So if someone uploads porn video on Dropbox, should it be banned too?
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.
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.
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...)
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.
<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!
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.
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.
"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.
That shouldn‘t be such a surprise.
Stop it
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.)