Instagram removes Pornhub's account | Hacker News Reader

Instagram removes Pornhub's account

variety.com

118 pointsnixcraft137 comments

Open articleView on HN

> The plaintiff in the case against MindGeek that names Visa as a defendent is Serena Fleites, who, when she was 13, said she was pressured by her then-boyfriend into making a sexually explicit video — which he allegedly uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent.

So if someone uploads porn video on Dropbox, should it be banned too?

She was 13 when she was filmed by her boyfriend.

He uploaded it. She asked for it to be removed… but those mindgeek scummy leadership folks ignored it initially.

Nothing wrong with adults showing others how they are rubbing their various body parts together and exchanging fluids (aka porn)… as long as it’s consensual and nobody is getting exploited or hurt.

But Mindgeek are / were exploitative.

https://traffickinghub.com/

Worth noting that pornhub and other mindgeek properties actually attempts extensive moderation of their platforms and err on the side of caution about complaints on videos.

It’s exceptionally easy to deplatform someone on pornhub as flagged videos are almost instantly removed and put up for review.

They even made the controversial move of only allowing verified accounts to post on pornhub for precisely this reason.

That needs context.

In 2021, the company was subject to a massive lawsuit and PR disaster after PornHub failed to remove a video of a rape for over 10 fucking years. Not rape as in "sex that turned out to be not consensual after examining the fine points", no. Dragged into a van and gang-raped is what we are talking about.

The victim's story finally got picked up by NYT [0] after the victims pleas, legal attempts etc. to the company fell on deaf ears for, again, over a decade.

After this became widely known, they reluctantly made the change you are talking about.

So yeah.

[0](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...)

I should start by saying unequivocally that of course this situation is extremely awful and anyone involved not helping deserves to be condemned.

However two things are apparent:

1) this is of course really one-sided, especially the op-ed which punches up the source quite a lot. Here is the source of the 10y story: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/432/ETHI/Brief/B...

2) the original source was upset by the fact the video kept recirculating, not that pornhub refused to take it offline, a lot fo

I'm not saying more couldn't be done, but in that context it makes things slightly different.

There are other problems where filters don't work against everything, you can filter "rape" but "forced", "coerced", "tricked", "rpe", "r4pe" etc; ad infinitum and including greedy matching ("grapeseed"?) would be a near impossible task; though they do try. So the Op-Ed saying they can search '14yo' and get results doesn't surprise me, but that's been quashed by the verified-only system now.

You should also know: A large part of the media backlash against PornHub was the fact that a show called "girls do porn", an otherwise normal seeming show complete with F.B.I warnings and notices about consent: was featuring girls who did not consent and/or were underage. -- in fact most of those stories from the op-ed that I managed to trace were from this.

The issue with the second thing here is that if a business entity looks legitimate and has their paperwork completely in order: there's very little you can do except deciding that you don't want to service them for some other more personal reason.

https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/432/ETHI/Brief/B...

<The police collected victim impact statements from Rose and her family. The attackers' lawyers argued that Rose had consented to sex, and the men were charged not with rape but "contributions towards the delinquency of a minor" - a misdemeanour - and received a suspended sentence.>

Not South America, not Africa, Ohio!

The context doesn't change things at all.

If you own Pornhub and the same non consensual videos are being uploaded repeatedly, despite complaints from those depicted in the videos, you need to improve your software to recognize the duplicates. If you can't do that, you need to stop accepting unverified videos. In other words, exactly what they did, except only after the pressure campaign.

Your post leaves the impression that the NYT article is about Rose Kalemba and about having search results for '14yo', when in fact each of those are one-liner throwaway references. The article is replete with examples of women trying to have non consensual content removed, only to have their efforts not honored in good faith:

> “Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.

> Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.

> “It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.” That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable. Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.

Pornhub wasn't punished because searching "14yo" finds results, or because they got duped by GDP. Pornhub was kneecapped because they repeatedly failed to demonstrate good faith in honoring takedown requests, over many years. The silver lining is that now, even though they're much more strict (read: applying a level of moderation that anyone with even the thinnest of moral fiber would expect), the payment processors haven't forgiven them.

"The context doesn't change things at all."

Exactly. Always amazed at how people use reverse logic to excuse their unlawful behavior.

All successful social networking platforms use the cost of monitoring user content as their excuse for not monitoring unlawful content: they don't deal with the problem from start, then they pretend solving the problem with solutions that any sane person knows it will not scale, and finally they become big enough to be granted the excuse "that would cost too much".

A good analogy for this would be a car manufacturer, who is eventually asked to install airbags after putting 6 million vehicles on the road, and responds that it would ruin the company.

These businesses navigate with their seed money, ostensibly put monitoring costs aside, and everyone with vested interests applauds when the owner calls for the magic "auto-regulated community crowdsourced content reporting mechanism" (they all invoke this feature, for years, and it always works).

PornHub executives should be fined personally and in jail. There is absolutely zero chance that they didn't understand this cost was part of the business model and the responsibility on their shoulders. It is criminal negligence and they should be in jail.

As long as we don't put one executive in jail, every other executive will continue damaging people's lives individually because he knows that he doesn't risk anything.

How long is the prison sentence her boyfriend received? What are the circumstances of mindgeek ignoring court order to remove content?

Do you know who is behind traffickinghub.com ?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-anti-porn-evangelicals-hoo...

I wonder why you didn't phrase your question as "Should Dropbox be free to host child porn?"

It was more of a "how do industry behemoths deal with this" in case I create my own file hosting service (which is highly unlikely).

Review every video.

"But that doesn't scale..."

So fucking what? Deal with it.

From a judge's (scathing) denial of Visa and Mindgeek's motion to dismiss:

>Why would MindGeek allow Plaintiff’s first video to be posted despite its title clearly indicating Plaintiff was well below 18 years old? Why would MindGeek stall before removing the video, which Plaintiff alleges had advertisements running alongside it? Why would MindGeek take the video and upload it to its other porn websites? Why, after being alerted by Plaintiff that the video was child porn, would it allow the video to be reuploaded, whereafter advertisements were again featured alongside the reuploaded videos? And why did Plaintiff have to fight for years to have her videos removed from MindGeek’s sites?

https://pershingsquarefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022...

Regarding dropbox, if dropbox publicly hosts a video titled childpornography.mp4 that contains child pornography, indexes it so people searching for it can find it, automatically tags and categorizes it for easy discovery, stalls for weeks when asked to remove it, runs ads alongside it in the meantime, distributes it to a myriad of other file hosting services, allows any file matching the hash of that file to be uploaded again, and then take years to finally purge it from their systems, they should 100% be held liable for distributing child pornography.

And instagram should ban them.

As an aside, WTF is wrong with people? Just get a paid membership to Dorcel and jerk off to sexy flight attendants seducing pilots and passengers and frustrated 40 year old housewives cheating with their gardeners like a normal fucking human being. If you can't afford that you should probably be doing something other than viewing pornography.

You don’t have to even upload it. Possession is a crime.

I mean from platforms standpoint.

I believe safe harbor laws cover this for the platform, but perhaps some platforms are pushing the limits and litigation will likely still be how we decide upon that. It would be surprising if there isn't precedent on this already, I would be surprised if it goes anywhere.

If Dropbox‘ Execs knowingly deny victims their help by ignoring calls for removal, yes.

That shouldn‘t be such a surprise.

I'm really exhausted by these pseudo-wise table turn comments from people whose table turn doesn't even slightly resemble what actually happened

Stop it

Since we've asked you more than once to stop breaking the site guidelines and you're not only still breaking them but doing it in almost every comment you post, I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(This is not a comment on the current issue in any way. I just needed a place to hang this comment, and picked this one arbitrarily.)

It's hard to know what you're saying, other than that people should stop because you're exhausted, but not willing to stop reading.

The financial times has an excellent podcast about online porn, its history, and the hidden porn barons: https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...

Well worth a listen.

Is there anything specific from that podcast you'd like to share that is related to large content platforms like Facebook deleting accounts for other large adult content platforms like MindGeek? Or are we supposed to listen through ~4 hours of audio content to get the gist of what you're saying?

You're supposed to listen to it obviously but if you want spoilers then payment processors police porn, porn sites have to follow their rules or lose all money. The way around this used by some is to become their own payment processors. It's more nuanced than that and covers lots more stuff in a better explained fashion than I'm doing here but you get the point.

I didn't take notes so forgive any inaccuracies, I tend to listen to podcasts when walking the dog and doing the cleaning.

At this point I can say I am stunned at the hypocrisy of Hacker News’ hivemind.

Deplatform KiwiFarms for their harassment, don’t deplatform PornHub from Instagram for having almost-useless non-consensual upload prevention systems.

There's no hive mind. Just individuals. That's why there's no hypocrisy.

Thank you for pointing this out. It is apparently difficult to understand for some people. Let me spell it out in more detail:

* There is a community ("HN") with many individuals. The individuals are independent of each other. Each can form and express their own opinion on each subject. There is no reason to expect that any two individuals should agree or be consistent on anything. They may agree on some things, or not.

* Therefore, when several individuals from the community express opinions that are inconsistent with each other, this does not constitute hypocrisy.

Agreed. Some people's discourse seems to be an endless string of category errors. What a waste of disk space!

Not true. The upvote/downvote system creates the hive mind. It's maybe less noticeable than on Reddit, but on the other hand HN attracts certain kinds of people so there's already a degree of self selection.

Imagine if the population of the world voted for equality for all, but also death to the Jews. Those votes represent the average opinion (AKA the hive mind). That hive mind would be hypocritical even though it is made up of individuals.

This isn't about majority votes, though. If 10% of Hacker News believes one thing and 10% believes the other--and even with 80% hating the topic entirely and refusing to participate--you will get weird juxtapositions of stories on either side hitting and holding the front page. You aren't even guaranteed to get a mix of comments, because the kind of people who show up to talk about one issue and the kind of people who show up to talk about another issue might have less overlap than you would expect from being on the same website.

I think your point is interesting and you could have made it without invoking Godwin’s Law.

Could have, but why does it matter?

Because invoking Godwin's Law tends to shut down discussion rather than further it. It also undermines your own argument because choosing such a jarring example makes it harder for the reader to interpret your argument as having been made in good faith, which is a shame because overall I think your point is correct.

I think only these comments you've made have attempted to shut down discussion. You're just bikeshedding. If an extreme example throws a point into sharp relief, rather than exaggerates a point, then that's good.

No, the extreme example was deliberate to make the point clear. The point would have been less clear with a less extreme example.

It's going to be interesting to contrast this comment section with the Kiwifarms one.

I don’t know if you can compare the two.

The Kiwifarms owners should be in jail for inciting others to commit psychological harm on people while the Pornhub owners should be in jail for knowingly exploiting underage and non consenting women.

That’s two very different reasons. But I fully expect the libertarians of HN in full swing explaining to us how it’s the death of free speech and justifying the worst exploitative behaviours because freedom as libertarians like to do.

> knowingly exploiting underage and non consenting women.

Has a court ruled that yet? If not, that's a pretty ridiculous claim. The site has user submitted content, and perfect moderation is not a simple technical (or even human curated) problem at all.

People are basically upset that PH doesn't have perfect moderation, and want them to moderate better, fine. But that's moving the goal posts.

At the beginning I though I was just going to stay silent but now actually I feel to deeply about that to even respect the rule. Let me clear: pretending until you are skewered in the press that leaving videos of rapes up for a decade, not caring about revenge porn or video of underage girls being posted by their idiotic teenager boyfriends and ruining their life is just a problem of moderation makes you a terrible, disgusting, awful human being. Seriously if that what you believe I hope you will change someday because gosh that’s sad.

Only one of those things violates US law. It’s not illegal to have abhorrent beliefs or to say offensive things.

The issue with kiwifarms is not that they have abhorrent beliefs. The issue is that it’s a platform inciting harassment masquerading as a place of discussion.

I find it interesting how, seemingly amongst one group of people, "it isn't illegal" is the go-to defense for organizations like Kiwi Farms while "it isn't illegal" is considered woefully insufficient for justifying the behavior of organizations like Cloudflare.

> But I fully expect the libertarians of HN in full swing explaining to us how it’s the death of free speech and justifying the worst exploitative behaviours because freedom as libertarians like to do.

I don’t think that was the particular aspect of the aforementioned thread GP was referring to (maybe in part)

Why? Both of them are just a bunch of engineers ignoring reality and clinging to extremist universalist positions while ignoring the details and that the law is actually clear here, and just nobody wants to sue CloudFlare into following the law

I do find it that Instagram, basically a gateway to Onlyfans, is doing this.

How will we react in 10 years when we "discover" that Onlyfans' verification system can be duped with fake documents?

It's already been done.

Pornhub is already a dead place since they removed those videos after lawsuit, what a pity, there were a ton of gems there, so I guess, its gone forever, no one saved those for preservation purpose.

If anyone had the time I highly recommend the podcast “The Last Days of August”by Jon Ronson. It chronicles the suicide of a pornstar in conjunction with the rise of mindgeek.

Time for PornHub to grow up and become a social media :)

Good, all these e-pimps are totally unscrupulous when it comes making money with child porn and revenge porn, and it also concerns websites like Only Fans, Twitter or Reddit...

Will Twitter remove OnlyFans’s account too? They are arguably the largest child porn distributor at the moment.

OnlyFans? Not a chance, they have super strict checks in place.

Snapchat and Twitter on the other hand are full of CP and adolescents posting questionable pictures. And Whatsapp seems to be the go-to app for groups people sharing links to material like this.

Even in my country where the media love to hype and profess the American social media and content giants, they find that competitors like OnlyFans, TikTok, Line etc. are on a completely different level when it comes to safety and quickly responding to illegal content.

Maybe things have changed in the last year but OnlyFans has had its own problems too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57429900

People are using fake passports; how far should OnlyFans go to verify someone's real-life identity?

My sister could sign up, and I could appear on the videos. This is going to be hard to prevent, especially in cases of 17year olds like in the story where it's not immediately clear from the material itself they're under 18.

I can't really think of any system that would prevent this while also not being highly invasive.

All performers in videos on OF need to be verified and submit paperwork or it'll get pulled.

Yes, but the point is that people are faking that paperwork. So what do you do then as a platform? Do you need to do anything? Is the platform even responsible for this? And if so, to what degree?

Nothing in that article suggests OnlyFans is "one of the biggest" distributors of child abuse material.

It's only substantive example is a single individual who was able to fool a moderator that family members passport was theirs, and that pales in comparison to... Well literally anything you might compare to.

It wasn't me that said it was one of the biggest distributors, I said they had their own problems, and they did.

Is identity theft really their problem to solve?

IANAL but strict liability could very well apply here, so the answer may be yes.

Of course. Would you be happy if someone posted you under your name?

If someone stole my identity, I’d have bigger things to worry about.

About the particular situation you’re describing—wouldn’t care, as I would have full deniability.

Legally yes.

Most FinTech businesses are obliged to undertake KYC procedures, so yes, identity theft is a problem that private business are commonly expected to solve, and it should also be the responsibility of any platform like OF.

They are, in a sense, a FinTech company after all.

They are a PimpTech company.

> They are arguably the largest child porn distributor at the moment.

Not sure about that claim, but Twitter still is distributing CP on their platform and they are still unable to remove it, which means they are indeed breaking the law. [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...

[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...

Can you show any example/creditable source to prove?

To the people who ask for sources:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57255983

https://popwrapped.com/onlyfans-a-breeding-ground-for-child-...

the "checks" onlyfans implements are easily bypassed by minors or their adult pimps.

Can you cite some example links so that I can add them to my URL filter?

You're asking for CP links?

It’s a joke. I know OnlyFans is clean, just wanna poke at the commenter and see what he coughs up.

At this point I can say I am stunned at the hypocrisy of Hacker News’ hivemind.

Deplatform KiwiFarms for their harassment, don’t deplatform PornHub from Instagram for having almost-useless non-consensual upload prevention systems.

There's no hive mind. Just individuals. That's why there's no hypocrisy.

Thank you for pointing this out. It is apparently difficult to understand for some people. Let me spell it out in more detail:

* There is a community ("HN") with many individuals. The individuals are independent of each other. Each can form and express their own opinion on each subject. There is no reason to expect that any two individuals should agree or be consistent on anything. They may agree on some things, or not.

* Therefore, when several individuals from the community express opinions that are inconsistent with each other, this does not constitute hypocrisy.

Agreed. Some people's discourse seems to be an endless string of category errors. What a waste of disk space!

Not true. The upvote/downvote system creates the hive mind. It's maybe less noticeable than on Reddit, but on the other hand HN attracts certain kinds of people so there's already a degree of self selection.

Imagine if the population of the world voted for equality for all, but also death to the Jews. Those votes represent the average opinion (AKA the hive mind). That hive mind would be hypocritical even though it is made up of individuals.

This isn't about majority votes, though. If 10% of Hacker News believes one thing and 10% believes the other--and even with 80% hating the topic entirely and refusing to participate--you will get weird juxtapositions of stories on either side hitting and holding the front page. You aren't even guaranteed to get a mix of comments, because the kind of people who show up to talk about one issue and the kind of people who show up to talk about another issue might have less overlap than you would expect from being on the same website.

I think your point is interesting and you could have made it without invoking Godwin’s Law.

Could have, but why does it matter?

Because invoking Godwin's Law tends to shut down discussion rather than further it. It also undermines your own argument because choosing such a jarring example makes it harder for the reader to interpret your argument as having been made in good faith, which is a shame because overall I think your point is correct.

I think only these comments you've made have attempted to shut down discussion. You're just bikeshedding. If an extreme example throws a point into sharp relief, rather than exaggerates a point, then that's good.

No, the extreme example was deliberate to make the point clear. The point would have been less clear with a less extreme example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com