Visa knew about Pornhub’s child porn, judge says, and now must face trial
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I don't see Visa as culpable here—no more culpable than the ISP serving PornHub, or their analytics provider, data center, ad services, or anything else. If the judge is after Visa, they should be after the others equally.
The blame for platforming the content and careless-moderation lies squarely on PornHub. And there are surely other institutions than Visa that should be obliged to take immediate serious issue with CSAM on PH.
Why isn't Visa being forced to stop providing payment processing services for liquor stores that sell alcohol to people who drive drunk and injure themselves and others? I swear, this isn't a strawman argument—Visa is as removed from culpability in this case as they are in this PornHub case, and deaths caused by drunk driving are reasonably far more damaging to human life.
The specific behavior users posting CSAM on PornHub is unquestionably damnable (and those who posted it are the most culpable, and must suffer the most consequences). This doesn't mean PornHub is a whole is a net-bad. Sex work is real work, and America has a damn hard time appreciating the aesthetics of the human body in a comfortable and unproblematic manner, and the pressure to keep PornHub hidden in the shadows reinforces the negative feedback loop of unhealthy perspectives of sex, and promotes some bad behavior—we can't culturally talk about sex comfortably and openly, when we're all made for it.
In any case, Visa's job is not to moderate the content of the internet, nor any other purchases on their platform—aside from an interested best-effort response to deny outright the sale of illegal goods and services. Visa should be able to fine or sue PornHub for breach of contract. Or increase their payment processing fees, and force them provide reports and transparency.
It is not ok for Visa to feel forced by external pressure to cut off this entire business category as a whole.
It's really the same thing; x party brought the suit against Visa, and that's why Visa is in this position as opposed to anyone else who the poster thinks would or should also be liable under the same logic.
My interpretation was that the above poster was making more of a fairness argument. Like "why is Visa being singled out and not the ISP, the x, the y". To which the response is simply that nobody sued them. Like I said, I am probably taking them too literally.
I express no opinion on whether the ruling is good as a matter of law or policy.
Assuming this is a district court judge, btw, the judge may very well not be viewing their ruling as setting precedent. A lot of judges hew to the fiction that they're just deciding individual disputes in front of them, and not making law. While that may be plausible at the trial court level, it's obviously not true of most appellate courts. Yet, appellate judges often say the same thing. Just the other day I was reading a SCOTUS opinion by Rehnquist or Scalia and one of them said "yup, we just resolve individual controversies here, we don't make the law, we just apply it..."
The pernicious thing about this is that the net result of all this may be that only people who go through stringent verification processes can post, meaning that the platforms will be even more dominated by large producers and the content will trend even closer to only having caricatures of the extremes with little representation of what people should really expect from sex once they try it in the real world.
Studio productions rarely show typical humans engaging in healthy sex.
It's especially ironic that so many people oppose crypto-currencies with the argument that "democratic control" is desirable when deciding the rules of our financial system, yet the consequence of this is obvious: the law must force monopolistic financial services providers to serve any entity that is operating legally. If PornHub did something wrong, we have laws and prosecutors for that.
It should be illegal for them to continue to facilitate illegal activity once they are made aware of it. For everything else they should stay out of it and be a neutral payment provider treating all legal transactions and customers equally. Until they start advocating for that it seems like they just want it both ways.
Well that may be coming next.
https://pershingsquarefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022... > Moreover, Visa alegedly had considerable sway over that business’s decision-making, a conclusion amply supported by the allegation that MindGeek removed 80% of its content when Visa suspended its business with MindGeek. Visa is not being asked to police “the billions of individual transactions it processes each year.” (Mem. at 9.) It is simply being asked to refrain from offering the tool with which a known alleged criminal entity performs its crimes.
Hopefully this is the beginning of a process that leads to such an unworkable situation that things move the other way. And leave crime up to the police and government and not PP, backs and CC companies. With any luck we might even be able to get some kind of safeguards. "Financial Services Neutrality Act" maybe?
What we have so far is the opposite, that they in fact did something when they had an idea that Pornhub was hosting illegal content. That should indemnify them, rather than make them liable. I'm really curious to see what evidence they present for this, since what we know so far seems absurd and backwards. Victims do deserve restitution but that should come from PH, who 100% knew and lied and profited.
I hate that payment companies are defacto internet morality police but it's not surprising that things like this in part force them into that position.
No, but they need a solution. That's a point everyone here seems to be skipping over; that's a problem and needs to be fixed before they can be excused. While not in included in this situation, PornHub has a revenge porn problem as well. These have real consequences, disproportionately on young women.
>we can't culturally talk about sex comfortably and openly, when we're all made for it.
Well the problem is the conversation isn't just about healthy perspective of sex. When there's a unregulated environment where CSAM is mixed in with regular content it's anything but healthy. This is specifically an issue of appreciating the human body in a problematic and dangerous way. And unless remedied, I fail to see why they should be excused of this
Much of that 80% of PornHub was "child porn"? Colour me skeptical on that one. They just deleted everything where they couldn't verify it was not child porn, but that's a very different thing.
Visa is not law enforcement; if there is evidence of child porn then law enforcement can and should crack down on that. And if there is no evidence ... why should visa do anything?
A lot of this is a concentrated effort by evangelical groups what in the past were drooling about things like sex toys or the "sodomite lifestyle" bringing ruin and despair to our society. Not saying there isn't a serious discussion to be had here, but that doesn't mean everyone is acting in good faith or that there isn't a large amount of exaggerated bullshit, too.
You are correct; the court's conclusions are absurd.
I think they could make a compelling argument that a significant amount of the deleted content was uploaded without its subject's consent... but to claim that most of it was CSAM is crazy.
Did they actually do that? I thought they only removed videos where the person who uploaded them did not provide evidence that the uploader was over 18. The uplooader may or may not be the person in the video.
> PornHub [removed] all videos on its site that weren't uploaded by official content partners or members of its model program
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqjjy/pornhub-suspended-all...
Which is basically all of the "amateur" / non-professionally produced videos. I recall reading that they went from around 5 million videos to 1 million.
That said, I think David is right that a verified account doesn't necessarily mean the subjects consented to the video being uploaded. In theory you're verified and have all the paperwork; I'm not sure how strictly they enforced this in practice.
> Videos are only eligible for earnings if you are in the video. You must fill out a co-performer agreement and keep it on you if there are other in your videos. We may request it at any time.
> PornHub Model Program FAQ
> It is simply being asked to refrain from offering the tool with which a known alleged criminal entity performs its crimes. That is not a tall order and does not spell out an existential threat to the financial industry.
In a society where innocence is presumed, "known alleged criminal entity" is an oxymoron as far as the law is concerned. If anyone can be an alleged criminal entity, how could this not be an existential threat?
We need the financial institutions to stop being asked (forced) by the government to do law enforcement's job. This is yet another argument for why we need some kind of 'financial services neutrality act'
As an analogy - where dissimilar things are compared for the ways that they're similar - if you asked people "should we keep the power on for people involved with CSAM", many people would say "no!" and vilify anyone arguing against the premise itself, because any punishment is a valid punishment to them.
So our liability laws should factor this in.
Also that argument is insane and dangerous in so many ways? What's next, employers being held culpable for the things employees spend their money on? And on another level.. Policing money is the VERY LAST thing private entities should be doing in the first place. If they aren't directly alerted/warned by law enforcement or some other overt way, then it shouldn't be their business.
Not that I feel too bad for the companies, they have their self to blame in a way.. Once you start playing money police games, well you get this. To be fair though it isn't entirely their fault.
That kind of mentality is a nice size part of why the government as been so idle on issues of ensuring equal access to banking and transfer services by organizations largely held up and protected by the government. Doing so would make it difficult for them to cut off people and orgs the government wants without official reason. Since the system now is set up to allow the government to pressure or threaten institutions to do their bidding in a way that now court would allow for any other issue!
Of course ownership interests for porn are really hard to unravel so it's annoying to do this in aggregate.
Well the thing is yes women hear I got scouted total game-changer. Ends up being nobody actually judges appearance for themself, like I learned to (again, straight model) to gauge competition for a role. Figured out who is handsome and who isn't, don't have a natural sense for that. Nobody decides for himself, people in fact seek models out on the basis of vocation. Some look terrible, the ones who got work bet they looked great on 4K, just not in the same room, they were the only ones acting like I was like nah...maybe looked bad that day. But it's decadent. And everybody wants to sleep with models, especially models.
So in the other industry, people figure hey naked sexually attractive people, decadence, barely legal, anything goes? Has to be profitable. Like prostitution right? Nah. Too efficient. It's sex after all, efficiency is bad. Sex can't be too efficient. There's nothing about the business that's monopolistic, like yes yes there's names but no there's nothing there. Not going to patent any thrusts, it's all pretty old shall we say. Modeling also, similar model strips down almost as far huge camera (they put a ton of their not infinite money into capital giant cameras) takes it all in. True beauty is rare, some people are unique, that is worth something, but mostly there's no monopoly to be had. Celebrity yeah...there is celebrity. But less because people don't gossip about so-and-so, supposedly nobody on hacker news looks at any of that stuff right? Whereas models can be spoken of, actresses actors, people say the name out loud.
Modeling is the opposite of coding, instead of lots of money and few female coworkers it's little money and many female coworkers. Well not so little money like for pictures I was told there you could make good money, a Hollywood insider told me that, I was surprised, totally assumed there was no dollar in the industry.
In general ads want slightly more women than men from my experience, and the women are generally straight, and the other men are generally gay, I'm pretty much asexual since my lynching but basically straight so I fit in, pretty tolerant environment of eg the huge gaps in my resume. Like the police, I got recruited for that too, they don't care you were unemployed for four weeks or 31 days, they only care about their criteria, which is no arrests no driving accidents. Good pay. Modeling, just look good, and be relatively young, don't have to be that young if you're a man though. Like I told them at the time, yeah I was in Stanford, it was hard got told to take time off, they had no issue with that. Whereas like Fortune 500 wants a 3.0 GPA just to start off at the very least, a top twenty university, internships every summer, no gaps in the resume, like 4 interviews, we want this good now we want this good now we want this eh you're out, unpaid homework (which is disgusting, I completed it with original cutting edge research because that was easier for me than getting the hints which I can't), generated responses to try to get you to focus on just one company and then give an insulting offer. Yeah essays telling you how good a fit you are for each other and nurture and then what like there is one thing and then there are two things GPT-4 for teasing candidates. And generally refuse to hire unconditionally, just want to feel in charge, get a really big auction going. At least models didn't with another model like me.
Modeling looks harder than it actually is as far as getting paid, coding looks more profitable but also is just exploitative. Boss impoverishes you every chance he gets in Chile at least. Every metric, everywhere. You have three bosses, you have thirty reqs, you have to write an epic (they should shut the fuck up about epics around me) like the tracking, you get dunned this money, like fuck. Same as porn, fucked business model with no monopoly, always conceiving of it like cornering a market yeah just corner employees.[1] Modeling it's like the money is there, you get work great, you do get paid, if you were smart have a good agent. Dude smart female coworkers man, there's so many models that are really bright, like A+ students just beautiful in addition to that. That's something I've noticed from approaching thousands of women in real life, so much overlap between beautiful and smart, contrary to stereotypes. Just it's a classic for a beautiful woman to be very serious about her studies. One of them told me why don't they make an app so we can get our place in line stedda waiting over three hours, well first off no because those three hours are time to talk to you, and second off no because it does have an exploitative streak still. And third off uh uh, I didn't think of that. Me. I've founded apps.
So honestly I got negged by coder employers much less as a model than as a coder. Really the challenge which is why women and gay men are more plentiful than straight men is really taking care of your appearance, dermatology. Like hours a day in upkeep. Be skinny, that's important so there's that. Wear good clothes to the casting, so invest in your wardrobe, the girl I got my first portfolio done with had beautiful clothes, I neglected that. And the appearance. Like with skin straight men don't even see it, like one straight man I saw I did notice "wow great skin" and that was only because he was a dermatologist himself.
[1] Although due to the nature of torture I only got interest from crappy companies that had no business. Also Facebook, and a few others, but they always identified me as a false positive on an early round--torture, too much spine because I didn't cooperate with it, companies hate that like they hate veterans and American citizenships. Fuck.
> Perhaps you'll think my comments are unthinkable. My only response to that is that they were legibly written, not by a machine, but by a writer with a soul.