestly a big reason I read hackernews is to see the hilarious cognitive dissonance some people have here when trying to twist their ideologies so that the state of capitalist society makes rational and humanitarian sense. There are so many extremely intelligent people here that put all that intelligence into the stupidest box.
Same is true in capitalism, and I will die on that hill too.
If you work in a company town and you’re forced into manual labour then I see that as quite similar honestly.
That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion.
But yes, it gets muddy when you have to contend with the idea of your free will not being your own, but I don’t get the impression that girls on onlyfans are forced, that they are unsafe or that they are being put in tenuous situations (like people trafficking them and keeping their passports).
You may be "coerced" into working by the general human condition of needing to earn money somehow to survive, but that doesn't mean your employer is coercing you. That relationship is still voluntary. You can choose to work for them on mutually-agreeable terms, or not—and they can choose to hire you, or not. Neither party is forcing the other to do anything.
> That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion.
On that point we agree.
There's definitely a spectrum of dead-end careers and employment by debtors with resulting economic exploitation versus desirable jobs that you have to show up to maintain, but it's quite a stretch to say that any hint of economic coercion is not OK. We're not yet a post-scarcity socialist society, the globe is very much capitalistic, and participation in our capitalist society implies some economic coercion.
Then there is porn which specifically focuses on vulnerability, humiliation, power balances, trust, you name it.
I don't think most porn is nonconsensual, especially not most professional grade stuff, but I know for sure there is a percentage of "consentual" porn that's actually based on faked or revoked consent because human traffickers can make big money on platforms like Pornhub and Onlyfans. It's the only logical conclusion, you don't need to be a criminal mastermind to think of this.
The legal definition of consent and exploitation is the easy part: there is no consent until it's freely given, and consent can be retracted at any point. Any non-consensual activity is abuse and exploitation. Easy peasy, covers pretty much everything. The verification process is where the actual problem lies. You obviously can't have people sign a document (because people can easily be coerced). Even in full production pornos where the people on screen seemed professionals doing their job, produced by dedicated companies and sold to the public on VHS tapes, turned out to be rape years after the fact, and people who bought those might never find out.
It's a practically unsolvable problem.
I don’t want to rape anyone but I have a rape kink, my girlfriend also has a rape kink- but anything that remotely resembles realistic depictions of rape (rape depicted in movies) is deeply unsettling still.
I think a lot of people don’t understand this, kinks of a thing aren’t direct desires to do the thing, and I can understand why- it’s confusing for me too.
> How do you know an actor or actress is not performing in a shoot because they were forced to? How do you know the editor hasn't cut out the parts where the model revoked consent between shots?
By making it legal and ensuring there are custodians who’s purpose in life is to ensure workplace health and safety. we have this for office workers already
Should such porn be banned? I don't know. Clearly there are couples out there who can live out their fantasies safely with people they trust. Looking at the statistics, it's almost shocking how common coercion, either physically or otherwise, comes up in kink prevalence lists. These topics aren't enjoyed by just the tiny minority I'd personally expect them to, and taking away their porn for theoretical possibilities of abuse seems quite extreme.
> ensuring there are custodians who’s purpose in life is to ensure workplace health and safety
I'd love that, but the fact remains that the people most vocal about these solutions are either extremely opposed to many concepts or perhaps too much into them to make clear judgement calls.
The UK has a list of topics not allowed by porn. Activities like pretend sexual abuse and role-playing as people who can't consent can be defended relatively easily, but the ban also covers spanking, caning, water sports, restraints, female ejacularion, and face sitting. If this is the type of committee that will decide the future of all porn, people like you and your girlfriend may be left disappointed quite quickly.
The government is very reactive on these topics and that usually means they're a bunch of prudes in any society.
Furthermore, a personal vetting system for porn would put a few people who will see quite a lot of porn during their work day in a position of power. That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
Human trafficking is almost entirely urban legend.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/childre...
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3883928-human-trafficking
As far as I know, though I'm clearly no expert on this topic, actual human trafficking mostly seems to involve the physical part of sex work (not necessarily the performing part). It's also usually not even close to the typical depiction of someone getting kidnapped, shipped off, and forced to have sex.
The real world involves modelling/fashion/contract deals that turn out wrong when the victim gets picked up from the airport, financial coercion of family, forms of wage slavery and other "soft" coercion methods. There have been plenty of stories in the news here about men and women signing contracts they couldn't read that claimed they agreed to all sorts of things (though legally that's complete nonsense, of course, but the victims don't know that!) The approach is not very different from the approaches abusers use to make Eastern European people work in richer European countries for far less than minimal wage with barely any worker's rights.
It's a tragedy that needs more nuance and definitely more government action even at its relatively modest real world scale, at least here in Europe. Every abuse case is one too many.
How do you know $worker isn't performing $job because they were forced to? If you're going to make the pearl-clutching argument that /anyone/ can potentially be in a coercive situation, then apply to to genuinely anyone, not just sex workers.
I don't think the risks of porn and other online content are comparable at all. If I'm watching your average YouTube video, I don't doubt for a second that the content on display was made intentionally by the video host. Your angry ex won't upload your comprehensive four hour Minecraft tutorial or the video detailing how you constructed your own army of garden gnomes.
Coercion might be a risk present in any media but there are definitely areas where the risk and impact are much higher than in others.
Why not? Parents pressuring children to gain celebrity status isn't exactly an undocumented phenomenon.
If most is consensual and certainly most professional grade stuff is, then what's the need to abolish the commercial sex industry as a whole?
I think it's better to drag these sort of things into the light where people can feel safe reporting abuse, and other criminal activity. Right now if you're forced into performing a shoot, it might be very hard for a person to report that to the police.
Apart from the usual worries they'd have in your typical rape incident, they'd have to worry that people wouldn't take them seriously because it happened during their occupation. In fact, many people might start to opine that they are just owed money for 'forced labor' and this is a civil matter.
> It's a practically unsolvable problem.
Crime in general is an unsolvable problem. We can mitigate it. We can reduce it. Yet we can't solve the issue for good.
However, mitigation and reduction start by having good laws that target the actual situation at hand. Look at the case of J. Epstein, where people were potentially forced to have sex with politicians who had no idea their partner was coerced. There ought to be a more specific law against this situation, because at the time everyone was unsure of who would be charged (the politicians who were honeypotted? Epstein? Other workers?).
Imagine you had a different employer who got people addicted to some substance and in return for more drugs had them work at some arbitrarily low rate via some contractual arrangement. Maybe, if drugs were all legal the arrangement would be legal --but would the population at large be okay with that? I think most people would cry foul.
All fields of work are routinely subject to “bonuses” and millions of people take painkillers and miscellaneous other medications to function through the workday in order to earn both their base pay and to try and meet targets in order to get bonuses…
Is the manual labourer taking painkillers on the job to get through a day of laying bricks who is ignoring their body telling them they need to stop the work, who is pushing themselves artificially in order to get a job bonus, hurting their body, potentially beginning a cycle of painkillers being necessary to function for their job, not being equally exploited by your logic?
Let us not forget how sexist and ageist the industry is as well.
If you aren't willing to allow any sort of pressures on people to perform what they consider their livelihood, then employing anyone such that they only make enough to live paycheck to paycheck is immoral as well.
Sex workers do.
Because the sentences absolutely are not the same.
And especially, and most importantly, they aren't the same to the affected people, whose interests the "faith-based groups" (and in one word — bigots) purport to protect.
The primary issue is that companies value growth above everything else. Measures like strict user verification and ID would stop a lot of these problems in their tracks, but go against the infinite growth model that every other site uses. So instead they farm out content regulation to poorly paid individuals that end up deeply traumatized by the worst content you can imagine while barely doing anything to remove said content when identified.
I'm not sure quite how strict it is, but pornhub now does require ID verification for anyone uploading content.
The nature or even the existence of Exodus Cry can neither contribute nor detract from the claims' trush or falsity.
If I make a claim, the claim is (to adopt your parlance) true or false - correct.
But if you do not/cannot know that as a matter of fact, then it is perfectly reasonable to evaluate the credibility and history of the speaker. If the only source of information is a non-credible source we have no reason to believe the claim, which is all we can do, whether or not it is true.
If the president of the united states tells you an asteroid is about to hit the earth you are likely to take them more seriously than a homeless person on a street corner. But you are correct, in both cases it either is or is not going to hit it.
The appropriate response you are looking for is asking for other sources of evidence. Your comment is just bad epistemic noise to try and undermine a critique.
I just think it's valuable context to the wider discussion, and in particular, I wouldn't want anyone who read just that section of the article to come away with an innacurate idea of what Exodus Cry is really about.
> “Laila was so helpful,” Rachel told me. “She did more for me than any police or anyone in the U.K. ever did.”
You might not like Exodus Cry. You might not believe in everything they believe in. But for the girl in the article, they did something that she couldn't get anyone else to help her with.
But they are helping some people like "Rachel" in ways that, hopefully, you can support as being a good thing.
There are countless stories of men offering to house female Ukrainian refugees, with the explicit goal of getting in their pants. Would you ask me to "support" those men, too?
Further, we can acknowledge Exodus Cry's background and intentions, without letting it detract from the significance of the issues involving PornHub.
I would suggest that type of polarization is very detrimental to society. You may disagree with my opinion on that and may even consider me a "bad person" because we disagree.
In a thread where we are talking about the sex industry and consent, I think we ought to be more careful with our language and assumptions.
I think the above poster merely meant that Mickelwait has ulterior motives, and potentially gains something out of this transaction so we should acknowledge that even while acknowledging the good that is done incidentally.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-02-06/super-bowl-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Integrated_photo-shari...
However the first (photo-sharing service) link is interesting. I think they should be liable there.
Ugh. Their incentive was (and is?) to not report crimes to law enforcement or promptly take down exploitive videos.
And while it's high time to hold Pornhub and the others accountable - the tools exist, AI can do facial recognition easily even on video - the fact that the campaigns are usually led by Exodus Cry and other outfits of questionable morality (i.e. far-right extremists, religious fundamentalists and to my personal annoyance even some anti-sexwork "feminists" from the left) doesn't help, quite to the contrary.
Where is anti-trust legislation in this? Where are the calls for police reform? Why is it accepted that people like me who create (amateur, non-sale) content are caught in the crossfire of religious fundamentalism and authoritarians who are willing to exploit "think of the children!!!" [1] for their personal fascist, control-freak dreams?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nati...
[3] https://honey.nine.com.au/latest/police-department-slammed-o...
[4] https://www.insider.com/revenge-porn-victims-and-the-law-201...
Fight sex trafficking the same way as any labor trafficking, by providing more resources to report and change the circumstance. For everything else provide insurance, collect taxes, improve working conditions like any other trade.
In fact, bringing PornHub into it is a total moot point, just as well it could have been YouTube or FaceBook or SnapChat.
If you allow user contributions, you now own the responsibility of moderating it. Saying "I'm just a platform" can not be an excuse anymore. Not once you start making coin from it. You're not just a platform, you're a market.
And you're right, could have been Facebook or YouTube, and they'd be just as responsible. Except the content can't and won't last on those platforms, because they explicitly prevent it.
I'm sorry: If you're profiting from something, you are now responsible. The world of pornography streaming sites allowing free mostly unmoderated upload of content is just a bit insane.
Before you are able upload Content on the Website, you need to verify your identity. In order to do so, you need to submit to us high-res images or scans of a minimum of one to two information documents, containing your date of birth, expiration date of the ID, your photo, your full legal name and your address. This could be, for example, your driver’s license (in countries where a national ID is not mandatory), international passport, citizenship card, state ID, national passport or your national ID card. The other form of identification may be a utility bill. If all the required information is set out on your government-issued photo ID, you do not need a second document. We may, in our sole discretion, require you to provide us multiple forms of identification to establish proof of adulthood and identity. Facial verification and an assessment of the authenticity of the aforementioned documents is also required in the context of our verification of your identity. Our collection, use and disclosure of such information and documentation is governed by our Privacy Policy.
There are tons of shady and seedy websites that will explicitly reupload content banned elsewhere, but Pornhub is actually one of the few companies that seems to have their ethics in check. They've removed the majority of their library and switched to a verified-only system, wiping out over a decade of porn in one fell swoop.
There are many websites that need to be kicked off the web and the owners of which should be arrested. I don't believe Pornhub is one of them. Pornhub is the most famous company, though, and it makes an easy target for the explicitly ban-all-porn organisation that's featured in this article.
They've made steps. They probably need to go further. I think this article probably focuses too much on Pornhub (also too uncritical of this Xian anti-porn group, too)
There are victims because several individuals chose to coerce or chose to do additional things without someone's consent.
This article and others have seemingly resigned away from investigating uploaders because of the assumption that theyre using a VPN, yet a criminal case is all that is necessary to get logs more often, or this entire article should be about the VPNs “profiting from exploitation” if thats the standard being used for Pornhub.
Skipping straight to Pornhub critique really seems to neglect a lot.
Even OnlyFans’ fake pivot was partially based on that
Anyway, be careful who you send your pictures to!!!! Do it only when you 10000% trust the person and even then you should be reluctant.
Or when you send out something, just assume it's going to be public.
So much of this is totally preventable with the right education...
> Do it only when you 10000% trust the person and even then you should be reluctant.
Even if you trust the person, their device could get stolen, their significant other could find it and blow a fuse ... it's best to just not ever do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak...
Horrifying.
Negligent mother allows underage daughter to use Internet connected device to talk to strangers and possess unlimited access to social media. Resulting horror ensues.
Pinning services are getting more resilient, cheaper, and unmoderated too
Requiring a license for the creation/distribution of pornography where the actor isn't the person creating/distributing seems like a good path. Allows people to send each other their own nudes and create onlyfans of themselves but not a lot else. If independent creators wanted to get licensed then they could.
I think this is a lot of convenient dodging and dancing around the idea that Section 230 might possibly need to be revised.
You can't download Star Wars and put it on YouTube. Uploading someone else's porn is not only similar, it's also much more personal.
I'd say that unless they know the exact circumstances and all the details about the production process, reuploading pornographic content of real people should be considered nonconsensual until consent can be proven. It's not hard to accidentally reupload content that was originally leaked by an abusive ex and you have no business choosing where to upload the content anyway.
I think it's important for people in the porn industry to be able to remove as much of their released material as they want at a later date. Reproductive rights and the freedom of choice over one's body is under pressure in more and more countries in the world and an old leaked porn shoot can leave some nasty damage.
Are you sure? What if the copyright holder encourages it?
I've yet to see any Creative Commons porn sites, though. I don't think it's a very realistic scenario.
There already is a trend in this direction
Currently implemented in a clumsy cumbersome fashion with some unofficial workarounds
Keyword: civilized. Which America is not. We have a mental health problem.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/6/3/23152516/fact-check-te...
The Chicago handgun ban was struck down over a decade ago. Concealed carry has been allowed there for quite some time too. And its super easy to bring in guns from neighboring states with very lax laws.
Maybe the violence in the US is not simply guns?
We also jail our citizens vastly more than other countries, we have different social safety nets, we are a different age (more akin to all the Americas), and many other factors that show your view is missing relevant evidence.
In fact, gun ownership rates across civilized countries negatively correlates with overall homicide rates. Can you explain that also by your belief that guns are the main driver of violence? The same happens across US states, which have varying gun laws. And when analyzing violence before and after gun law changes across all countries, not simply poster child Australia, the picture is again much cloudier than you imply.
For example, the CDC study [1] done under Obama concluded that guns are used more often to deter crimes than are used for crimes. If this is true, it's entirely possible there is enough violence here regardless of guns that naive bans could cause more harm than not. You should read the study, not simply the parts you believe, to get a much better view on state of the art research on guns and violence in the US.
>gun ownership rates across civilized countries negatively correlates with overall homicide rates
[citation needed]
>The same happens across US states, which have varying gun laws.
Well, no - they might have slightly different laws, but generally speaking firearms are wildly available everywhere.
>concluded that guns are used more often to deter crimes than are used for crimes
Can you show me where it says that?
Easy to check yourself - find list of gun ownership by country, or by OECD, or by state. Find homicide rates for each, also easy. Put in excel or Google sheets, run a correlation.
>Well, no - they might have slightly different laws, but generally speaking firearms are wildly available everywhere.
Such a simplistic argument would then imply crimes, homicides with guns, etc., should be the same rate across states, and they are not. By your argument, no per state laws would have any effect, in which case they're useless. But this seems far from true.
So, if laws do have any effect, it should be detectable. Since the correlation for gun owner vs overall homicide rates point to the opposite direction, and it seems like that there are far more defensive gun uses, perhaps people are deterring some crime.
>Can you show me where it says that?
Page 15: "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010)."
Also, somewhat related, p16, "Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies".
Yeah, what it shows is the exact opposite to your claim.
>Such a simplistic argument would then imply crimes, homicides with guns, etc., should be the same rate across states
No, it would only work like that if it was the only variable.
>Page 15: "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses
Please read the methodology. In that very same paper you’ve quoted.
Not according to my calcs - are you using gun homicides or total homicides? Most people mistake the former and ignore the latter. Across all countries, [1] and [2] result in a correlation between avg guns per 100 people and total homicides of -0.13. This means across all countries increased guns correlates with less homicides, which is what I stated. It also gives negative for OECD countries.
What data sets did you compare and what correlation did you get? I get similar answers to the above on many different places to find data.
>No, it would only work like that if it was the only variable.
Ah, but it works like that from your claims above. That seems a bit dishonest.
> Please read the methodology.
I did. I've also read most of the 19 surveys I could find. The sentence I quoted is exactly the conclusion on the matter from the report authors.
Of the 19, there is a range from 108k (with the problem listed - the report didn't even ask about the issue) to several with tens of millions. The majority landed around a few million.
Now, if there's a topic that you're not already decided on, and 19 different reports from over a dozen research groups report on some social topic, with a few extreme outliers and a significant number clustered around the same result, using multiple methodologies for the 19 reports, what would a be a reasonable conclusion?
The one the study reaches in this report: the middle of the road is the main claim directly stated, which I quoted above.
Or do you want to tell me that there is a different conclusion to the opposite effect in the report?
Also no comment on their finding that using a gun defensively results in less injury to the defender? Does that not seem a useful thing to know?
I get the feeling you picked a side and read evidence from that slant, instead of reading what is presented to make an opinion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-ho...
I don't think the comparison to the war on drugs when anyone argues that X should be banned is warranted. If pornography was banned I don't think it would be the same, especially now that pornography is mostly online. Authorities would be more inclined to target producers and distributors/hosts rather than individuals. Also, just because someone thinks something should be banned doesn't mean they think there needs to be perfect enforcement. The fact that something is illegal itself can be a societal deterrent even if the enforcement isn't strong (see internet "piracy", most people don't do it because those invested enough have to go to the "fringes" of the internet to do it).
What do you think of that from a definition standpoint?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_...
People aren't logic automata and trying to make rules that treat a population as such will always end up in the way that prohibition did. You should punish/sanction very harmful expression of base-instincts of humans, but criminalizing all of those that appear even somewhat undesirable will just make the prison problem even worse.
If that is seriously your argument I... tells me everything I need to know about you.
There is nothing dirty (which your comment is implying) about porn. Are there some shady actors in the industry? Sure, but you can say that about any industry.
What we need is to stop being ashamed of the human body. I would call Germany very civilized and they don't have as much shame about their body because (like alcohol for European countries) it is normal from a younger age. It isn't uncommon to see bondage and other very sexual things just normally about. Which is a good thing!
I am an Atheist, your bible verses mean nothing to me.
Here is the thing, in America we have so much shame about sex. Yet we have an insanely high amount of childhood pregnancies. With schools preaching abstinence, that their desires are wrong, etc. It is no wonder that they have sex.
It has been proven time and time again that trying to say something is bad encourages people to use it. We have seen it with sex, drugs, alcohol, etc etc etc.
Bondage is not vile! It is just another act of sex/love (either or, depending on the situation) between consenting adult.
Youth have sexual desires! It is natural, for fuck sake we go through puberty in our youth. Instead we lie about where babies come from (because apparently "mom and daddy loved each other and you were inside your mom" is too much?).
plague after plague after plague
debauchery, currently fringe sexual practices being glorified
massive conflicts
like, if 1918-1932 wasn't a leading indicator of the rapture what makes you think today is any closer? or is it paradoxically because it didn't happen the last 50 times this is always therefore closer?
there are lots of irrelevant prophecies that can have things retroactively attributed to them, which breaks their prophetic capability, hard to prioritize Christian death cults
I remember when the rhetoric was "consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom", and now it's "people should be able to practice their sexual kinks in public, including in front of children [1], and if you disagree then you are a bigot!"
This is what a society heading towards collapse looks like.
Pride is OUR event, I don't give a rats ass about your children showing up. Do not tell ME how to celebrate our history.
Trying to remove Kink from pride ignores the history of our community. You are trying to tell me what my sexuality should be.
Edit: Sorry for the language but this is a particular hot topic for me and I will not take any of it.
We are talking about being able to represent ourselves. For many of us our Kink identity is part of who we are.
For the most part we are talking about wearing some leather, rubber, a harness, a pup hood, maybe using a leash, etc. Things that are mostly tame.
Your kid will either likely laugh at it or not think anything of it. If they actually make the connection to sex... they already knew about it.
But again. Pride is our event. I don't need you there or care that you are there. This country is seriously fucked with its puritanical views.
I'm proud that people can embrace who they really are in this day and age.
I also have never seen anything (sex) actually happen at pride. It is always people being cheerful, maybe wearing some gear. If you think that gear is sexual you have already been exposed to it in an actual sexual manor.
If you really are upset about people wearing gear I hope you don't take your kids to the pool or the beach either. You see far more in those situations.
> [1] https://archive.ph/d3URl
Your idea of a society heading towards collapse is... a bunch of people with coloured flags?
> When our children grew tired of marching, we plopped onto a nearby curb. Just as we got settled, our elementary-schooler pointed in the direction of oncoming floats, raising an eyebrow at a bare-chested man in dark sunglasses whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong. The man paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog. “What are they doing?” my curious kid asked as our toddler cheered them on. The pair was the first of a few dozen kinksters who danced down the street, laughing together as they twirled their whips and batons, some leading companions by leashes. At the time, my children were too young to understand the nuance of the situation, but I told them the truth: That these folks were members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do.
> […]
> We don’t talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment.
Yep, they're groomers.
It’s also strange that in the era of MeToo, where even seemingly routine situations of consensual adult sex can be retroactively classified as acts of sexual violence, that we are accepting of these extreme and violent depictions of sex being normalized and widely available. The whole “sex work is work” push isn’t helping, as it’s only encouraging young people to embrace and participate in this type of content. How many young girls are waiting until they hit 18 so they can finally open an OnlyFans? We would all be ashamed at how low our society has fallen if we still had the capacity to feel shame.
I don't think there's anything inherently bad about porn at all. Most arguments against it are religious in nature and as an atheist I'm not bound by religious rules.
- Researchers have found that repeated porn use "wears out" the dopamine reward system in the brain.
- A German study shows that some porn users become dependent on new, surprising, or more extreme porn to get aroused.
- Some men report that their level of concentration and emotional well-being have been negatively affected by porn use.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hero/201603/is-porn-...
> - Researchers have found that repeated porn use "wears out" the dopamine reward system in the brain.
For example some couples also lose interest in sex after several years and this is a cause for partners to start looking for affairs. It's the same effect.
> - A German study shows that some porn users become dependent on new, surprising, or more extreme porn to get aroused.
So? As long as it's not illegal, perhaps they will discover something that they get satisfaction from in real life too (e.g. S&M)
> - Some men report that their level of concentration and emotional well-being have been negatively affected by porn use.
Possible but not something the state should get caught up in. We don't live in a nanny state.
Also, none of these effects are serious enough on a societal level to justify banning it IMO.
I don’t know, do you have a source to answer that or just trying to muddy the waters? Absolutely no one will ever be able to have as much frequent sex as there are sources of increasingly extreme pornography.
> Also, none of these effects are serious enough on a societal level to want to ban it.
If users become dependent on more extreme porn to get aroused, how long until they need the more extreme porn in existence. How is the presence of that porn, and the victims it requires, not serious enough on a societal level?
If some men report their concentration and well-being are negatively impacted by porn, and about 98% of men view pornography[1]…how can you not see how that will be bad for society?
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201...
I have not done research on it but I recognise the effect in couples, that have even told me their sex life became bland. And that they were looking for more 'extreme' things themselves (involving other people, toys, ropes etc or just having affairs).
You focus very much on a drive to extreme porn but I don't really think this happens for everyone. For me I don't notice this, I don't like the more extreme forms of porn that come over from Japan for example. I don't find that arousing at all. I've come to appreciate the more well-produced camera work. From VHSes with grainy gonzo (that was all that was available back then) to more excellently lighted and seductive camera work. I don't think it's too different from people evolving in their enjoyment of regular movies.
Personally I think that people that gravitate towards ever more extreme things were always inclined to those things but just not engaging with them due to societal pressures. This is usually what I hear from people into bondage and S&M etc. I shared a house with someone really into that who was also pretty 'promiscuous' to put it mildly :) so I've had a lot of chats on the topic. They were always interested in it, but it took time to overcome the shame, and thus it seemed like they were evolving towards it. I'm not into it myself but it was enlightening and cool to talk about. People into these things seem to be very open to discussing it in my experience. I wish more people were like that. Just talking about sex more would make the experience a lot better for everyone.
I find this a very interesting discussion as well, by the way.
> If users become dependent on more extreme porn to get aroused, how long until they need the more extreme porn in existence. How is the presence of that porn, and the victims it requires, not serious enough on a societal level?
They're not victims unless they are doing it against their will. Some people enjoy extreme practices. The ones that are crossing the line are already illegal and don't warrant a ban on pornography as a whole.
But I think you're focusing very much on the extreme which is really a niche in pornography. Only some people gravitate to that and if they do, why is it bad in the first place, as long as they enjoy it?
> If some men report their concentration and well-being are negatively impacted by porn, and about 98% of men view pornography[1]… how can you not see how that will be bad for society?
Personally I think this is none of society's business. Whether it's true for myself I don't even know (I don't think so) but the label 'some' means it's not an effect everyone reports.
But in any case, as long as they can live their lives it is not up to society to interfere, in my book.
degenerating into filth is not something to say "so?" about, the whole "as long as its not illegal" is a line that gets thinner as people begin to approach it when they get into more extreeme things.
we should have a nanny state
The main problem with this line of thinking is that banning, and not having it are two very separate things. Seeing the effect of banning widespread things in societies, the only thing that such a ban ensures is a thriving black market. More suffering for the people involved, loss of power for the government, and the banned thing being practiced in harmful ways.