Visa, Mastercard suspend payments for ad purchases on PornHub, MindGeek
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Basically, a court recently ruled that, since Visa is processing payments for ad purchases on Pornhub, Visa is a co-conspirator on all sex trafficking and child porn that Pornhub is involved with. Apparently Pornhub merely being alleged to have engaged in those activities is sufficient knowledge to constitute a "meeting of the minds" for Visa to become a participant in those activities.
(As you might imagine, I vehemently disagree with that ruling. But as it's the ruling that stands, it's the situation that Visa finds itself in, and were I in Visa's shoes, I'd do exactly the same thing they're doing now. They really don't want to be a part of this--and they really shouldn't be a part of this, and dumping Pornhub's ad purchases is the fastest route they can take to not be a part of this, as problematic as it is.)
Would other companies that support pornhub/across in any way also be considered participants? Water supply/electricity/ internet providers/whoever sells them dildos/food
> MindGeek is being sued for knowingly monetizing child porn. Visa’s act of continuing to recognize MindGeek as a merchant is directly linked to MindGeek’s criminal act, as Visa’s act served to keep open the means through which MindGeek completed its criminal act knowing that that criminal act was being committed. At this early stage of the proceedings, before Plaintiff has had any discovery from which to derive Visa’s state of mind, the Court can comfortably infer that Visa intended to help MindGeek monetize child porn from the very fact that Visa continued to provide MindGeek the means to do so and knew MindGeek was indeed doing so. Put yet another way, Visa is not alleged to have simply created an incentive to commit a crime, it is alleged to have knowingly provided the tool used to complete a crime.
Selling child porn has a special place in the law in a way that "feeding suspected CP criminals" does not.
But storing is also special. Storing child porn is very illegal, so how far does that extend? Does AWS renting an EC2 instance to pornhub, knowing pornhub may store CP on it, mean AWS is complicit in storing child porn?
Does Western Digital selling an SSD to pornhub for their datacenter make WD complicit in storing child porn?
Does the data-center that leases them a server become complicit in storing and distributing CP?
In this analogy, Visa is in the same position as a power plant that provides electricity for Tesla cars.
I believe Visa should not be held legally accountable for the lack of action on Mindgeek/Pornhub in taking down and blocking reuploads of reported CSAM. However the issue is that Visa themselves have chosen to be a moderator of what content is allowed by its customers, regardless of the actual legality of the content. They do it indirectly by accepting and rejecting customers based on these guidelines that are not in line with what is or isn't allowed by law.
Based on a shallow reading of the court documents, Visa made essentially the same argument, that it stands an independent of the decisions of Mindgeek and those who uploaded the CSAM. The counter is the idea that Visa is at fault for giving Mindgeek/Pornhub/Uploaders of CSAM a platform to make money in the first place. That was a decision made by Visa. The fact that Visa already stopped being a payment processor for Pornhub/Mindgeek once in 2020 due to a NYT article about CSM shows that Visa was aware of and had control over how strictly Mindgeek/Pornhub polices the uploads for CSAM.
The case isn't about the existence of CSAM on Pornhub either, it's specifically calling out how Visa and Mindgeek has already profited from traffic generated by CSAM hosted on Pornhub.
In my analogy, it would be a power plant knowing the electricity they provide will be used in Tesla cars used by criminals to rob places. Tesla, in this example, knowingly selling cars that they know will be used for robberies and not doing anything about it. Tesla cars can't run without electricity, and the power plant makes money from selling the electricity to a group they know will use it up faster than the general driver.
Electricity and transportation is a regulated utility. I wonder if this case would not have a legal standing if net neutrality existed and a counter was made by Visa that it treats Mindgeek like any other media content provider and won't reject customers it provides services to, because it doesn't differentiate based on the specifics of the data. The website owners would still be responsible for host CSAM in that situation. Visa could potentially argue no joint understanding if net neutrality existed. Right now it's in contention because Visa has already shown it rejects and accepts customers based on their own rules about what kind of data is being served by its customers.
Visa's previous action to stop and then restart providing a platform to Mindgeek/Pornhub, after they removed unverified content, shows a clear understanding of what kind of media is served. By re-accepting them as a merchant, Visa opened itself up to being a beneficiary and conspirator in Pornhub making money from CSAM, by being the company that provides a way for Mindgeek to make money. Not from pornhub directly but by being a payment processor for the advertising arm of Mindgeek.
The specific issue is making money from CSAM, not the existence of CSAM.
Maybe it's time to regulate payment processors and turn them into utilities. That or create a national payment processor that does one thing and one thing only (process payments) under a transparent set of laws treating every traction equally.
I have no love for Visa or Mastercard. I'd rather not deal with them at all if I had an alternative that was just as convenient. It kind of crazy that with our modern tech and banking system we don't have that easy alternative and still have to keep these dinosaurs around just to easily pass numbers back and forth between banks.
Yes, which shows that when Visa was aware that Pornhub was (allegedly?) breaking the law, they stopped providing service to them. Only once Pornhub tightened their policies significantly (and removed all of their content from unverified users) did Visa resume...
And it definitely is about the existence of it, actually; one of the allegations is specifically that Pornhub had child porn, failed to police it, and Visa knew both of those things.
In this case Visa knows full well what they are enabling, by allowing payments to be processed on PH, especially given the volume of transactions, there's no way they don't know what they are supporting.
On one hand, if a business generating almost $500M in revenue per year[1] is doing something illegal, it shouldn't be allowed to operate. Simple as that. If it is allowed to operate, then it should have access to the same payment methods as any other business.
On another hand, if I belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn't exist[2] and had no way of getting them banned completely, that's exactly what I would try to do: force their biggest business partners to cut ties with them.
But you're right in that if a thing is illegal, it should be targeted directly and not by making private companies responsible for defining and enforcing "law".
I suspect if all businesses were held to this standard perfectly, there would be no businesses operating that generated $500M in revenue per year. Every business at that scale is doing something illegal somewhere. Not saying I agree with the state of things, but it seems businesses have decided occasional penalties for getting caught things illegal in jurisdictions that are capable of compelling them to pay the fine, are part of doing business.
If this standard were held perfectly and everyone knew it would be applied to them, businesses wanting to generate more revenue would adapt accordingly. Obviously violators of this standard exist today _because_ this standard is not enforced (i.e. laws without any "teeth" are not sufficiently motivating).
Moreover, is that bad? Is punishing people when they do something illegal bad?
Absent punishment, everybody will just drag all bystanders (from around any scene, there is somebody that disagrees with anything) into a court.
> Absent punishment, everybody will just drag all bystanders (from around any scene, there is somebody that disagrees with anything) into a court.
What a great description of the dysfunction of the US judicial system.
But this is like going after McDonald's because some drug dealers use their parking lots to conduct business.
I don't agree with the overall precedent that would be set, but it's hard to argue when Visa chose to stop working with certain parts of Mindgeek showing they knew CSAM existed. Visa made itself a moderator of content by deciding who it does and doesn't work with based on the kind of content they serve and that decision exposed them up to the consequences of Mindgeek's actions.
Payment processors are in a difficult position but I believe they should be treated like a utility, similar to electricity. If net neutrality was solidified in the US, Visa could potentially argue that it treats all data in a similar way and then the lack of moderation and Pornhub/Mindgeek alone would be at fault. But by by choosing what should and shouldn't be allowed on the platform of its customers, Visa becomes a responsible for when its customers break the law using its platform.
(I don't necessarily agree with the allegation, but that is the allegation.)
> if I belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn’t exist..
This seems to be the only plausible explanation. Going after them by exploiting a legal technicality (hacking the law). I don’t know if I feel any better about this approach, than I do about the original allegation.
Perhaps, it’s the part of me seeking some order in this world, holding out for a more pure form of justice. An ideal that doesn’t exist in reality.
Not a pornhub fan, but I believe there are far more exploitative companies out there.
2) Visa, like any other business, must be allowed to use own judgement when deciding whom it's dealing with. They are no saint, though, because they probably noticed that they were dealing with PH (given its size) long enough ago and ignored what was going on there.
That only establishes that Visa is actually being accused of something illegal, i.e. Pornhub allegedly knowingly profiting from child porn and Visa allegedly providing payment services to Pornhub while allegedly knowing that Pornhub was using those payment services to profit from child porn (allegedly) would make Visa a participant in the alleged crime, if those allegiations turn out to be true. Hence Visa is a defendant in the court case where the truth of the allegiations will then be debated.
That's why the document you linked uses the word "allegedly" so often.
Only cash is able to protect the ability to do private transactions withouth any possibility of external dependencies or interference.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/net...
“Women are allowed to squirt, but we’re not allowed to urinate,” DeVille says. “We can’t insert our panties into our vaginas anymore, because that’s an object. I tried to use a carrot-shaped dildo. That’s a problem because that’s an object, too, but a phallic-shaped dildo is apparently okay.” She shakes her head in amazement. “The rules are completely nonsensical.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cherie-devil...
Note that both male and female ejaculation may be faked in a porn movie.
"Fantastical" quote from the above:
> > Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Stripe. As a result of these discussions, our banking partners have agreed that they are willing to continue supporting your business as long as you are not selling products that are colored such that they might be mistaken for human flesh.
After SESTA-FOSTA, the pages hosting those ads folded, as they couldn't comply with the new rules. Many full-service workers are now walking the streets again and have to have sex in their clients' cars. It's obvious that this makes them much more vulnurable.
It even goes further: Banks will close your account if they think your business has something to do with "sex", even if what you do is legal. If they feel you might be a risk, they freeze your account.
This law has hurt many sex workers, often people already at the very bottom of society. On the other hand, it's unclear how many lives it saved from sexual exploitation.
Sex workers are vulnerable, and many women are being abused. But the way this law was enacted, I can't help but think that pushing sex work further into illegality was a desired side-effect.
Source: I know a couple of sex workers in NYC.
The relevant code here is 1591(a)(2).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1591
The opinion of the court is that the defendents benefit monetarily from a commercial sex act involving someone below 18 years of age.
112 years later nothing has changed from what she described - fundamentalist churches in supposed campaigns against sex trafficking, yellow journalists printing sensationalist stories - 112 years and nothing has changed whatsoever.
Funny story: Pre-9/11 the Bush administration was talking about cracking down on internet pornography. The Christian right was saying the same things they had about magazines in decades past. So some industry people got together and founded websites dedicated to the most horrible pornography possible, in full expectation that they would be attacked. They were going to be champions of the first amendment in the same was that Hustler magazine had been a generation previously. But then 9/11. The expected crackdown didn't materialize. Those websites are still around, having evolved into some of the biggest names in the biz.
06-Jan, 2001.
"The conservative queen of syndicated outrage, who happens to be George W. Bush's pick to head the Department of Labor, has repeatedly warned of what she describes as the perils of sexually explicit material online and urged government action against it. If the Senate gives her the nod, Chavez will not have any day-to-day responsibilities dealing with online speech. But her nomination signals the approach that a Bush presidency is likely to take toward sexually explicit material online."
For the rest of the story, you will have to dig into the history of certain websites that I shall not link to here on HN.
That's never going to happen. All it would do is drive regular porn to the same corners of the internet where snuff films and child porn live, and nobody wants that as that drives more people to those areas.
We already have enough issues with puritanical people pushing their views on everyone else, but I always felt at least some mild level of safety that I could still mostly do what I want if I was in certain states/cities.
I do realize that Visa was in a really hard place at this point and they likely had to make this decision, so I don't exactly blame Visa here. But it worries me that it could even get to this point that Visa is somehow responsible and I see they are not trying to go over Discover.
These changes and age verification requirements have eliminated all the normal amateur sex scenes between regular consenting adults (On RedTube for example) and left the age-verified professional porn, which depicts unrealistic sex between adults who don't give a sh*t about each other, but have perfect bodies and big parts. Instead of showing wholesome normal sex, now all we get is porn shop slut/stud sex
And it does sound like it's definitely a subset of the more mainstream porn that he's practicing, after all the more extreme things often require more people.
Like the other poster I also wonder whether this is a result of influencing from porn or that porn is influenced by changing behaviour. After all, porn wouldn't be made if people didn't like it.
I understand the motivation: let's reduce the trafficking of women and revenge porn, but I'm not sure we're going about it in a good way.
Unless you believe there's some sinister cabal out there conspiring to hurt 18-25 years with porn, you'll just have to accept what's out there is what people pay to see.
The big hardcore porn scenes aren't cheap they are deliberate and calculated.
> depicts unrealistic sex between adults
Doesn't depict the kind of sex you like to watch or partake in but "Middle America" isn't the only view point (no offence if your not American).
There's plenty of bars / clubs / spaces / apps for "kinksters" and the more adventurous. "kink" came before porn and will exist long after it.
Its unfortunate hardcore porn rises to the homepage of these porn sites but its simple economics "ew that's gross, lemme just click it real quick" and there's the advertising space sold - its just "the algorithm" at it again.
Maybe you should make an account and let "the algorithm" do its thing.
I don’t think porn companies are necessarily trying to harm people in the same way I don’t think social media companies, casinos, drug dealers, etc. are necessarily trying to harm people. They are trying to make money, and they don’t care too much if they cause harm in doing so.
I really don't know how you'd even define the "normal" sex behaviour, there is just so much variation.
edit: even now, the places where extreme bodily exaggerations, distortions, and surgical interventions dominate are very vanilla and mainstream, like instagram and twitter, or even softcore/non-nude.
Private companies after a certain size (which Visa certainly qualifies) have to be forced to be open and neutral - they'd expand their power to anything they can given the chance.
(Same goes for the government, but at least that you get to vote for).
Unbridled optimism.
A federal judge in California on Friday denied Visa’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit by a woman who accuses the payment processor of knowingly facilitating the distribution of child pornography on Pornhub and other sites operated by parent company MindGeek.
I think Visa doesn't mind the law as much as the legal system.
There's a long history of them blacklisting people and even using their influence to pressure companies from removing them.
Right, which does massive damage to that website as Visa is part of a duopoly with a complete stranglehold on the market
> If I don't agree with Visa's decision, I am free to walk away from Visa
Ok, and if Mastercard follows suit, where do you go?
The problem with essential services - monetary transmission, in this case - being monopolized by private companies is that your trite claim that "each party can walk away" is actually quite clearly untrue for the consumer in each such situation. Market actors should be free to make their own decisions, but monopoly and cartel situations need regulation to prevent consumer harm, and it's clear what this is.
This has to be intentionally obtuse, we're talking about online payment processors...
> Bitcoin?
So easy to use, so stable
> PayPal
Yes, you're right, in the US it's more of a tri-opoly than a duopoly - you'll note globally it's more of a duopoly. But that's pretty far from supporting claims like "Visa doesn't have a stranglehold on financial transactions". Visa and MasterCard usually move in some form of legal tandem from what I've seen, which returns us to the original point: arguing about idealistic "market" conditions in a captured, distinctly not-free market is foolish at best and intentionally misleading in this case.
There is a famous series of HN posts from some startup trying to get into this space (sorry, can't remember the details - maybe someone else can fill in). The horrorshow of getting "money transmitter licenses" and working through compliance issues in 50 different states (plus federal) made it impossible.
There is not a free market for transaction processing in this country. A small handful of companies are grandfathered into what is effectively a government enforced monopoly. So they need to be treated like the quasi-public utilities they are.
That's implying that PH is doing nothing to stop it. There's a difference between there being a few handful of examples of cases slipping through the cracks, vs PH intentionally allowing it to happen.
It's like Youtube, there will always be false positives and false negatives in their automatic and manual moderation. Online moderation is a hard problem, not a single platform has got a bulletproof solution.
Pornhub is used, rarely and without their consent, to illegally transmit child pornography.
What sort of business are you in? I'm pretty sure that I can find a way that it facilitates some sort of illegal activity. Your HN profile says "Defense". Let's see now...
How is that illegal? Illegal immigrants may be in the country illegally, but that doesn't mean that everything they do while in the country is also illegal. We don't have outlawry anymore. Such concepts don't work in the modern world.
It's the difference between selling a bag of rice to a killer for hire, and selling a gun to a killer for hire.
Is that in fact illegal?
That's why you ship your drugs with the USPS. But this is more like mailing a check for drugs.
Pornhub used to permit anonymous uploading by amateurs. Yes, plenty of amateur stuff was posted, but with such a system of course some stuff slipped through that shouldn't--copyright, revenge and kiddie porn. When the problem came to light Pornhub deleted all the stuff that didn't have a proven identity. (And the US standards for proof on porn are too high. They're fine for a big studio but impossible for amateurs and they preclude any attempt to keep identities secret.)
Only a sliver of the 80% of their database that got deleted was kiddie porn and note that not all kiddie porn is sexual abuse anyway--some of it is just teens being stupid.
Child, Pornography and Abuse ... each definition requires a multi-hour lecture at any law school. One can debate the definition of "child" for days without coming to any firm conclusion. But many states have very exacting laws, backed up by draconian punishments. It it perfectly reasonable for large corporations to take an equally harsh approach. The punishments for being "in possession" of such material are so dangerous that instantly deleting entire accounts/databases will be seen as reasonable business judgement. But I guess that is the point of such punishments. They are designed scare everyone into acting without hesitation.
I'm pretty sure in the new contract was something like you can't have anonymous uploads at all.
Some want to prevent monopolies from having too much influence over commerce but it's far from the majority (based on all available evidence).
No other processors are allowed to take their payments either, it's on the Visa/MC network level.
Yes, I know that the vast majority of the content they post is perfectly fine and legal. But enough of it isn't, and they are lax enough in checking, that they kinda deserve punishment at this point.
But I also don't think porn is going away. I hope whoever replaces them (looking at you, OnlyFans) is less scummy, so it is easier to defend them.
This is what Satoshi was talking about; "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model[0]."
So I need to trust and rely on Visa, MasterCard and other credit card companies not to cut me off their network? And they can do it anytime because they might not like my business, my business model or my business practices. If business is legal and up and running just let it be.
With the general use of centralized crypto exchange, we just swapped two masters (Visa/Mastercard) with another (Coinbase).
Of course with private wallets, we could technically avoid centralized exchanges, but the on/off ramps to crypto (fiat in/out) with the state KYC requirements, an authoritarian state could still go after the linked bank accounts.
Welcome suggestions on the way forward. Maybe decentralized exchanges?
https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...
It spends quite a bit of time explaining how the credit card companies became the de-facto regulators of porn on the Internet.
Visa is too big to ever be in big trouble. They constantly have some class of customers that are "dangerous" to do business with. Once upon a time it was porn websites. Then it was VPNs. Then it was "filesharing" services. Eventually as these thing become normal and better-understood by the general public Visa relents. The only thing Visa really fears is some upstart payment system eating into their territory (paypal).
Like it or not, part of the baggage of doing that service is being an extension of the long arm of the law.
So "rolling your own" minus the regulatory baggage you don't like, isn't per se "making your own payment processor", but something else.
Bit of a Catch-22, but how it works. Everyone just tends to leave the quiet part unsaid.
Pornhub essentially is already their own payment processor, as it looks like they are processing cryptocurrency payments from the customers.
If Visa loses, payment processors have little choice but to remove processing from sites that allow user generated content, including Reddit. They are legally responsible for all under-18 content, and as "Big Evil Corporations" they have no support from anyone in the community that matters.
The EU and UK is even worse in this regard, so no anonymous commercial social networks will ever be created again.
Yeah, many creators and pr0n companies will tone down their content. But we all know that consumption of pr0n doesn't lead to more vanilla tastes. The more "deviant" acts will find ways to make revenue outside the mainstream and then all it will take is a critical mass for some digital currency to mean something.
Making it Visa's responsibility forces them to be proactive. We're dealing with a case of illegal porn involving underage victims so I think that makes sense. Mindgeek has taken steps to fix the problem but maybe Visa isn't convinced that they've done enough.
By allowing policies that crack down on the entire sexwork industry, more women, children, trans people, etc are hurt, than are hurt by the actual criminals making child porn or sex trafficking. When everything goes underground and there is no well-regulated marketplace, people get exploited and abused. There's hundreds of interviews with sexworkers who all talk about how their work is more dangerous now.
Pressuring Visa makes all porn go underground, which includes child porn and trafficking. That leads to more harm, because there's no visibility and no protection.
If we didn't pressure Visa, and instead had a flourishing open market that was monitored, regulated and policed, it would be easier to notice the illegal activity and move to stop it. A Department of Sexwork could work directly with Visa and content creators to develop sophisticated methods to identify and stop illegal activity.
But since it's harder to see abuse when everything is underground, politicians prefer it that way. If you don't notice the abuse happening, must not be happening; problem solved. No US politician will get voted out of office for banning sexwork, and Visa's bottom line won't get hurt either, even if it does result in more actual harm to people.
The whole stack includes the merchant, the payment processor (think CyberCash, Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, Verifone, NCR, etc), the merchant bank, the card network, the issuing bank, and the customer.
If the card network won't deal with you, you've got to build your own card network and issue cards or convince customer banks to issue cards, and convince processors to process them and merchants to accept them etc. I don't know how many adverisers PH has, it might be easier to just ask them to write checks.
They started requiring age verification for the people in uploaded videos but maybe they should take it a step further and only accept content from approved accounts, like reputable studios that keep records.
What a brave stance. It's nice to see a card network that cares about the children.
The Financial Times released an 8 episode podcast titled Hot Money on who controls the industry. The podcast isn't appropriate for everyone, but is a great listen.
In all seriousness, this nonsense is exactly why I continue to support crypto to this day. Visa, Mastercard and some random court jurisdiction in some random country should not have a say in whom I transact with.
You would think DRM would have been all about enforcing this instead of corporate greed.
We can't just repeat any buzzword without thinking about what exactly does it actually mean in practice.