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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

PH and the people that work there are a 1000% liable for this person’s abuse. Publishing sensitive content without verifying the supply chain is a risky move, and they eventually got caught.

That said, I really don’t want the payment processor involved in a case like this.

There’s a bigger issue at stake, and that is private companies legislating morality. We’ve allowed Visa to be a monopoly and that is a hard hard thing to undo. If we actually had choices besides Visa, I wouldn’t care, but alas, they are a monopoly and we’ve done nothing about them.

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> private companies legislating morality

This was one of the problems cryptocurrencies were invented to solve. It shouldn't be up to Visa whether to cut off funding to anyone in particular.

These private companies aren't legislating morality, though. As a private business, they have complete autonomy over who they choose to partner with. If a Pornhub deal falls through, they have no legal obligation to continue processing payments for them (especially if their lawyers are documenting the problems).

Cryptocurrency doesn't solve this, nor was it really invented to address this issue. Decentralization is a nice side-effect of a low-trust network, but it also completely sabotages any moderation efforts on the platform, and preserves an entire population's porn habits in an openly-availible, transparent ledger. I don't think your average Pornhub visitor will be terribly excited to adopt this radical new technology since it presents a scenario where their purchases could be completely deanonymized.

> It shouldn't be up to Visa whether to cut off funding to anyone in particular.

It's not. Chase Bank or Mastercard are welcome to jump in and take Visa's place if they think the platform is a safe place to make money. It sounds like this is more of a Pornhub issue than a Visa one though, so I wouldn't expect it to get fixed very soon.

> These private companies aren't legislating morality, though.

They are. If you're a banker, you effectively choose which direction society evolves towards by choosing who gets banking services and especially access to credit. Deny someone banking and credit and they're pretty much done. That's way too much power.

> it also completely sabotages any moderation efforts on the platform

"Moderation" is the job of law enforcement.

> preserves an entire population's porn habits in an openly-availible, transparent ledger

Which is why people should choose privacy cryptocurrency like Monero.

> They are. If you're a banker, you effectively choose which direction society evolves towards by choosing who gets banking services and especially access to credit. Deny someone banking and credit and they're pretty much done. That's way too much power.

That's why we have fair lending laws. If you're denied private services with a bank on the basis of a protected characteristic, you can take them to court. Deny someone banking and credit, and you get sent to jail. I don't know where you're citing some of this stuff, but some sources might be nice.

> "Moderation" is the job of law enforcement.

That would be a completely new precedent to me and the United States of America. As a platform runner, you are responsible for the data that you host. You can't just make a social media site, have a bunch of people post gore on it, and then tell the judge "but they did it, not me!". They're going to chuckle, force you to testify that you stored the illegal content on your own server, and then lock you up for as long as they'd like.

This has happened many times in the past. Platform owners are not exempt from moderating their own platform. Even 4chan needs moderators, or else they too would get shut down.

> Which is why people should choose privacy cryptocurrency like

So... you're saying that the average person, who fears things like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks, is going to start using the premier currency for human trafficking and the drug trade? No, I don't think they will. My radical prediction is that people will continue to buy porn the same way they have for the past 30 years, because none of the boons of cryptocurrency directly benefit them.

> I don't know where you're citing some of this stuff, but some sources might be nice.

Sex industry is an example. They are frequently cut off by banks and payment processors even when their works feature no actual humans whatsoever. Every now and then I see a thread here about something like that. If I remember correctly, Patreon had trouble with money flow at some point and threatened to censor content.

> As a platform runner, you are responsible for the data that you host. You can't just make a social media site, have a bunch of people post gore on it, and then tell the judge "but they did it, not me!". They're going to chuckle, force you to testify that you stored the illegal content on your own server, and then lock you up for as long as they'd like.

That makes no sense to me. Aren't there safe harbor laws which exempt you from the consequences of your user's actions if you comply with law enforcement? Someone shares a malware github here on HN and the whole site gets prosecuted?

And since when is gore illegal? Obviously if someone creates a snuff film that person will be investigated and hopefully prosecuted for murder, but I don't think it's actually illegal to view that stuff. I remember discussions about sites literally dedicated to gore on this very site around the time liveleak shut down.

If anything, that's yet another example of private corporations legislating morality. Advertisers will cut you off if they think you're offensive. I remember several cases of web sites self-censoring after Google pulled their ads.

> Even 4chan needs moderators, or else they too would get shut down.

4chan complies with law enforcement. I've read transcripts of the former administrator testifying in court. As far as I know, it was never held directly responsible for anything its users did there.

>but it also completely sabotages any moderation efforts on the platform

You can moderate by watching the flow of goods instead of money.

Too bad they have utterly failed at their stated purpose

Yeah, it sucks. They turned into stocks the second exchanges showed up. The worst part is there are good projects out there like Monero but nobody really cares because price doesn't go up.

I can't sign off on any cryptocurrency being a "good project" unless I can easily exchange it for goods and services. I haven't found a single cryptocurrency that qualifies, including monero.

I got paid for my services in Monero once. It was a great experience, I wish all money worked that way. Unfortunately I had to sell it for USD because of the price fluctuations.

Not to mention that using a lot of these altcoins are likely to put you on some FinCEN watchlist, if it ever gets traced back to you

Which is why everyone should use it. What good is a watchlist if everyone is on it?

It's a chicken and egg problem. Who's going to stick their neck out long enough for "everyone" to get in on it?

I think crypto got too hyped but I wouldn't say it's failed, I have used it for purchases/etc in the past with success

"I think Voat got too hyped but I wouldn't say it's failed, I have had conversations on there with success"

... it's a failure. Maybe it blows up in the future... maybe.

Well voat was a specific website. The idea of link aggregators hasn't failed (considering we're using one), and sites like communities.win (now scored.co for some inexplicable reason) continue to be successful even with more successful sites like reddit

Me too. I've gotten paid anonymously via Monero for a small service. Worked really well.

Are you defending the position that as a society, we should continue to allow funding the creation of child pornography through means of crypto?

Visa states openly that they weren’t aware of the situation at issue, don’t support child pornography, and have taken steps to avoid supporting it. This isn’t a case of cutting off some “industry”; child pornography is already widely and rightly maligned.

I'm saying it's the police's job to go out there, investigate and arrest child molesters, not some payment technology's. Money companies turning into extra-judicial law enforcement by means of risk assessment is how you get bullshit like PayPal's constant freezing of accounts.

Can't speak for matheusmoreira, but I think Visa should handle payments & law enforcement should handle diddlers. Turning payment processors into an extra-judicial enforcement system on top of the existing one is a mess in so many different ways (jurisdiction, lack of due process, arbitrary enforcement, financial motives, conflict of interest, lack of transparency, etc...).

Of course not, child pornography is strictly within the domain of public schools, until those pesky parents infiltrate the boards.

VISA was trying to have themselves removed from the lawsuit before trial even happens, but this ruling is where the judge lays out why the plaintiff has both standing and a possible cause of action against them and therefore why they must be included in the lawsuit.

Isn’t the fact they aren’t a monopoly what gets them to change? Bill Ackman was on CNBC this morning ripping into them for like 15 minutes of prime air time on this issue. The CEO of Visa is nowhere to be heard from. I suspect the end result will be to revoke PH as a customer. Why? Because Mastercard and Amex exist

Sounds like Bill Ackman has a short on Visa.

It would sound that way, which is why CNBC made him clear up any conflicts on air. He said he currently has 7 total long positions and zero shorts and no plans to enter anything with Visa. He was stretching to find a connection with Visa and the best he came up with is that Lowes accepts visa cards

I agree but I think there's a caveat. I think it is possible to have situations where it is really hard to corner the offenders and it makes sense to go after the enablers.

One case would be ransomware attacks, another case can be content out of reach from the jurisdiction(for example, at one point Russia might choose to host copyrighted or other no bueno materials).

With the case of PornHub, the victim apparently reached them but it took PH weeks to remove the offending materials. Maybe, if that industry or that company cannot be forced to act appropriately before an irreversible damage is done it can make sense to go after their enablers like Visa.

It could be reasonable to require payment processors to have a fast channel to report abuse. PH would have noticed the problem much quicker, had Visa cut them off from collecting payments.

Should the manufacturer of the camera be held responsible because they did not verify the purpose of the buyer and consequently allowing them to produce illegal material? (They could technically have some online DRM installed to all of their cameras and if it is reported that someone is making illegal material, they can brick those cameras in question.)

I think the issue is that Visa should not be tasked with enforcing the law. In my opinion, in an ideal world, PornHub should be forced to verify its content not by Visa, but by the government, i.e. there will be heavy fine for allowing illegal materials to be uploaded.

> Should the manufacturer of the camera be held responsible because they did not verify the purpose of the buyer and consequently allowing them to produce illegal material?

I don't think this is a good analogy as Visa does operations and it's quite reasonable to require safety during operations.

> PornHub should be forced to verify its content not by Visa, but by the government

The problem with this is, which government? We don't have a world government or harmonised regulations but we have an international network.

> That said, I really don’t want the payment processor involved in a case like this.

Are you saying that a payment processor should not be held liable if they had knowledge of the illegal content, and actively decided to profit from it, or are you saying that you do not believe they actually did that? Because only the first point was at issue in this decision.

Visa cut off Gab.com, on their own initiative, for incidentally carrying posts by the Pittsburgh shooter. Why didn't they exercise the same judgement against PornHub for incidentally carrying vids of child sexploitation?

They opened themselves up to this line of legal reasoning.

Why haven’t they exercised the same judgment against Google for YouTube hosting abuse or Google Search indexing abuse?

Money, probably.

They did. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-endi...

TFA is about events in 2014. If anything, putting a stop to such things six years later makes them look more guilty.

That’s not a legal argument for liability. As a private company they’re perfectly free to pick who they do and don’t do business with. They just can’t do business with criminals engaged in criminality.

The only real issue is wether they knew that Pornhub had child porn.

Now if Visa said it’s technically impossible to ban someone, Gab could be used to prove that it is

It is a legal argument for liability. By reaching outside their own specialty, digging into the ethics & practices of their customers, and taking action against them, they've opened themselves up to plaintiffs & regulators. In other words, if you touch it, it's yours.

Putting themselves in the morals & enforcement business, it was only a matter of time before they were held to account for not doing a better job of it. A much stickier situation in front of a jury than being able to honestly state, "Hey, we just process payments."

Risk-reward... that's the only thing banks care about

Ah yes American supply chain responsibility following the great American institutions like Nestle, Johnson and Johnson, Amazon, and my personal favorite the United Fruit Company.

>Ah yes American supply chain responsibility following the great American institutions like Nestle, Johnson and Johnson, Amazon, and my personal favorite the United Fruit Company.

They have no morals other than the dollar and maybe my glasses are rose colored but that sounds like a pretty damn simple, predictable and equitable way to run a business.

These sorts of events do not seem "equitable":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre

Nestle is Swiss.

Nitpicking: Nestlé is Swiss.

Nitpicking: Nestlé's supply chain doesn't exist without American freshwater.

So when they're taking African freshwater it's an evil African company?

My larger point is that it doesn't matter where Nestlé is located since they'll ruin your ecology wherever you live. It doesn't matter if they're located in Antarctica, the parent's point was still relevant since Nestlé has a supply chain that relies on America.

Nestlé can be located anywhere for all I care, but it's not relevent to the discussion since they rely on American resources (and American manufacturing/processing plants, for that matter).

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