Talked with friends occasionally transporting packages in Central Europe for Amazon. In case they want to appeal some vague "fees" deducted from bank transfer, they have to call Amazon's office in Dublin and they're put on hold until they give up. Oh, and English only of course.
i got a clipboard, a checklist, and a navy blue shirt with pencils in the side pocket. we can make this inquiry happen. Also we can steal their servers all with the same outfit.
It says that each individual Meta employee had to personally appeal to have her specific Instagram account unblocked. Seems like it would be trivial for someone at Meta to verify. If she's not lying, she just completely threw those Meta employees under the bus (if they're still working there).
I looked her up, she isn't my type. But if she's making it in this line of work, there obviously must be men who lust for her. Much uglier prostitutes than her don't have trouble finding interested men.
I give this less than a year before we get a scandal where a few Meta employees start banning accounts of sex workers and extort them in order to get their account back.
If sex worn was “mainstreamed” more women would feel pressured to do it, and they don’t want that pressure. It’s like OSHA and minimum wage laws. It puts a floor on what workers in a market economy are expected to do. To avoid a race to the bottom, it’s not enough to simply avoid working in a dangerous workplace yourself (or working below minimum wage or doing sex work), you have to make it illegal for everyone.
Women already feel pressure to perform sexual favors in exchange for things. That is a problem with society and culture, quite separate from what we're talking about here.
All adult women want is the empowerment to make decisions for their own bodies. It is theirs, after all.
> Women already feel pressure to perform sexual favors in exchange for things. That is a problem with society and culture, quite separate from what we're talking about here.
No, it's completely intertwined. Because these pressures exist in numerous contexts, we've developed both social norms and laws to limit the race to the bottom, overwhelmingly with the support of the women affected by those pressures.
> All adult women want is the empowerment to make decisions for their own bodies. It is theirs, after all.
Which women? More women identify as "conservative" than "liberal"--and even among the latter, legalizing sex work is not a majority (and possibly not even mainstream) position.
My mom thinks sex work is very bad for society. It's probably one of the things my mom, all my aunts, and my wife's mom and aunts agree with, despite being from different countries and otherwise having quite different political views. Opposition to sex work is something that women tend to get the most riled up about, because ultimately its mothers and daughters that suffer from the consequences of sex work.
> Which women? More women identify as "conservative" than "liberal"
Not even close to reality. More women identify as liberal than as conservative, more are registered Democrats than Republicans, and even within the Republican party women skew moderate rather than conservative. Among nonvoters the gender breakdown on various issues that can be easily identified as liberal or conservative shows that women favor policies that are generally considered liberal.
More women identify as conservative than liberal: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead..., with the plurality identifying as moderate. People think sex work should be “mainstreamed” (as stated by OP) would almost certainly identify as liberal; and I’d be surprised if even a majority of self-described liberals would support that position.
Women tend to be less libertarian than men, and sometimes that breaks towards more liberal attitudes (they are more likely to favor generous social programs), and sometimes that breaks towards more conservative attitudes (they are more likely to oppose legalized prostitution and pornography).
As of 2016, attitudes were closely divided on legalizing sex work overall (40% in favor, 43% against). But the gender breakdown was striking: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me.... Men supported legalization 51-36, while women opposed it 30-50.
Being a Democrat, of course, isn't dispositive of anything. My mom is a democrat, because she likes Obamacare and Anthony Fauci. But she's as socially conservative as any republican. (Like Black people: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu...)
Social libertarianism is championed mainly by the white college educated wing of the Democratic Party. But the party is ideologically diverse. For example, under 60% of Democrats say that “changing gender roles” has “made it easier for women to lead satisfying lives”: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/10/18/wide-pa.... For Democrats without a college degree, it's under 50%.
Sorry for the lengthy rant, but people projecting their views onto "women" (or another popular one these days, "people of color") has become a pet peeve of mine. When you say stuff like what "adult women want is the empowerment to make decisions for their own bodies" you’re making a libertarian argument, and statistically that’s going to be most appealing to white men. (That doesn’t make it wrong, but if you’re going to bring identity into it you don’t get to play fast and loose with what arguments different groups tend to find more compelling.)
Bullshit, women know they get things in exchange for some play or because of their looks. Not every women of course does this, but its foolish to ignore the group that very well knows this and uses this to their advance. Its not the womans fault though, its the man who falls for this.
Similarily theres men who do the same thing using either their looks or wealth as a chip.
We are human, but we are also bunch of monkeys in the end.
If a market free from regulation improves jobs, I would love to hear how that idea is reconciled with the existence of pimps. A pimp is the abusive free market solution to a regulated sex work market.
> And please, your citation should not just justify your socially conservative talking point, but also falsify the converse perspective, which is that laws against sex work marginalize those who perform it, opening them up to exploitation from criminals and persecution from law enforcement.
Laws against sex work do marginalize the people who perform it. It's a trade off. Liberals tend to place a strong emphasis on that harm to the minority, and devalue the harm to the majority from breaking down the taboo. Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to focus more on the benefit to the majority of the norms, and devalue the harm to sex workers.
> I'd also like to understand what you're saying about minimum wage laws.
> That's magical conservative thinking, the belief that an unregulated marketplace creates a positive sum game and not an exploitative economy. The belief that removing protection for labour creates better jobs for everyone, and not more exploitation of employees. The belief that removing regulations around commerce will get rid of fraud, not incentivize it.
I'm just applying the same arguments that you're applying about minimum wage laws to sex work. In both cases, the laws make it illegal to do certain kinds of work--it limits individual freedom because some people may be willing to do that work--in order to prevent a race to the bottom and exploitation of the population as a whole.
What you're describing as "magical conservative thinking" is, more accurately, "magical libertarian thinking." And liberals are quite often inclined to engage in such magical libertarian thinking--the idea that maximizing individual freedom maximizes social welfare--just in different contexts.
Can someone please make a memo somewhere that "magical thinking" is not an argument it's just a new thing people say to devalue someone's argument. I don't care what side people are on this phrase is WAAAAY overused.
> A taboo is a prohibition based in a cultural sensibility that perceives it as excessively repulsive, sacred, or allowed only by certain persons. Taboos are not about "harm," they're about enforcing so-called "cultural norms."
Cultural norms are typically an adaptation to the realities of human life. They may become outmoded in certain circumstances, but they're rarely completely gratuitous.
> Being homophobic is about taboos.
Taboos against homosexuality exist because until recently, sexual reproduction was non-optional. My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh where 1 out of 4 kids died before age 5. If you didn't have kids to help you farm, you'd be dead in your old age and potentially sooner than that. There was no Social Security, and there weren't alternative social roles for people who couldn't contribute to the next generation of the village. (And, of course, surrogacy and other modern medical technology was non-existent.)
Think about it logically: if the taboo was purely gratuitous, like you suggest, why did it arise independently in many different civilizations?
> They were used to justify taboos against interracial marriage, pornography, short skirts, and woman having jobs. They were used to justify paying women less and segregating education. They were used to justify discrimination against men who grew their hair long or wore tattoos.
There is a joke along the lines of "they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown." Sometimes society is wrong; more often, taboos simply become obsolete. For example, if it was 1945 and the backbone of the economy was still people lifting heavy car doors and bolting them into place, you can bet norms around workplace gender equality would look a lot different. It's important to see what taboos may be obsolete, but railing against taboos for the sake of doing so threatens society.
I'll point out that sexual liberalism has hardly been proven right by "history." Virtually every society to embrace it has seen birth rates collapse. The future of the world now belongs to Muslims and Africans, who for the most part still strongly embrace traditional sexual taboos.
> You can rant all you like about heterosexuals being "harmed" by homosexuals loving each other
rayiner hasn't said anything like that. You're putting invented words into his mouth, which is not just despicable, but also a clear violation of the site's rules (which you repeatedly do: see your "talking points" comment above where you basically deny him any ability to think by himself).
You’re misreading the comment and going off on a tangent. OP was giving another example of the behavior to illustrate a point, its very clear they are not implying that the person they are responding to has made that specific claim.
For the same reason workers do sub-minimum wage jobs or work in unsafe conditions: because of economic duress. Additionally, keeping it illegal helps society as a whole prevent vulnerable people from being coerced or manipulated into such work.
People have these libertarian notions of rational people making enlightened decisions to do sex work, but for the most part the women (and men) ensnared into such work have various vulnerabilities that predators in the industry manipulate. They are typically young (remember, humans don't have fully developed rational faculties until they're 25: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...). They may have been abused, etc. Society needs to be able to protect vulnerable people, sometimes from their own decisions.
The economic duress creates the pressure, and legalizing/decriminalizing sex work doesn't change the economic duress. An expanded social safety net would decrease the economic duress. Legalizing sex work just makes the option to deal with that economic duress safer.
Decriminalization might increase the number of people coerced and manipulated into such work. But criminalization definitely doesn't prevent people from being coerced or manipulated into sex work, and it makes it more dangerous for the ones who are.
Pros
You'd make it safer for sex workers, both voluntary and coerced ones.
You'd probably reduce rates of sexual assaults/abuse outside of sex work.
Sex workers would be more easily able to escape sex work because they won't have prostitutions charges on their record keeping them from getting a job.
Cons
Maybe more people would be coerced or manipulated into it.
Andrea Dworkin, a prominent feminist, wrote poignantly about her experiences with being coerced into sex work starting at age 15 by a 21 year old boyfriend: https://newrepublic.com/article/122457/modern-magdalenes. That’s the kind of coercion you see over and over again in the sex industry. For the most part, it’s not highly educated women making empowered decisions, but women who are coerced, or do it out of financial duress, or do it impulsively and regret commoditizing themselves.
That's a heart breaking story, but there are plenty of ex sex workers, some of which were in even more coerced situations (not emotional pressure from a boyfriend but threats of physical violence from a gang) who prefer decriminalization because it would have made it safer for them and would have allowed them an easier exit from sex work.
Maybe women are more against decriminalization because they've dealt with sexual coercion. But given that much more women think it's morally wrong to be a sex worker or to buy sex work (which doesn't have to do with coercion) I suspect that has little do with the difference. Instead i think the majority of the difference is that women think prostitution is wrong even when entered into by two willing and consenting parties, and this is why they're against decriminalization/legalization.
What’s special about money that requires the government to ban consensual sex between two adults when moneys exchanged? I know the real reason is just plain Christian morality. But ignoring that shit, there is nothing inherently wrong or harmful about two adults having sex.
What about the risk of STDs to a man who goes down to the local brothel for his unknowing faithful wife?
What if a man contracts HIV/AIDS and gives it to his wife?
What if a woman who already has children with one man gets pregnant from a man she’s not married to, or a man gets another woman pregnant?
Are these purely Christian morality or do they hint at very real underlying biological reasons total sexual freedom might be problematic to a society? These sorts of things do happen.
> what if a woman who already has children with one man gets pregnant from a man she’s not married to Who cares? There's no law against this.
> his unknowing faithful > a man gets another woman pregnant
Your hypotheticals talk about people who are dishonest. The problem is inappropriate activity outside of a monogamous relationship. If one partner doesn't discuss their behavior with their other partner, the problem wasn't the sex worker, it is that they are not being honest about their activities. Your examples are moot anyway because regulated sex workers are tested every day, and are required to use condoms to protect against HIV. The risk of STD or pregnancy with a regulated sex worker are miniscule. It's far more risky for the husband to go to a bar and pick up someone randomly.
> Are these purely Christian morality
> total sexual freedom might be problematic to a society
At least for now, we have sexual freedom in many jurisdictions all over the world, and society seems to be chugging along. Sexual activity isn't bringing the world to it's knees. (hee hee) The concept might be problematic to your vision of what society should look like, but the rest of us are enjoying life and letting others live their life choices.
> > what if a woman who already has children with one man gets pregnant from a man she’s not married to
> Who cares? There's no law against this.
There are, in fact laws against extramarital (and, for that matter, premarital) sex, though in the US those that remain in the books are unenforceable (though the line of Constitutional law making it so is under massive assault at the moment, so maybe not for long.)
> I know the real reason is just plain Christian morality.
Which is why prostitution is embraced in the Muslim world, Asia, etc? Or maybe these completely different groups of people tend to overwhelmingly agree on taboos against sex work because it reflects something fundamental about human psychology?
Prostitution is legal in many places in Asia. Try not to paint a gigantic content with a single brushstroke.
As for the "Muslim world", I wouldn't be so sure that there's anything behind the sexual taboos held except garden variety discrimination. Monogamy is a sacred duty for women, but men are allowed to take up to 4 wives by Islamic law. Why can't women have 4 husbands?
Read Quran, Verse IV: 3. The best part is that if you can't be nice to your wives, just marry 4 slaves instead! That's a pretty serious endorsement that the roots of "taboos against sex work" are really just part and parcel of how men in ancient times maintained control over women.
Men get 4 wives, women get but one husband. Not only is it unfair, it's purely about keeping control over women. Or 4 women, for that matter.
It isn’t “mainstreamed” (see original comment in this thread) anywhere. Even in countries where it’s technically legal—like Bangladesh, where I’m from—the associated business activity is still illegal, and there are strong social taboos against sex work.
Sometimes societal evolution takes a wrong turn and embraces ideas that are maladaptive. For example, in the Netherlands, the Muslim immigrants who are demographically ascendant for the most part embrace these “1950s” ideas, and are outcompeting the Dutch folks who have embraced sexual liberalism.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand. Really, what an incredibly weak argument.
The Netherlands has chosen to legalize prostitution, for good reasons which have proven in practice that the argument that you are making is invalid. That immigrants (the bulk of which joined since that legalization) are demographically ascendant and embrace those same ideas that you espouse is utterly irrelevant. The point is: there is ample evidence that the theory you push is wrong.
Cultures that decouple sex from procreative relationships are in decline. The literal commoditization of it through legalized prostitution is a merely a specific manifestation of a more general cultural attitude.
> Cultures that decouple sex from procreative relationships are in decline.
Ok, so now we're in 1890 or so. Really, this is beyond absurd.
> The literal commoditization of it through legalized prostitution is a merely a specific manifestation of a more general cultural attitude.
No, it means that you recognize that realistically prostitution is going to happen anyway, regardless of what you think or feel about it, so you try to make it as safe for the sex workers as you can and legalization is a very important step in that.
> Yes you do, because otherwise the sex worker reporting the extortion to the police will also be admitting to a crime. So it won't happen.
No you don't, you just need to make buying sex and pimping illegal, you can do that without punishing the victims, what you call "sex workers" is a euphemism for sex trafficked women.
The overwhelming majority of prostitutes are sex trafficked women and children who were never given the choice. Legalizing prostitution leads to more trafficking.
That doesn't say anything about what percentage of sex workers were sex trafficked. The only stat it gives are what percentage of sex workers were sexually abused prior to entry.
The best estimate I've seen for percentage of active sex workers that are currently being trafficked was between 3 and 4 %.
> what you call "sex workers" is a euphemism for sex trafficked women.
How involved are you in combatting sex trafficking? I've been involved in this to varying degrees for a few years now, and this is would be new information to me.
Sex trafficking and sex work is a Venn diagram with overlap, certainly, but they are definitely not the same. Many women do sex work as an independent decision, choosing it over other choices that they are presented with, and they find fulfillment in it.
Trafficked people are, at best, highly vulnerable individuals who feel they don't have any alternatives and are brainwashed by people close to them. More often than that, they are simply abducted and traded as property. Sex trafficking is a recognized form of slavery. Very different from independent sex workers.
EDIT:
The reason it's important to get this distinction right is because misinformation around it dilutes the seriousness of actual human trafficking. There are people in slavery who need intervention from police and governments. Not middle-class women in Orange County who do private sessions in the basement of the home they own.
This account is tied to my real identity. I'm not afraid of trying to openly discuss the nuances of these very complicated and painful topics because together through rational discourse we can make the world a better place.
From an anonymous "throwaway" account, you completely disregard what I'm saying, you trivialize my passion in this topic, and you go so far as directly accusing me of normalizing sex trafficking.
> I think it's worth making the distinction between highly coerced women and children vs. "let's get our kink on" women who make a buck on the side
Ya think?
But there's always one person who twists the narrative, claiming to have the absolute moral high ground.
People willing to actually think about the subject are baited into giving them the benefit of the doubt, thinking they must just be ignorant, because after all, human trafficking is horrifying.
But it's just another blood libel: Accuse your opponents of supporting the most heinous thing you can imagine, so that you can justify annihilating them.
In this case, the position truly being supported is that women cannot sell sex.
Vehemently, violently rearranging the rhetorical space to equate selling sex with sexual slavery is just a method of magically transforming you into an evil that must be destroyed. And you will go along with it willingly, looking ever more pathetic as you try to argue that, in fact, you're on the side of the good--the bloodthirsty opponent becomes ever more and more convinced that you are completely evil.
And not only evil, but disgustingly, twistedly evil. It's almost sad, how evil you are. Because you're so confused. You've been so confused by evil that you think you're good. At that point, it becomes an act of mercy to annihilate you.
Think this is over the top? I don't. I don't think we should engage at all with these conversations. Downvoting is good. Flagging is better.
Conservative voters are not actually convinced that the "ya think" case is false. They genuinely believe that the party in charge of the government right now is trying to make sex with their children a thing. I don't really blame them.
The problem is that “legitimate” prostitution provides cover and legitimacy for sex trafficking. I personally favor a combination of the Nordic model (I.e. don’t prosecute prostitutes themselves) and prosecutorial discretion; middle class Orange County basement whores aren’t bothering anyone as long as they’re discreet about it.
Nor are the differences as clear as you make them out to be. Sure, there are clear cut cases of human trafficking, but how do you know that your Orange County basement whore isn’t caught up in an abusive relationship with some indolent man who uses her as his livelihood? More to the point, how does the john know? The whole narrative that women freely choose sex work and find it fulfilling may be true in some cases, but there’s no easy way to tell which cases those are, and the human consequences of guessing wrong are awful.
I think being a sex worker is probably more work than being a software developer at a FAANG. Certainly higher risk. Absolutely a real job. Better than, say, pharmaceutical rep.
Jobs are required by law to be constructive to a personality and a family life? Is that some new Supreme Court decision or something?
A job is a paid position. That’s the definition. You don’t get to make up your own to suit your own twisted view of reality.
Hey, being a police officer often tears families apart, with police having far higher rates of divorce. That’s not constructive to family life. Is policing a real job?
BTW: For example in Switzerland it is legal, you even have (in theory) to pay taxes. But still the problems are the same (human trafficking etc), nothing changed, and if you go to the police you have accidents like floating dead in a river a week later. Legalize it but make nothing to take the mafia away from it brings nothing, in fact it gives them a legal way to make money.
Maybe it should be a state owned business only and not a private thing, sounds crazy but if you work for the state not even the mafia would dare to touch you, you have stable employment, insurance and medical services.
Yes, but liquor need's no protection ;) But i know what you mean, i really don't have a solution just some ideas, i just know that "just" legalize it did not change the life's (or just very few of them) to the better.
Doesn’t sound like she actually stalked anyone. She’s using the term colloquially to mean “I spent time browsing a stranger’s social media profile”, which is a common usage.
The sex work you see on OnlyFans is already legal, the problem isn't legality it's the attitudes of social media companies, platforms, and payment processors.
This is also why "Big Tech" has to be mainstreamed and laws created to protect user accounts and provide a streamlined, regulated way to remove | ban | un-ban | reinstate accounts.
We should not be letting "our systems" in Big Tech do their thing. Specially when it comes to a person's accounts
I would hope people feel empowered to go to the authorities or media, but all too often sex workers are heavily discriminated against. Sometimes going to the police can get them in trouble, going to the media may bring unnecessary attention to them and their family.
I agree with the other comment about how we need legislation to ensure proper channels on how to get account access back or services. Far too often if you dare question say Google or Facebook your account may be banned for life with little retribution on your end.
That's why these platforms need to be broken up or follow standards that could allow people to take their social graphs/data and go to other competitors.
If you read what actually happened you can see that all proper internal procedures were followed. Corruption heavily implies that something that exists for other people is (temporarily) removed, or some requirement is waived as a result of compensation. That is not what happened.
If internal procedures allow Meta employees to be paid (in cash or favors of any kind) to be internal champions for repeatedly resubmitting bans to the Integrity Team roulette appeals process, “proper” is the opposite of the word I would use to describe the practice.
That’s how “friends and family” policies work, though: the company gives you perks to bestow upon your friends, so that they can trade their relationship with you for a benefit.
She used sexual favors to get an employee to unban the account that shouldn’t have been banned in the first place. I doubt those are proper procedures as defined by Meta’s guidelines.
That depends on whether the Meta employees were wise to the true nature of their relationship with this woman. Did she tell them what she wanted before she had sex with them? The article doesn't make this clear, but I suspect she didn't.
"Demand generation". If you're able to whip the masses into a frenzy, the sky is the limit.
Under the hood, our human propensity toward "storytelling" and social cohesion is both a blessing and our bane. People collectively go for convenient (but leaky) abstractions, leaders, influencers, fads.
AKA the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
The cesspool is not specifically American. As long as the music plays, economy's touted "fundamentals" pretty much come down to ape psychology. The music just plays louder is some places than others, at the moment.
Thanks for clarifying. I was actually thinking the founder of OnlyFans and admittedly have a really bad tendency about 25% of the time to only read headlines.
Being a "creator" or "influencer" has pervaded our cultural ethos so deeply, you'd be in the minority for assuming that it's the creator of Onlyfans or that all of Instagram had to be reinstated.
These are popular consumer brands, and colloquialism would prefer their "insta" or "instagram", rather than "instagram profile".
They wouldn't have this issue if they allowed (but flagged for children, advertisers, people who don't opt in) NSFW content in the first place. It's allowed on Twitter, so why not on Instagram?
Facebook makes over 20x as much money as Twitter, and it's not just on volume; they are vastly better at monetizing each of their ad slots.
It's perfectly OK to hate Facebook as a platform or a concept, but their ad revenue team is very good their jobs, and I would be very hesitant to question their decision-making on what does and doesn't attract advertisers.
If its the corporate policy, that's fine, no? Its fine to ban or un-ban people. If corporate policy demands that infractions can be revoked by sex, and people agree to do it, I don't see the problem.
This is not a legal issue. Its not a freedom of speech issue, which in any case can also bypassed by corporate policy.
It’s a social engineering attack in a way. I would not blame the OnlyFans creator but I would encourage silently letting the employee who did this go with severance pay.
Imo long-term, companies should be legislated into having fair ban appeals, and enforced in transparency of why accounts are banned after they are a certain size.
Then I would happily start debating the removal of these employee specialty services which allow this. I say this as someone who has used this power before for legitimate reasons.
There should be official channels to do this with companies as large as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube etc.
Community guidelines are fine - they are all you need.
Freedom of speech can be ignored - if the community guidelines say so. Similarly, if the guidelines are that if you 'offer up' you can be reinstated, and you are fine to do that, that's fine too?
We're in the world of corporate policy now. Laws have nothing to do with! These are private corporations, and their policies determine what's right or wrong on their platforms.
Maybe this tactic will help me get my youtube account back. Any Googlers interested in a 45 year old graying software developer with a dad bod?
But seriously, I wrote a post about my youtube account getting banned and without telling me what caused it just shut down my request for review. Sounds like in all of these companies you can either have a false positive AI flag you, someone decide they dont like you online and report you for something that isnt necessarily true/the case, and then you have some tech workers who either dont care enough to really fix problems or enjoying their fiefdoms and the power they wield at strangers.
YouTube loses more money paying someone to review your case than what they stand to make if you come back. Their insurance policy for this is the guarantee that any actually large creator getting banned will generate enough PR buzz for a fully-fledged Googler to be notified and raise an internal issue about it.
Oh yeah, I remember Jordan Peterson got banned, then suddenly Joe Rogan was making a fuss on Twitter about it. Next day, boom everything back to normal.
I would pay to have a human review my case and actually do something about it. When my wife lost access to her Instagram through a 2FA cockup, I paid over $100 and about $500 of my time to get the original phone number back through a friend. It was all for naught in the end. I used to defend Google around here back in the day when they were just ambiguously evil. Now I really hate Google and Meta. They both do these kinds of things with accounts, with apps, with "fact" policing, etc. I hope the government fucks them up.
They need to be taken to court, and this practice has to be made illegal. A service should have a valid reason for banning someone, otherwise we will end up with a group of people that are perpetually discriminated and punished by AI for no reason.
Blocking your Facebook account can lead to losing access to support groups and local marketplaces that may be important to people in need, and it is absolutely disgusting that they are allowed to kick people out for no reason.
I see you have your priorities sorted out. It has to be made illegal in the sense that its illegality should be recognized by a court, because it is plain discrimination.
> It has to be made illegal in the sense that its illegality should be recognized by a court, because it is plain discrimination.
In the US, at least, “plain discrimination” by private parties is generally legal, but for regulated utilities (which Facebook is not) and fairly narrow sets of specifically prohibited bases of discrimination by public accommodations.
If you want a general rule applying something like the rational basis test used as the minimum standard applicable to public discrimination to private commercial discrimination, that's
a fairly radical change to the law.
If you mean “Facebook is the kind of thing that the government should regulate as a utility”, well, that's fine, but that's something that requires at least regulatory, if not legislative, action to make happen and set the regulatory rules (including any applicable anti-discrimination rules) for.
So, again, the applicable rules need to be created elsewhere in government before Facebook is taken to court for allegedly violating them.
Electricity, water, natural gas, internet, and district heating are utilities. Facebook isn’t. There are no transmission lines or pipes running to each Facebook user directly from Facebook, there’s no physical reason that other social networks can’t exist.
It’s not a utility just because several billion people use it.
It certainly doesn't operate as a utility, but rather, a publisher that relies heavily on editing. And you know what? That's probably fine. BUT...they shouldn't get section 230 protections, which are for common carriers. They can have their cake, XOR they can eat it.
> BUT...they shouldn't get section 230 protections, which are for common carriers.
No, they are expressly for what would be, under the law without Section 230, publishers.
The entire purpose of Section 230 is to allow platforms (and users!) to freely moderate content on based on their own views of what is appropriate without incurring liability as a publisher as would otherwise accrue to those exercise such control of distribution.
(Section 230 protections wouldn't be needed for common carriers, who would, as such, be forbidden from exercising the kind of editorial control which would, without a safe harbor, produce the kind of liability from which Section 230 provides a safe harbor.)
> It’s not a utility just because several billion people use it.
Yeah but you can also make the same argument for education: education is not a utility because several billion people like to be educated.
Facebook connects people and businesses, groups. It’s basically the same as if someone decided to ban you from using SMS or snail mail or libraries at this point.
Forum for local communities. Be it a local shop owner keeping in touch with their customers or a group of people from the same multi apartment building just having a place to be organised.
That being said I log into Facebook once every 6 months approximately. It was replaced by WhatsApp and Instagram for me, however my point still stands as much for those platforms as it is for Facebook.
There isn't always a good alternative for a service that arbitrarily denied you access. Facebook Marketplace has replaced classifieds in many places, and being denied access to the service can negatively impact people's lives.
Though I think that private companies can choose who they do business with, I also think that these companies are an exception.
They are so huge they should probably be classified as a public utility of sorts. This is a tough pill to swallow for this site since it could possibly derail the tech gravy train.
Rather than regulate the company it feels like the more common solution is to force companies to split up any vertical integrations in order to reduce the barrier to compete with them.
Private companies SHOULD be able to choose who they do business with. They should also be subject to the rules everyone else is. As soon as they start getting preferential treatment through regulation, they should absolutely expect restrictions upon those rights as the cost of that preferential treatment. And of course, Section 230 provisions are absolutely preferential treatment.
their services are subsidized by other parts of the business / venture capital in a way that make normal market economics of "go to the competitor" not possible.
This is a problem with most of mega tech right now. Nobody can spin up a fair competitor to Youtube because Google can throw money from other parts of the business to keep it dominant. How are you supposed to compete fairly with Amazon when they can reinforce with AWS money?
I believe this should be the case for most web moderation, it should be mildly regulated and things like shadow banning banned (or at least stated that it's a feature somewhere). I'm not a regulation guy I prefer freedom, but if you regulate me I regulate you, for obvious reasons.
No, those are private web properties, they are free to provide or not provide you services as they wish (with the only exception that they cannot target protected categories).
I might not like it, but they are in their right. I can always create my own web property.
By that unjust actions they actually show the value in de-centralizing WWW back to good old days.
You do realize that people's lives are being impacted, right? Running services of this size comes with responsibilities, and not just to your shareholders, but to society. You can't drive competitors out of business, then restrict access to services that have become essential.
You shouldn't argue that a farmer who was kicked out from Facebook for absolutely no reason should no longer have the right to access a wider variety of local offers for farm equipment on Facebook Marketplace, or have a better chance to sell their produce.
And you shouldn't argue that people are destined for this fate for the rest of their lives because of a primitive algorithm put in place by people who have no morals.
They are not in their right. They are abusing their position, and they are harming people.
Over 5 million people can’t vote in the US because of a felony conviction. How many of them are innocent, or should have been convicted of a lesser crime, or just have done their time and should be equal again under the law? But they don’t get to vote. We shouldn’t apply a higher standard to Facebook regarding shopping than we do to our government when it comes to the vote.
Same thing happened to me on my last HN comment (you probably can't see it, it's "dead"). As far as I can tell, I didn't break any rules or say anything controversial. Who do I have to sleep with to get this sorted out?
I've also had a ban which I can find no way to appeal, I've given up hope at this point. I got banned after submitting a claim for content of mine hosted on a channel I can't access anymore, automated system banned me. Maybe one day I'll meet a googler who has some free time.
basically their policies are so rediculously subjective, that the mood of the reviewer is enough to shut down an entire "business" venture. I think that's the big problem here.
Typically with a store, if you're causing harm, the community can petition for you to lose your license. And all that comes with legal protections for due process.
On youtube or instagram, your entire business which you invested time/money/body into, is entirely hanging by the thread of some employee having a decent day or finding you attractive.
> basically their policies are so rediculously subjective, that the mood of the reviewer is enough to shut down an entire "business" venture. I think that's the big problem here.
There's a near-infinite pool of people willing to sink absurd amounts of time and money and other resources into these social networks.
Pretty much everywhere is aware of the risks.
It seems to be a risk many are more than willing to take.
They sell the dream, and the dream is you can be an influencer. Their mind is reinforced with it, and they are encouraged to try at every single step. So nobody is forcing, but they certainly are luring.
The end goal is a bit different, but this reminds me of how some recruiters find my contact information across a ton of sites to try and contact me about changing jobs (some even find work contact info and contacting me there).
Employee will probably be fired. While there’s nothing wrong with being a sex worker, I have a hard time respecting what this woman has done by throwing the employee under the bus. Seems like the only reason to share this story was to advertise her OF.
All she had to do was say nothing, and Meta probably wouldn’t have found out. But it’s going to be very simple to look at the admin tool logs and see exactly who unbanned her account.
I never said that either. I think the whole situation is screwed up. The company’s internal tools being structured such that a random employee can unban an account without oversight is obviously a bad thing, and it’s an example of corruption.
I’m also blown away at how short-sighted this woman is about the man’s employment, after he did her frankly a big favor in return for sex. Not to mention her account will just get banned again, given she admitted to it on video.
Hopefully she isn't an idiot and has downloaded everything she cared about from facebook.
But the fact is that we're all talking about this, inside tech spheres as well as outside. A literal real-life "who do I have to screw to get my stuff back?" moment.
It means that no matter how little you respect what she has done, she may have just changed the world. Or, we'll forget in five minutes and Metabook will continue to ban people with impunity.
Just my opinion, but someone being willing to lose something they sold their body to win back is reasonably respectable. Certainly they've done the world a big favour, whatever their motivations.
> Not to mention her account will just get banned again, given she admitted to it on video.
Banning her at this point would look pretty vindictive: "You revealed corruption in our organization, so we're banning you." Would make for some pretty bad headlines. They might still do it, but it's not a good PR move.
> I’m also blown away at how short-sighted this woman is about the man’s employment, after he did her frankly a big favor in return for sex.
This is a classic case of corruption, just using sex instead of money. In corruption, both sides are guilty, but i would generally put more blame on the side initiating the corruption.
I think most people would say that the side with the power is the one that is guilty.
Consider, for example, flights to a corrupt country. To get through customs unscathed, every passenger is required to bribe the staff at the airport.
Just because the passenger pulls out their wallet and hands over a bribe at the first sign of friction, does that make the passenger more guilty than those who set up this corrupt system? Those that benefit from the corruption?
It must always be those with power that we hold to account. That's not to say that those who participate in the system should have zero consequences (which, in these examples, is not the case - they've paid something, whether with their wallet or with their flesh) - but until those in power are fully held to account and the systems are changed, you are blaming the victim, even if they did initiate this form of corruption.
> Just because the passenger pulls out their wallet and hands over a bribe at the first sign of friction, does that make the passenger more guilty than those who set up this corrupt system? Those that benefit from the corruption?
If they set up the corrupt system and everyone is expected to pay bribes, then the newly incoming passenger is not really the initiator, in that case the corruption is systemic, and i would put most blame on management to not make steps to eliminate it, but i agree that in this setup the bribees are more responsible than bribers, as they have more experience and information about the corruption in the system.
But let consider a slightly different case - a bureau (say building authority), with many twisted bureaucratic rules and procedures, where any request takes long to proceed and is often denied, but generally not corrupt. People just patiently do the necessary steps and accept it, or shrug off and go away. Then someone does not accept that and instead offers a bribe to get pass their request fast. In such case the initiator is clearly responsible for corruption, while the bureau is just responsible for general bureaucratic inefficiency.
And lets consider third case - driving license exam, and someone who fails it just bribes driving inspector to instead make it pass. In that case it is not even inefficiency, the license should be rejected and the briber just seeks unfair advantage. That is even more clear that initiator is more guilty, although the driving inspector has the power.
So, i would say that there are two kinds of corruptions - first, where briber wants something that should get without bribes, and second, where briber wants some unfair advantage.
Without getting too deep into the intricacies of morality, I'd disagree. (Who am I kidding? We're already deep :D )
Your premise is that acting on the desire of an unfair advantage is the greater immoral act, and the act of accepting the payment for an unfair advantage is less morally bankrupt.
In each of these scenarios, the person being bribed has the power. They have nothing to lose if they reject the bribe.
Yet, if they have nothing to lose when _accepting_ the bribe, that is how corrupt regimes start.
Of course, one could argue that it depends on the corruption. In your case of a building authority, imagine one that always says no regardless of the request. Maybe they let through the odd high-profile project where someone in the project is chummy with the director of the authority. Arguably, this building authority is already corrupt, and merely hiding behind the excuse of bureaucracy. (We don't tend to think about social capital as a form of bribery, but it very much is)
In the case of the driving inspector, they are potentially licensing an individual who will get others killed. Morally speaking, any future deaths are at least partially attributable to the driving inspector.
I suspect part of your position hinges on a malicious intent in the initiator. However, power and responsibility are not separable - and cases where there are possible consequences, morality must be judged in part on the basis of that responsibility.
As I say, we're getting into the weeds - these hypothetical situations are in many ways divorced from the original question, so let's look at that:
- A person is kicked off an online communications platform. Nobody is quite sure why, but there are some pretty likely conclusions.
- The platform is known for bending the rules for high-profile accounts
- The person can prove that they are not breaking any consistently-applied rules (assuming valid interpretation of vague rules should be judged on whether their peers are allowed to post similar - and in this case, she pointed out that her content is well within moral norms for the platform)
- The platform offers no accessible recourse (except for those with social capital) and not just bureaucracy, but hidden bureaucracy dependant on the whims of a hidden adjudicator who has nothing to lose for interpreting the rules harshly.
- Very limited harms if accepted, potential loss of revenue, personal content, position in a (digital) society, freedom of expression etc if rejected.
In this case, I'd say the briber has, at the point their account was terminated, already lost a lot to the corruption of the platform, and yet the bribe was still over-paid. Saying that theirs was the more immoral act seems intensely unfair, when they did the only thing they felt they could to re-gain justice.
The meta employees didn't necessarily understand the transactional nature of their relationship with this woman. It might be the case they thought there was a genuine connection and the request for an unban only came after rapport was established.
Two possible ways this might have gone down:
Employee is cold-contacted with an upfront offer: "Let's meet up, I'll have sex with you, and exchange you can help me get my account unbanned"
..or..
Employee is cold-contacted with something like: "You seem like a cool guy, let's meet up" Then a few days later they get hit with "Btw now that we've hit it off, can you help get me unbanned?"
It is mindboggling to me that HN will argue all day about the merits of a peer reviewed scientific paper and then accept ad nauseum that this PERFECTLY constructed viral story told on a podcast represents TRUTH
EDIT - Downvoted? Do others accept this is true? Why?
Yeah, it's strange. This was a person riffing on a podcast, it's not even like there was some journalism involved. Just an interesting anecdote that may or may not be true.
There is an embedded Twitter video with the exact clip where the OF creator herself tells the story, it's not just a constructed headline. But I'll agree that the HN headline leaves out the word "says" which changes it a bit. We can't know for sure whether she's telling the truth about this.
They edited their comment to remove the word "headline" after I commented, changing the direction of their comment from the article reporting it to the video content.
I'm not sure that the meta employees thought of it as a quid pro quo when they hooked up with her. It isn't like Facebook could ban employees from sleeping with all Facebook users. So I suspect the actual fire-able offense was when they intervened on her behalf as a favor.
If they have a family and friends request to get things reviewed (as others have alluded too) but that person cant necessarily unban them himself. Is is inappropriate to use that process for a romantic partner?
How do we know that the conversation was "i will have sex with you if you unban my account" (which is pretty clear quid pro quo), and not her establishing a relationship then asking for a favor from a "friend"? It seems like a pretty dark rabbit hole if Meta of all places has to figure out if this person has a relationship with a person for pragmatic reasons or not. How many relationships do you have in your life that exist to facilitate X/Y/Z.
People trying to befriend people who are perceived to have some kind of power (be it economic, social, political, or in this case i guess technological?) is a very old tale.
Yes, there's no way to tell that there was a clear quid pro quo. I would say that these employees could be fired for intervening on behalf of someone who says she had sex with them to get her account back, though. You can be "friends" with your boss at work but hr will want to know about it if a physical relationship starts because of conflicts of interest and an appearance of impropriety.
Friendship won't be treated like a bribe but sex definitely could be, especially if one party says it is.
I suspect you're right. From the article: “We met up and like I fucked a couple of them and I was able to get my account back like two or three times,” she says. “
It sounds like she's saying she met up with more Meta employees than she actually fucked. So what happened with the others, did they get cold feet and back out of the deal? Maybe. Or maybe they they didn't realize there was a deal at all, and thought the meeting was simply a date that didn't pan out.
That some very "sophisticated" social engineering.
Jokes aside. Maybe the story is true, maybe it's just fabricated to tell interesting stories.
In an ideal world, there would be transparent governed by law policies what can and can not be shown or done. But facebook, instagram, google, tiktok ... will fight to their graves against transparency. It's bringing them money.
Like the facebook/google ad deal, facebook maga money, googles ad dominance ...
I don't want to defend them because I hate Meta particularly but the problem with transparency or the conversation that most people want to have is that something that is worth like $50 to them turns into $1000 of time arguing with an account holder about "this doesn't violate", "yes it does".
It is easier to stonewall.
Like others have said, however, there could be some other mechanism, whether paid for or something for scenarios like this where her account was worth a lot to her and the money could even be refunded if they agree that the red flag was bogus.
The other hard problem is that even the fact she works in the adult industry is enough for some people to flag the account. Lots of parents don't like their kids following insta stars who might lead them astray!
> Lots of parents don't like their kids following insta stars who might lead them astray!
Human sexuality is one of the only realms where (to some) ignorance == virtue. At some point these kids are going to have to live in a world that includes sex workers, thirst trap Instagram accounts, and a range of human sexual behaviours. Can't keep them ignorant forever.
Lost a Google account recently when they randomly started asking me to confirm a number which I no longer have access too and cannot remember. So annoying to have no support. Must setup something with a commercial provider soon.
you can only put a single link in your insta account so its a quick and simple way to link to multiple pages from your insta without building a webpage for it. It's used a lot, so in that sense it's a game changer
Replace Instagram account with any hard drug and then this is more common place.
“[hard drug]-addict had sex with man to get more [hard drug].”
Here I guess it’s a bit different cuz she’s an adult content creator … but the idea is more or less the same. What would the Kardashian’s do if they got cut off from Instagram?
The idea is absolutely not the same. She didn't want her Instagram back because she's addicted to insta as a user. She wanted it back because her social media presence is part of the business she runs.
The analogue here is the casting couch, sans the implication that it's sprung unexpectedly on her.
> She didn't want her Instagram back because she's addicted to insta as a user. She wanted it back because her social media presence is part of the business she runs.
Are you sure there is a clear-cut line between the two? Which was she first, a sex worker or a habitual social media user? If she was first a social media addict, then it seems conceivable that she found this line of work because it was adjacent to social media, a straight forward way to turn her social media addiction into a job.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadLevel 1 - Start a thread on Hackernews or Twitter.
Level 2 - Fuck'em.
Ugly female? Worth a shot.
All adult women want is the empowerment to make decisions for their own bodies. It is theirs, after all.
No, it's completely intertwined. Because these pressures exist in numerous contexts, we've developed both social norms and laws to limit the race to the bottom, overwhelmingly with the support of the women affected by those pressures.
> All adult women want is the empowerment to make decisions for their own bodies. It is theirs, after all.
Which women? More women identify as "conservative" than "liberal"--and even among the latter, legalizing sex work is not a majority (and possibly not even mainstream) position.
My mom thinks sex work is very bad for society. It's probably one of the things my mom, all my aunts, and my wife's mom and aunts agree with, despite being from different countries and otherwise having quite different political views. Opposition to sex work is something that women tend to get the most riled up about, because ultimately its mothers and daughters that suffer from the consequences of sex work.
Not even close to reality. More women identify as liberal than as conservative, more are registered Democrats than Republicans, and even within the Republican party women skew moderate rather than conservative. Among nonvoters the gender breakdown on various issues that can be easily identified as liberal or conservative shows that women favor policies that are generally considered liberal.
Women tend to be less libertarian than men, and sometimes that breaks towards more liberal attitudes (they are more likely to favor generous social programs), and sometimes that breaks towards more conservative attitudes (they are more likely to oppose legalized prostitution and pornography).
As of 2016, attitudes were closely divided on legalizing sex work overall (40% in favor, 43% against). But the gender breakdown was striking: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me.... Men supported legalization 51-36, while women opposed it 30-50.
Women similarly oppose pornography--just 25% find it morally acceptable, compared to 43% of men: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...
Being a Democrat, of course, isn't dispositive of anything. My mom is a democrat, because she likes Obamacare and Anthony Fauci. But she's as socially conservative as any republican. (Like Black people: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu...)
Social libertarianism is championed mainly by the white college educated wing of the Democratic Party. But the party is ideologically diverse. For example, under 60% of Democrats say that “changing gender roles” has “made it easier for women to lead satisfying lives”: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/10/18/wide-pa.... For Democrats without a college degree, it's under 50%.
Sorry for the lengthy rant, but people projecting their views onto "women" (or another popular one these days, "people of color") has become a pet peeve of mine. When you say stuff like what "adult women want is the empowerment to make decisions for their own bodies" you’re making a libertarian argument, and statistically that’s going to be most appealing to white men. (That doesn’t make it wrong, but if you’re going to bring identity into it you don’t get to play fast and loose with what arguments different groups tend to find more compelling.)
Similarily theres men who do the same thing using either their looks or wealth as a chip.
We are human, but we are also bunch of monkeys in the end.
Laws against sex work do marginalize the people who perform it. It's a trade off. Liberals tend to place a strong emphasis on that harm to the minority, and devalue the harm to the majority from breaking down the taboo. Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to focus more on the benefit to the majority of the norms, and devalue the harm to sex workers.
> I'd also like to understand what you're saying about minimum wage laws.
> That's magical conservative thinking, the belief that an unregulated marketplace creates a positive sum game and not an exploitative economy. The belief that removing protection for labour creates better jobs for everyone, and not more exploitation of employees. The belief that removing regulations around commerce will get rid of fraud, not incentivize it.
I'm just applying the same arguments that you're applying about minimum wage laws to sex work. In both cases, the laws make it illegal to do certain kinds of work--it limits individual freedom because some people may be willing to do that work--in order to prevent a race to the bottom and exploitation of the population as a whole.
What you're describing as "magical conservative thinking" is, more accurately, "magical libertarian thinking." And liberals are quite often inclined to engage in such magical libertarian thinking--the idea that maximizing individual freedom maximizes social welfare--just in different contexts.
Cultural norms are typically an adaptation to the realities of human life. They may become outmoded in certain circumstances, but they're rarely completely gratuitous.
> Being homophobic is about taboos.
Taboos against homosexuality exist because until recently, sexual reproduction was non-optional. My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh where 1 out of 4 kids died before age 5. If you didn't have kids to help you farm, you'd be dead in your old age and potentially sooner than that. There was no Social Security, and there weren't alternative social roles for people who couldn't contribute to the next generation of the village. (And, of course, surrogacy and other modern medical technology was non-existent.)
Think about it logically: if the taboo was purely gratuitous, like you suggest, why did it arise independently in many different civilizations?
> They were used to justify taboos against interracial marriage, pornography, short skirts, and woman having jobs. They were used to justify paying women less and segregating education. They were used to justify discrimination against men who grew their hair long or wore tattoos.
There is a joke along the lines of "they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown." Sometimes society is wrong; more often, taboos simply become obsolete. For example, if it was 1945 and the backbone of the economy was still people lifting heavy car doors and bolting them into place, you can bet norms around workplace gender equality would look a lot different. It's important to see what taboos may be obsolete, but railing against taboos for the sake of doing so threatens society.
I'll point out that sexual liberalism has hardly been proven right by "history." Virtually every society to embrace it has seen birth rates collapse. The future of the world now belongs to Muslims and Africans, who for the most part still strongly embrace traditional sexual taboos.
rayiner hasn't said anything like that. You're putting invented words into his mouth, which is not just despicable, but also a clear violation of the site's rules (which you repeatedly do: see your "talking points" comment above where you basically deny him any ability to think by himself).
Please stop!
"You can rant", "your talk of sex", it's clearly a personal attack.
People have these libertarian notions of rational people making enlightened decisions to do sex work, but for the most part the women (and men) ensnared into such work have various vulnerabilities that predators in the industry manipulate. They are typically young (remember, humans don't have fully developed rational faculties until they're 25: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...). They may have been abused, etc. Society needs to be able to protect vulnerable people, sometimes from their own decisions.
Decriminalization might increase the number of people coerced and manipulated into such work. But criminalization definitely doesn't prevent people from being coerced or manipulated into sex work, and it makes it more dangerous for the ones who are.
Pros You'd make it safer for sex workers, both voluntary and coerced ones. You'd probably reduce rates of sexual assaults/abuse outside of sex work. Sex workers would be more easily able to escape sex work because they won't have prostitutions charges on their record keeping them from getting a job.
Cons Maybe more people would be coerced or manipulated into it.
> Cons Maybe more people would be coerced or manipulated into it.
I think you’ve accurately summarized the pros and cons. The question is how to weight those factors.
On that front, it’s telling that women—who face various degrees of sexual coercion pretty much their whole lives—are more likely to oppose legalizing prostitution than men: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me...
Andrea Dworkin, a prominent feminist, wrote poignantly about her experiences with being coerced into sex work starting at age 15 by a 21 year old boyfriend: https://newrepublic.com/article/122457/modern-magdalenes. That’s the kind of coercion you see over and over again in the sex industry. For the most part, it’s not highly educated women making empowered decisions, but women who are coerced, or do it out of financial duress, or do it impulsively and regret commoditizing themselves.
Maybe women are more against decriminalization because they've dealt with sexual coercion. But given that much more women think it's morally wrong to be a sex worker or to buy sex work (which doesn't have to do with coercion) I suspect that has little do with the difference. Instead i think the majority of the difference is that women think prostitution is wrong even when entered into by two willing and consenting parties, and this is why they're against decriminalization/legalization.
Are these purely Christian morality or do they hint at very real underlying biological reasons total sexual freedom might be problematic to a society? These sorts of things do happen.
Your hypotheticals talk about people who are dishonest. The problem is inappropriate activity outside of a monogamous relationship. If one partner doesn't discuss their behavior with their other partner, the problem wasn't the sex worker, it is that they are not being honest about their activities. Your examples are moot anyway because regulated sex workers are tested every day, and are required to use condoms to protect against HIV. The risk of STD or pregnancy with a regulated sex worker are miniscule. It's far more risky for the husband to go to a bar and pick up someone randomly.
> Are these purely Christian morality
> total sexual freedom might be problematic to a society
At least for now, we have sexual freedom in many jurisdictions all over the world, and society seems to be chugging along. Sexual activity isn't bringing the world to it's knees. (hee hee) The concept might be problematic to your vision of what society should look like, but the rest of us are enjoying life and letting others live their life choices.
> Who cares? There's no law against this.
There are, in fact laws against extramarital (and, for that matter, premarital) sex, though in the US those that remain in the books are unenforceable (though the line of Constitutional law making it so is under massive assault at the moment, so maybe not for long.)
Which is why prostitution is embraced in the Muslim world, Asia, etc? Or maybe these completely different groups of people tend to overwhelmingly agree on taboos against sex work because it reflects something fundamental about human psychology?
As for the "Muslim world", I wouldn't be so sure that there's anything behind the sexual taboos held except garden variety discrimination. Monogamy is a sacred duty for women, but men are allowed to take up to 4 wives by Islamic law. Why can't women have 4 husbands?
Read Quran, Verse IV: 3. The best part is that if you can't be nice to your wives, just marry 4 slaves instead! That's a pretty serious endorsement that the roots of "taboos against sex work" are really just part and parcel of how men in ancient times maintained control over women.
Men get 4 wives, women get but one husband. Not only is it unfair, it's purely about keeping control over women. Or 4 women, for that matter.
It isn’t “mainstreamed” (see original comment in this thread) anywhere. Even in countries where it’s technically legal—like Bangladesh, where I’m from—the associated business activity is still illegal, and there are strong social taboos against sex work.
Sometimes societal evolution takes a wrong turn and embraces ideas that are maladaptive. For example, in the Netherlands, the Muslim immigrants who are demographically ascendant for the most part embrace these “1950s” ideas, and are outcompeting the Dutch folks who have embraced sexual liberalism.
The Netherlands has chosen to legalize prostitution, for good reasons which have proven in practice that the argument that you are making is invalid. That immigrants (the bulk of which joined since that legalization) are demographically ascendant and embrace those same ideas that you espouse is utterly irrelevant. The point is: there is ample evidence that the theory you push is wrong.
Ok, so now we're in 1890 or so. Really, this is beyond absurd.
> The literal commoditization of it through legalized prostitution is a merely a specific manifestation of a more general cultural attitude.
No, it means that you recognize that realistically prostitution is going to happen anyway, regardless of what you think or feel about it, so you try to make it as safe for the sex workers as you can and legalization is a very important step in that.
I give up.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/dru...
No you don't, you just need to make buying sex and pimping illegal, you can do that without punishing the victims, what you call "sex workers" is a euphemism for sex trafficked women.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/19/is-legalize...
The best estimate I've seen for percentage of active sex workers that are currently being trafficked was between 3 and 4 %.
https://aella.substack.com/p/what-percentage-of-sex-workers-...
How involved are you in combatting sex trafficking? I've been involved in this to varying degrees for a few years now, and this is would be new information to me.
Sex trafficking and sex work is a Venn diagram with overlap, certainly, but they are definitely not the same. Many women do sex work as an independent decision, choosing it over other choices that they are presented with, and they find fulfillment in it.
Trafficked people are, at best, highly vulnerable individuals who feel they don't have any alternatives and are brainwashed by people close to them. More often than that, they are simply abducted and traded as property. Sex trafficking is a recognized form of slavery. Very different from independent sex workers.
EDIT:
The reason it's important to get this distinction right is because misinformation around it dilutes the seriousness of actual human trafficking. There are people in slavery who need intervention from police and governments. Not middle-class women in Orange County who do private sessions in the basement of the home they own.
From an anonymous "throwaway" account, you completely disregard what I'm saying, you trivialize my passion in this topic, and you go so far as directly accusing me of normalizing sex trafficking.
This discussion is over.
Ya think?
But there's always one person who twists the narrative, claiming to have the absolute moral high ground.
People willing to actually think about the subject are baited into giving them the benefit of the doubt, thinking they must just be ignorant, because after all, human trafficking is horrifying.
But it's just another blood libel: Accuse your opponents of supporting the most heinous thing you can imagine, so that you can justify annihilating them.
In this case, the position truly being supported is that women cannot sell sex.
Vehemently, violently rearranging the rhetorical space to equate selling sex with sexual slavery is just a method of magically transforming you into an evil that must be destroyed. And you will go along with it willingly, looking ever more pathetic as you try to argue that, in fact, you're on the side of the good--the bloodthirsty opponent becomes ever more and more convinced that you are completely evil.
And not only evil, but disgustingly, twistedly evil. It's almost sad, how evil you are. Because you're so confused. You've been so confused by evil that you think you're good. At that point, it becomes an act of mercy to annihilate you.
Think this is over the top? I don't. I don't think we should engage at all with these conversations. Downvoting is good. Flagging is better.
Nor are the differences as clear as you make them out to be. Sure, there are clear cut cases of human trafficking, but how do you know that your Orange County basement whore isn’t caught up in an abusive relationship with some indolent man who uses her as his livelihood? More to the point, how does the john know? The whole narrative that women freely choose sex work and find it fulfilling may be true in some cases, but there’s no easy way to tell which cases those are, and the human consequences of guessing wrong are awful.
But if you want to actually address the problem, you do need to decriminalize prostitution.
Robespierre had to argue in 1789 that the French Republic should let actors and Jews vote:
https://www.amis-robespierre.org/Robespierre-dans-le-texte-S...
A job is a paid position. That’s the definition. You don’t get to make up your own to suit your own twisted view of reality.
Hey, being a police officer often tears families apart, with police having far higher rates of divorce. That’s not constructive to family life. Is policing a real job?
> Shaking your ass on a camera adds more joy to the world than implementing dark patterns for ads imo
Wow, an example of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good"'s rare friend "letting the worse being the ally of the bad."
Also, "bringing joy" is the wrong way to describe "shaking your ass on a camera." At best it's titillation.
So where do you draw the line on productivity, social usefulness, and whatever metric you care about on what kind of work should be allowed?
You seem to agree that ad tech is worse. I think there's a lot of stuff between ad tech and ass shaking personally.
> Also, "bringing joy" is the wrong way to describe "shaking your ass on a camera." At best it's titillation.
Titillation should bring you joy.
Arguing about which is better or worse is, frankly, a useless distraction.
>> Also, "bringing joy" is the wrong way to describe "shaking your ass on a camera." At best it's titillation.
> Titillation should bring you joy.
Eh, no. Pleasure and joy are separate things, and the former doesn't necessarily lead to the latter.
BTW: For example in Switzerland it is legal, you even have (in theory) to pay taxes. But still the problems are the same (human trafficking etc), nothing changed, and if you go to the police you have accidents like floating dead in a river a week later. Legalize it but make nothing to take the mafia away from it brings nothing, in fact it gives them a legal way to make money.
Maybe it should be a state owned business only and not a private thing, sounds crazy but if you work for the state not even the mafia would dare to touch you, you have stable employment, insurance and medical services.
We should not be letting "our systems" in Big Tech do their thing. Specially when it comes to a person's accounts
I agree with the other comment about how we need legislation to ensure proper channels on how to get account access back or services. Far too often if you dare question say Google or Facebook your account may be banned for life with little retribution on your end.
That's why these platforms need to be broken up or follow standards that could allow people to take their social graphs/data and go to other competitors.
Depending on your check mark, subscriber count, and audience, you can easily sell any blue checkmark for 1-10k.
Access to the Twitter dashboard? 50k
0day account takeover - 150+k, rarely happens anymore
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYfePxLUYAAoZj9.png
Under the hood, our human propensity toward "storytelling" and social cohesion is both a blessing and our bane. People collectively go for convenient (but leaky) abstractions, leaders, influencers, fads.
AKA the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
The cesspool is not specifically American. As long as the music plays, economy's touted "fundamentals" pretty much come down to ape psychology. The music just plays louder is some places than others, at the moment.
Also, an Instagram /account/ was reinstated, not all of Instagram.
These are popular consumer brands, and colloquialism would prefer their "insta" or "instagram", rather than "instagram profile".
It's perfectly OK to hate Facebook as a platform or a concept, but their ad revenue team is very good their jobs, and I would be very hesitant to question their decision-making on what does and doesn't attract advertisers.
This is not a legal issue. Its not a freedom of speech issue, which in any case can also bypassed by corporate policy.
Imo long-term, companies should be legislated into having fair ban appeals, and enforced in transparency of why accounts are banned after they are a certain size.
Then I would happily start debating the removal of these employee specialty services which allow this. I say this as someone who has used this power before for legitimate reasons.
There should be official channels to do this with companies as large as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube etc.
Freedom of speech can be ignored - if the community guidelines say so. Similarly, if the guidelines are that if you 'offer up' you can be reinstated, and you are fine to do that, that's fine too?
We're in the world of corporate policy now. Laws have nothing to do with! These are private corporations, and their policies determine what's right or wrong on their platforms.
But seriously, I wrote a post about my youtube account getting banned and without telling me what caused it just shut down my request for review. Sounds like in all of these companies you can either have a false positive AI flag you, someone decide they dont like you online and report you for something that isnt necessarily true/the case, and then you have some tech workers who either dont care enough to really fix problems or enjoying their fiefdoms and the power they wield at strangers.
Given what I’ve seen on dating apps, you’re prime material.
Blocking your Facebook account can lead to losing access to support groups and local marketplaces that may be important to people in need, and it is absolutely disgusting that they are allowed to kick people out for no reason.
Don't you have that backwards?
In the US, at least, “plain discrimination” by private parties is generally legal, but for regulated utilities (which Facebook is not) and fairly narrow sets of specifically prohibited bases of discrimination by public accommodations.
If you want a general rule applying something like the rational basis test used as the minimum standard applicable to public discrimination to private commercial discrimination, that's a fairly radical change to the law.
There's no such thing as a “de facto utility“.
If you mean “Facebook is the kind of thing that the government should regulate as a utility”, well, that's fine, but that's something that requires at least regulatory, if not legislative, action to make happen and set the regulatory rules (including any applicable anti-discrimination rules) for.
So, again, the applicable rules need to be created elsewhere in government before Facebook is taken to court for allegedly violating them.
Where did I say they are to be taken to court?
Electricity, water, natural gas, internet, and district heating are utilities. Facebook isn’t. There are no transmission lines or pipes running to each Facebook user directly from Facebook, there’s no physical reason that other social networks can’t exist.
It’s not a utility just because several billion people use it.
> no transmission lines
> no physical reason that other [social networks] can’t exist
Sorry for nitpicking, but you can get internet without transmission lines too (just as phone service) - and it's still an utility :V
But I am just nitpicking, sorry :V
No, they are expressly for what would be, under the law without Section 230, publishers.
The entire purpose of Section 230 is to allow platforms (and users!) to freely moderate content on based on their own views of what is appropriate without incurring liability as a publisher as would otherwise accrue to those exercise such control of distribution.
(Section 230 protections wouldn't be needed for common carriers, who would, as such, be forbidden from exercising the kind of editorial control which would, without a safe harbor, produce the kind of liability from which Section 230 provides a safe harbor.)
Yeah but you can also make the same argument for education: education is not a utility because several billion people like to be educated.
Facebook connects people and businesses, groups. It’s basically the same as if someone decided to ban you from using SMS or snail mail or libraries at this point.
That being said I log into Facebook once every 6 months approximately. It was replaced by WhatsApp and Instagram for me, however my point still stands as much for those platforms as it is for Facebook.
> Your request has been blocked.
> If you have questions, please contact us.
They are so huge they should probably be classified as a public utility of sorts. This is a tough pill to swallow for this site since it could possibly derail the tech gravy train.
This is a problem with most of mega tech right now. Nobody can spin up a fair competitor to Youtube because Google can throw money from other parts of the business to keep it dominant. How are you supposed to compete fairly with Amazon when they can reinforce with AWS money?
I might not like it, but they are in their right. I can always create my own web property.
By that unjust actions they actually show the value in de-centralizing WWW back to good old days.
You shouldn't argue that a farmer who was kicked out from Facebook for absolutely no reason should no longer have the right to access a wider variety of local offers for farm equipment on Facebook Marketplace, or have a better chance to sell their produce.
And you shouldn't argue that people are destined for this fate for the rest of their lives because of a primitive algorithm put in place by people who have no morals.
They are not in their right. They are abusing their position, and they are harming people.
Edit: It's fixed now.
Typically with a store, if you're causing harm, the community can petition for you to lose your license. And all that comes with legal protections for due process.
On youtube or instagram, your entire business which you invested time/money/body into, is entirely hanging by the thread of some employee having a decent day or finding you attractive.
There's a near-infinite pool of people willing to sink absurd amounts of time and money and other resources into these social networks.
Pretty much everywhere is aware of the risks.
It seems to be a risk many are more than willing to take.
It’s a risk they take because there’s no other choice.
All she had to do was say nothing, and Meta probably wouldn’t have found out. But it’s going to be very simple to look at the admin tool logs and see exactly who unbanned her account.
I’m also blown away at how short-sighted this woman is about the man’s employment, after he did her frankly a big favor in return for sex. Not to mention her account will just get banned again, given she admitted to it on video.
Hopefully she isn't an idiot and has downloaded everything she cared about from facebook.
But the fact is that we're all talking about this, inside tech spheres as well as outside. A literal real-life "who do I have to screw to get my stuff back?" moment.
It means that no matter how little you respect what she has done, she may have just changed the world. Or, we'll forget in five minutes and Metabook will continue to ban people with impunity.
Just my opinion, but someone being willing to lose something they sold their body to win back is reasonably respectable. Certainly they've done the world a big favour, whatever their motivations.
Not sure you're assigning the responsibility to look after someone's career to the right person here.
Banning her at this point would look pretty vindictive: "You revealed corruption in our organization, so we're banning you." Would make for some pretty bad headlines. They might still do it, but it's not a good PR move.
> I’m also blown away at how short-sighted this woman is about the man’s employment, after he did her frankly a big favor in return for sex.
It's not a favor if you had to pay for it.
Consider, for example, flights to a corrupt country. To get through customs unscathed, every passenger is required to bribe the staff at the airport.
Just because the passenger pulls out their wallet and hands over a bribe at the first sign of friction, does that make the passenger more guilty than those who set up this corrupt system? Those that benefit from the corruption?
It must always be those with power that we hold to account. That's not to say that those who participate in the system should have zero consequences (which, in these examples, is not the case - they've paid something, whether with their wallet or with their flesh) - but until those in power are fully held to account and the systems are changed, you are blaming the victim, even if they did initiate this form of corruption.
If they set up the corrupt system and everyone is expected to pay bribes, then the newly incoming passenger is not really the initiator, in that case the corruption is systemic, and i would put most blame on management to not make steps to eliminate it, but i agree that in this setup the bribees are more responsible than bribers, as they have more experience and information about the corruption in the system.
But let consider a slightly different case - a bureau (say building authority), with many twisted bureaucratic rules and procedures, where any request takes long to proceed and is often denied, but generally not corrupt. People just patiently do the necessary steps and accept it, or shrug off and go away. Then someone does not accept that and instead offers a bribe to get pass their request fast. In such case the initiator is clearly responsible for corruption, while the bureau is just responsible for general bureaucratic inefficiency.
And lets consider third case - driving license exam, and someone who fails it just bribes driving inspector to instead make it pass. In that case it is not even inefficiency, the license should be rejected and the briber just seeks unfair advantage. That is even more clear that initiator is more guilty, although the driving inspector has the power.
So, i would say that there are two kinds of corruptions - first, where briber wants something that should get without bribes, and second, where briber wants some unfair advantage.
Your premise is that acting on the desire of an unfair advantage is the greater immoral act, and the act of accepting the payment for an unfair advantage is less morally bankrupt.
In each of these scenarios, the person being bribed has the power. They have nothing to lose if they reject the bribe.
Yet, if they have nothing to lose when _accepting_ the bribe, that is how corrupt regimes start.
Of course, one could argue that it depends on the corruption. In your case of a building authority, imagine one that always says no regardless of the request. Maybe they let through the odd high-profile project where someone in the project is chummy with the director of the authority. Arguably, this building authority is already corrupt, and merely hiding behind the excuse of bureaucracy. (We don't tend to think about social capital as a form of bribery, but it very much is)
In the case of the driving inspector, they are potentially licensing an individual who will get others killed. Morally speaking, any future deaths are at least partially attributable to the driving inspector.
I suspect part of your position hinges on a malicious intent in the initiator. However, power and responsibility are not separable - and cases where there are possible consequences, morality must be judged in part on the basis of that responsibility.
As I say, we're getting into the weeds - these hypothetical situations are in many ways divorced from the original question, so let's look at that:
- A person is kicked off an online communications platform. Nobody is quite sure why, but there are some pretty likely conclusions.
- The platform is known for bending the rules for high-profile accounts
- The person can prove that they are not breaking any consistently-applied rules (assuming valid interpretation of vague rules should be judged on whether their peers are allowed to post similar - and in this case, she pointed out that her content is well within moral norms for the platform)
- The platform offers no accessible recourse (except for those with social capital) and not just bureaucracy, but hidden bureaucracy dependant on the whims of a hidden adjudicator who has nothing to lose for interpreting the rules harshly.
- Very limited harms if accepted, potential loss of revenue, personal content, position in a (digital) society, freedom of expression etc if rejected.
In this case, I'd say the briber has, at the point their account was terminated, already lost a lot to the corruption of the platform, and yet the bribe was still over-paid. Saying that theirs was the more immoral act seems intensely unfair, when they did the only thing they felt they could to re-gain justice.
Two possible ways this might have gone down:
Employee is cold-contacted with an upfront offer: "Let's meet up, I'll have sex with you, and exchange you can help me get my account unbanned"
..or..
Employee is cold-contacted with something like: "You seem like a cool guy, let's meet up" Then a few days later they get hit with "Btw now that we've hit it off, can you help get me unbanned?"
We both know that the chances of an internet entertainment professional doing that are close to zero.
That seems like a situation ripe for abuse. Just continually report any account you want taken down.
I think you misspelled 'indifferent'
EDIT - Downvoted? Do others accept this is true? Why?
How do we know that the conversation was "i will have sex with you if you unban my account" (which is pretty clear quid pro quo), and not her establishing a relationship then asking for a favor from a "friend"? It seems like a pretty dark rabbit hole if Meta of all places has to figure out if this person has a relationship with a person for pragmatic reasons or not. How many relationships do you have in your life that exist to facilitate X/Y/Z.
People trying to befriend people who are perceived to have some kind of power (be it economic, social, political, or in this case i guess technological?) is a very old tale.
Friendship won't be treated like a bribe but sex definitely could be, especially if one party says it is.
It sounds like she's saying she met up with more Meta employees than she actually fucked. So what happened with the others, did they get cold feet and back out of the deal? Maybe. Or maybe they they didn't realize there was a deal at all, and thought the meeting was simply a date that didn't pan out.
Jokes aside. Maybe the story is true, maybe it's just fabricated to tell interesting stories.
In an ideal world, there would be transparent governed by law policies what can and can not be shown or done. But facebook, instagram, google, tiktok ... will fight to their graves against transparency. It's bringing them money.
Like the facebook/google ad deal, facebook maga money, googles ad dominance ...
It is easier to stonewall.
Like others have said, however, there could be some other mechanism, whether paid for or something for scenarios like this where her account was worth a lot to her and the money could even be refunded if they agree that the red flag was bogus.
The other hard problem is that even the fact she works in the adult industry is enough for some people to flag the account. Lots of parents don't like their kids following insta stars who might lead them astray!
Human sexuality is one of the only realms where (to some) ignorance == virtue. At some point these kids are going to have to live in a world that includes sex workers, thirst trap Instagram accounts, and a range of human sexual behaviours. Can't keep them ignorant forever.
No wonder there is no easy way to reach support at Meta.
game changer.
“[hard drug]-addict had sex with man to get more [hard drug].”
Here I guess it’s a bit different cuz she’s an adult content creator … but the idea is more or less the same. What would the Kardashian’s do if they got cut off from Instagram?
The analogue here is the casting couch, sans the implication that it's sprung unexpectedly on her.
This is like giving the right people free promotional <whatever it is you make> because your booth got kicked out of the craft fair for a dumb reason.
Are you sure there is a clear-cut line between the two? Which was she first, a sex worker or a habitual social media user? If she was first a social media addict, then it seems conceivable that she found this line of work because it was adjacent to social media, a straight forward way to turn her social media addiction into a job.