It sounds like you haven't read the NY Times article. It's not about religion. It's not about some anti-sex worker movement. It's about content that is illegal and reprehensible.
If it was about some "religious anti-sex work movement," then the credit card companies wouldn't still process payments for the legal brothels in Nevada. Which they do.
This article explains the originals of the NYT opinion article and the anti-sex work campaigns behind it: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war...
Millions of VERY illegal child abuse are uploaded to Facebook, Twitter and all UGC platforms. In the NYT article, the journalist dismisses the (non religious) Internet Watch Foundations number of 118 cases of CSAM on Pornhub over 3 years. He asks IWF why the number is so low and says they couldn't explain it. Maybe because it is.
No, I wonder why Mastercard does process charges on those platforms and what it means especially for Twitter and Reddit that allow UGC adult content.
Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram:
I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly.https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973...
It's called targeted enforcement where your friends don't get in trouble. Facebook has so much more clout than PH they can never get cut off from payment processors.
If someone was pointing to behavior of another payment processor it'd maybe be deflection or whataboutism.
Pointing out that the actor listed is applying their standards here unequally and therefore the standard might not be what's publicly said isn't deflection or whataboutism.
The amount the term "whataboutism" is used in an attempt to not have to address an empirical counterargument is getting old.
> If it was about some "religious anti-sex work movement," then the credit card companies wouldn't still process payments for the legal brothels in Nevada. Which they do.
Don't know about brothels, but even in the strip clubs I went to years ago they didn't process cards. Instead you had to go to the corner ATM with ridiculous fees to withdraw some cash.
Right but if we follow this to it's logical end we're at the same place. In my mind any platform that can be used to promote sex work is going to have these issues. Does that mean we just push sex work back into the dangerous fringes of society?
Pornhub monetizing user uploaded content is what caused these issues. A Porn company that employs only legal workers avoids, or at least minimizes, this issue. I think the fundamental problem here is people's demand for free pornography.
It's not an article, it's a hit piece, written by a known agitator not a journalist at a time when the religious anti PH movement is at it's crescendo.
It's an article. It just happens to be an article you disagree with.
written by a known agitator not a journalist
That's why it's in the Editorial section, not the News section. Also, "agitator" is a loaded term that is in the eye of the beholder. Some people might use "activist" or "hero."
at a time when the religious anti PH movement is at it's crescendo.
If you believe this is true, nobody on the planet change your mind. But I will tell you it comes out like hysterical raving.
And I'll tell you that your position is as equally misinformed and comes off that way. Those who have been tracking this issue and digging into the details of it understand it to be religiously motivated.
I won't claim to be "tracking this issue" and "digging into the details of it." If that's your thing, good for you.
As for it being religiously motivated, I don't believe that it is exclusively religious. I think that regular, average people and people with religious convictions can both be against rape videos and child pornography. If you're not, then I suggest you seek mental health counseling.
It's fatigue. That's what you're reading from comments like mine and the one you dismissed and judged so easily without informing yourself.
I've been "tracking this issue" and "digging into the details of it" because I'm a pornhub performer who has had payment issues since earlier this year when this campaign kicked off out of nowhere. My partner and I went through Pornhub's verification process (for which we uploaded current government issued IDs and signed forms, and were initially rejected and had to appeal). My partner and I have millions of video views in the last year, and yet despite the fun and monetary benefit of it all, I happen to view myself as a good person who is conscious of how my actions can impact others negatively, often unwittingly. So I've naturally wondered whether I should ethically be involved with Pornhub at all.
So apologies for my snark, but this campaign is not rational, and me and others like me are fatigued at those jumping to all sorts of non-sequitur conclusions based on fearmongering which is in turn based on shoddy (and at times obviously manipulated) statistics. Even IF pornhub had a verification issue (which will never be perfect), it is not AT ALL clear who has responsibility in this new age of information sharing, how morality should be controlled (god I hope it's obvious it shouldn't be controlled by finance execs), etc. Who is financing the campaign against Pornhub?
Dig into this campaign and it's obvious it's not motivated by sound understanding and reason and has its roots in religiously affiliated action groups.
It's important to remember that official Opinion pieces are not fact checked, and don't even have the semblance of being fact-based. And this particular opinion writer is well known for being really bad at facts. That being said, it is simultaneously possible for:
1. Nicholas Kristof to have a tenuous grasp on reality and to launch unfounded moral panics, and
2. PornHub has a lot of serious issues that should be dealt with.
You know the sayings about broken clocks...
(And for that matter, while I trust The NY Times more than the average newspaper on some topics, like science reporting, it has SERIOUS issues with being driven by political access rather than journalism, doing "both sides" too much, and not being willing to question Trump very much. That and their massive support for pretty much any war, to the point of open lying about stuff. I have cancelled my subscription in the past and will not subscribe again.)
We can’t let the abuse that happens on platforms like pornhub become a partisan issue. It’s grotesque and tortuous to the people who are affected by it. This has zero to do with being sex positive.
From what I've seen, PornHub is one of the worst thing that happened to the porn industry. It is a piracy hub, 90% of it is illegal with regards to copyright, the rest is fueled by predatory business practices. If it was mainstream media, it would have been sued to oblivion, or, like YouTube, forced to adopt aggressive anti-piracy measures.
And, maybe there is a little bit of child porn on PornHub, it is bound to happen since users can upload anything. I could probably upload child porn on YouTube if I wanted to, that would be short lived and it would get me into trouble but I can probably get a few hundred views before it gets caught. But the thing is, I never stumbled upon it. In fact, I pretty much only get illegally uploaded content from legitimate studios or "PornHub originals".
That anti-sex work groups attack PornHub is ironic. It would be like being against the record industry and attacking The Pirate Bay.
They have hundreds of thousands of sex workers uploading and making ad revenue, and selling content, which they now won't be able to. They also announced a few days ago that uploads would only be for people in their model program and partners, so this is a huge blow to those sex workers.
It also has a dark history -- it basically managed to dominate by initially causing pornography publishers/producers to go under due to its rampant and unchecked hosting of pirated content, and then, in the ultimate ironic twist, it would turn around and cheaply acquire them: https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/mindgeek-porn-monopoly-...
They do as much as any UGC platform (auto scanning with photoDNA, reviewing, flags etc) and just committed to doing even more like forcing users to give ID to upload https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002934613
This was a long campaign by anti-sex work campaigners.
Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram:
I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly.https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973
They were using photoDNA and Youtube CSAI Match before the article. This is the same as what Reddit uses. I see it mentioned here back in March https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN21D3E9
Users who desire to upload content should be forced to provide ID to comply with US law as it relates to age verification of adult talent (2257 Regulation) [1].
Pornhub does verify its uploaders, requiring IDs for performers and affidavits of consent for all involved. Obviously some bad actors slip through. But far less than these pearl clutchers would have you believe.
Hm, then your experience was different from mine. When did you get approved as a model? Because I certainly did have to show IDs back in... January I think it was. And my partner and I were initially rejected, then we had to appeal. For us at least there definitely was a process.
> Users who desire to upload content should be forced to provide ID to comply with US law as it relates to age verification of adult talent (2257 Regulation)
2257 requirements even on primary producers have been struck down on First Amendment grounds for material containing a wide class of performers; Free Speech Coalition vs. Attorney General of the United States (3d Cir. 2020.) And, serious Constitutional issues have been raised about the application of 2257 to “secondary producers” like individual users.
And, even under 2257, covered “secondary producers” aren’t required to provide their ID, they are required to have specific information about the maintenance of records related to the perfomers age affixed to the content.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable stance for more physical businesses, e.g. shipping products.
Really though, how does it work for a business like this? How do you not serve a specific country on the internet? I'm not aware of any technical solution to this - geoip databases simply aren't accurate.
For businesses where most customers pay, perhaps you can gate the site and verify payment details but that plainly doesn't work for the business model we're discussing as most people surely don't pay anything by design? This isn't Netflix?
FTA, the amount of hires they have to weed out visually intensive and traumatic material was listed at 80 worldwide. The article compares it to Facebook's hires for similar weeding out and there was a couple of orders of magnitude difference. I recommend reading the article - it was sobering how bad it is and how it continues to traumatize its victims.
If FB is unaware of the illegal sedition they have plausible deniability.
In this case, MasterCard no longer has plausible deniability. This increases their liability.
Imagine someone at a liquor store sells beer to someone. Then, they learn the ID is fake and the person is lying about their age. Once they know someone is doing something illegal they can be held liable if they continue to sell the person beer.
Note, I'm not getting into right an wrong here. I'm getting into legal liabilities. Large companies like MasterCard are conservative (legally speaking) in how they handle this stuff.
> What happens when your article is accepted? First, you’ll get a contract giving us the right to publish it and laying out some of your responsibilities. The most important ones have to do with originality and truthfulness. You can’t plagiarize yourself, or someone else, and we won’t run something that has appeared in another publication, either print or digital. We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise: Did you invest in a company that you praise in passing? Did you once work with a public official you mention in flattering or critical terms? Could you or an organization or company you represent benefit from the stance you take in an Op-Ed? We need to know. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.
It's not "anti-sex work" to want to stop people from being abused. Are they targeting onlyfans too? No. Just these exploitative sites that enable bad behavior.
Not to be cynical, but they're probably working their way down the list. CESTA/FOSTA was also ostensibly about stopping people from being abused and has instead harmed sex workers[1].
US VISA also does not process porn or sex-work related charges, but VISA international does. Hence things like CC bill (source: I tried to become a cc provider for sex workers and porn sites, and found out it is a trainwreck). I'm not defending PornHub at all, I'm pointing out religious conservatives still have significant power when there is such a credit-card monopoly.
There is a subtle element here... US lawmakers have control over what is legal and illegal. US VISA won't process activities that are illegal in the particular country. It's not that religious conservatives have power over the credit card companies.
I also hope you're not saying that the US should allow child sexual assault which is the issue in this case.
Nothing to do with legality: as I said, christian values at high levels. I mean, contraception, and gay and interracial marriage are legal, but Christians in the US still fight it tooth and nail, like: refusing to hand out marriage certificates, or refusing to fund the pill but fund viagra, or closing down health clinics for women. I mean this can't be your first rodeo, right?
I think that's mixing issues. On the one side, we have a beautiful thing memorializing the most basic, and instinctually pleasant of human activities (sex between adults).
On the other side, we have something so unequivocally and fundamentally immoral that many countries place it on the same level as murder, and even typical murderers draw their own moral line against it.
The two can't be spoken with in the same sentence.
If PornHub is complicit in child pornography, every single executive involved should go to prison. If MasterCard has evidence, or suspicion that PornHub is complicit then they must turn such evidence over to the authorities immediately, and have a moral (not legal) duty to ensure that all the PornHub executives they dealt with are prosecuted. This is a poison barrel issue from which no one must escape.
However, the way MasterCard is acting is as if they merely want to break ties with a high-fraud risk client, whose risk profile may have changed during the COVID crisis. It reeks of a company protecting profit margins, and not of a company hurriedly running away from a tarpit of felonies and turpitude.
I may be wrong, and PornHub will be destroyed within 2021 like BackPage was, but right now I doubt it. VISA was their primary payment processor, and they only cut off access after MasterCard made public allegations. VISA has their own evaluations team, and I know from experience they're quite strict. The question is how could they not catch this before MasterCard?
If it was about some "religious anti-sex work movement," then the credit card companies wouldn't still process payments for the legal brothels in Nevada. Which they do.