OnlyFans? Not a chance, they have super strict checks in place.
Snapchat and Twitter on the other hand are full of CP and adolescents posting questionable pictures. And Whatsapp seems to be the go-to app for groups people sharing links to material like this.
Even in my country where the media love to hype and profess the American social media and content giants, they find that competitors like OnlyFans, TikTok, Line etc. are on a completely different level when it comes to safety and quickly responding to illegal content.
Most FinTech businesses are obliged to undertake KYC procedures, so yes, identity theft is a problem that private business are commonly expected to solve, and it should also be the responsibility of any platform like OF.
They are, in a sense, a FinTech company after all.
People are using fake passports; how far should OnlyFans go to verify someone's real-life identity?
My sister could sign up, and I could appear on the videos. This is going to be hard to prevent, especially in cases of 17year olds like in the story where it's not immediately clear from the material itself they're under 18.
I can't really think of any system that would prevent this while also not being highly invasive.
Yes, but the point is that people are faking that paperwork. So what do you do then as a platform? Do you need to do anything? Is the platform even responsible for this? And if so, to what degree?
Nothing in that article suggests OnlyFans is "one of the biggest" distributors of child abuse material.
It's only substantive example is a single individual who was able to fool a moderator that family members passport was theirs, and that pales in comparison to... Well literally anything you might compare to.
> They are arguably the largest child porn distributor at the moment.
Not sure about that claim, but Twitter still is distributing CP on their platform and they are still unable to remove it, which means they are indeed breaking the law. [0] [1] [2]
I'm sure they do. It's hard to root for a company as diabolical as MindGeek but the organization fighting them (and winning in this case) has it's roots in a right wing, sex-negative, religious moralism. So yea I'm sure Pornhub cares and it's probably good for everyone else to care because it's the fights on these moral fringes were society's values are shaped.
i dont think i ve ever seen the pornhub instagram account, and i am a pornhub user
But you are right, mindgeek will probably shut down at some point , leaving the space open for a new porn king, which will probably (?) be in Russia, and it will use cryptocurrency out of necessity. In that sense, i m kind of rooting for it tbh
If Mindgeek shuts down or sells its business, the new owner will be US-based.
There's a clear pattern that is becoming very visible now, where the US attacks European or Asian owned companies in the social/content media space by leveraging baseless accusations about wrongdoings or some crime committed, then disturbing the service by threatening to ban it, or withdrawing access to payment methods.
It doesn't matter what space or type of company it is. If it is large enough and owns a big piece of a lucrative market, then it will be attacked.
The goal is to put pressure and allowing US-based investment firms to acquire the company, or to make it fold so US-based competitors can absorb the market share, and thus finally owning and controlling what is typically tens of billions of market share and steering the revenue into the US.
TikTok, Pornhub/Mindgeek, Spotify, and OnlyFans are some recent examples where exactly this method is being applied.
The issue with MindGeek is that they were hosting cp. Also, they have a massive market share on both the consumer and producer ends of the market and they use that power in really scummy ways. None of these issues are about stifling innovation or being anti tech.
Pornhub was hosting cp. It's fair that they're attacked in that case to clean up their operation. Also, aside from the very much based in fact cp issue, a lot of the attacks are coming from US based religious conservatives. What evidence do you have that there's an international conspiracy against pornhub?
If you think MindGeek should shutdown for the things they've done, I don't think a "new porn king" in Russia using crypto is going to solve any of those problems.
My interpretation was that they are rooting for mindgeek (being able to fix the numerous issues they have), because the alternative will be so much worse
The suits are based on videos uploaded before the purge and the introduction of the verification requirement. Incidentally this took place few days after a major article was published on NYT (in Dec 2020) although they're multiple reports by the people shown on those videos over years.
My understanding is the parties involved don't have to provide ID to Mindgeek or the uploader. The requirment is that the uploader must provide an ID. The uploader may or may not be the person in the video so it is possible that children are still in the video.
Please tell me this is a joke and you didn't just read a dozen stable diffusion headlines and assume it is somehow going to devastate an industry revolving around hosting videos.
I work in AI/ML content generation, specializing in video.
Hosting videos at scale is an easy problem these days. Pornhub solves the niche and hard problems of handling user uploads, transcoding from a variety of upload types, content recognition, validating legality, and search over poorly defined user metadata.
A new entrant could centrally generate a human millennia of videos and richly tag them by every searchable dimension.
Pornhub won't exist in ten years because the entire need for that type of software will be reduced to near zero.
Unlikely, people still have generate and host the videos. So even if the videos are CGI, the online distributers still have a business, just a slightly different product.
Of course. I didn't say people wouldn't capitalize on this.
A new startup with less baggage will generate images and video at scale and destroy them. No user uploads, no legal issues, no infrastructural problems of scale for transcoding and caching arbitrary uploads, doing safety checks, etc.
The alleged pro-free-speech right never got the "I disagree with what you say but" memo; they have only very weakly if ever stood up for non-right free speech, such as when Switter got banned from Cloudflare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876040
I briefly interacted with a few people from switter during my fediverse stay. I'm sorry to hear they are gone. I do believe that it was for legal reasons (laws that I do not agree with), so cloudflares hands were tied.
Eh, there's nothing wrong with banning both. A pluralistic world has no room for the kind of toxic, offensive material that comes out of these antisocial (asocial?) spaces.
Voltaire was simply wrong about what an enlightened society looks like. It's basic paradox of tolerance stuff. Some things shouldn't exist anywhere.
* Free Speech exists to protect and guarantee disagreeable speech, because guess what: Nobody's going to censor speech they like or agree with; agreeable speech by its very nature does not need Free Speech protections.
* You have no Right to Not Be Offended, such a right does not exist period. Grow some skin and git gud.
I don't think you've actually read what Popper said about the paradox of tolerance. For your education:
> If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Yes, you can always say that this time, Popper's caveat does not apply, because the opponents are too far gone.
Perhaps we should stop treating Popper or anyone else as an oracle of truths. He was a smart man, you can disagree with him nevertheless - in both directions.
> "You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into."
I disagree 100%, and the fact that atheism is steadily growing, even among formerly devout Christians, the admirable success of Daryl Davis convincing KKK members to renounce their own hate, and the numerous examples of collaboration for a common cause between groups that should hate each other, like the KKK and the black Panthers, all demonstrate that this claim is flat out wrong.
Instead, what your cute catchphrase typically represents is an excuse to justify your own hate for an outgroup. Often understandably borne of frustration from impatience to learn about or inability to understand the motivations or experiences of an outgroup, and a subsequent assignment of negative qualities to them, because obviously you're not the problem (the "bias blind spot").
It's not my job to educate you about why you're wrong, but only to raise my voice as part of the chorus saying that you are. Hate and your sad support for it will always be met with refusal. You are finished.
Not your job perhaps, but arguably your duty as a member of a democratic society where social change must happen by persuasion, since the legitimacy of government follows from the consent of the governed.
Insults are the last refuge of those who have lost the argument. Sadly, I guess you just don't believe in the UN's declaration of human rights or the principles behind the US's declaration of independence.
Pretty sure Voltaire's not wanting a country with endless and shifting politeness laws, prone to giving government and tech power over speech, was certainly not wrong.
I get the feeling there comes a point where 'do better than them' turns into do exactly like them. I really wish people had gone with 'live and let live', but since that didn't happen the inevitable pendulum swing will.
Describing your own ethics in relative terms to your enemies' ethics is an admission that you have no firm or rational ethics. It's like the first centrist commandment.
And the more similar your enemy is to you in this quality, the more likely this becomes a vicious circle that eventually lets everyone compromise everything.
"The bad guys are doing the same thing that we're doing, so isn't it good that us good guys are keeping up? Would you rather this be done by the good guys, or just the bad guys? Are you working for the bad guys?"
Superman, when properly written, is super because he will never cross the line (Superman vs. the Elite). Those stories shed an amazing light on the behavior we love in humanity, that you can do "good" and never stray and still win. The power of those stories is that we believe the underlying truth.
Sadly, if people play by the rules and unfair stuff keeps happening, you teach people to use tactics that they find personally revolting. Welcome to what happens when you move from "I must act honorably" to "the end justifies the means". Never push people to the thin ice unless you are prepared for the consequences as those powerless peons you hurt might just not be so powerless.
As I mentioned, I have written off instabook. Decleared them a lost cause. There is no point protesting their censorship. Rather the only option is to destroy and replace them. Debating just how controlled the controlled opposition should be is a waste of time. Now please elaborate on all the ways you are better than me.
It can be both. It’s equally true that for some women it’s an empowering way of making a living and that most of it is the product of criminal exploitation.
The main issue is that the largest corporate actors of the porn industry like to hide themselves behind the idea of women empowerment while profiting from exploitation. Between the New York Times investigation on Pornhub and the numerous trials for rape which have emerged in the past few years, it’s becoming very hard to deny the harm the industry is doing.
Enduring a form of rape is empowering if it’s financially lucrative?
Yeah, someone will need to explain that to me - because it just looks like a fundamentally misogynistic view of the ‘use value’ of a woman, and at odds with socialist thought on the value of individuals and the undesirability of them being physically exploited as a consequence of a capitalist market economy.
(And is it even lucrative? Doesn’t it often just support a lifestyle of subsistence drug addiction?)
Is the above comment really downvote worthy? - because it (“sex work is a form of rape”) was received left-wing feminist wisdom until recently.
To be blunt, progressive -> inclusive -> sex work is morally fine just doesn’t cut it if the real politic is socially marginalised women having horrible sex with horrible men to fund their drug addictions, and I’m kind of shocked so many men who doubtless see themselves are right-thinkers manage to affect blindness to that because they enjoy watching pornography.
Nobody has the time to defend porn, they are too busy watching it. I have a friend who works at a network company and the stream rate of adult material is pretty much the same across the world, regardless of political or religious objections against such material. It even get streamed from government networks, and a well known City State.
There's numerous media stories about the Vatican City porn habits. There's a popular one where somebody downloaded a transgender porn film, but pornhub has said their searches are mostly standard. One article I found https://torontosun.com/2013/04/12/porn-site-reveals-download...
Keep in mind this is all IP tracking, so not that telling. Not that I'm aware of any Vatican proxies.
I defend porn in the same way as I defend sugary drinks... it has a reason to exist, it's fine in "small doses", and having too much of it is bad for your health.
The good thing about both is, that noone is making you consume any of it.
> The good thing about both is, that noone is making you consume any of it.
Oh man, I'm not particularly susceptible to porn, but I'm a bit conflicted on the sugary drinks side. And, generally, on the related "junk foods" (think Snickers bars, etc.).
When I was in college, I used to eat a lot of those, and figured that I wasn't able to control myself whenever I had them in the house. If ate one, I would need to keep on eating. Even now, that I absolutely know better and have first-hand experience with how good I feel when I don't eat those, whenever I get a pack "because surely, I can control myself now, and they sure taste good" I'm bitterly disappointed.
Sure, no one holds a gun to my head forcing me to eat another candy bar, but boy, is there no need for that.
Now, I don't agree with sugary drink bans, nor even with the sugar tax some governments implement. But I do think that maybe some things are inherently dangerous, and perhaps we should make sure everyone knows it. Possibly, a label like "Warning! This may be highly addictive".
> That only leaves libertarians but most of them are just conservatives too embarrassed to call themselves conservatives.
That's a ridiculous mischaracterization of libertarians.
As for defending porn, widespread availability of porn has been associated with reductions in all kinds of sexual assault. Furthermore, "the left" is a small portion of "liberals", and moderates who consider the legality of porn to have been decided long ago.
Wealthy white 'lefties' who live in gated neighborhoods are the most anti-porn people out there, especially the women I've found. They're the ones who trying to get these sites de platformed and writing the NYT articles, not religious groups.
The Kiwifarms owners should be in jail for inciting others to commit psychological harm on people while the Pornhub owners should be in jail for knowingly exploiting underage and non consenting women.
That’s two very different reasons. But I fully expect the libertarians of HN in full swing explaining to us how it’s the death of free speech and justifying the worst exploitative behaviours because freedom as libertarians like to do.
The issue with kiwifarms is not that they have abhorrent beliefs. The issue is that it’s a platform inciting harassment masquerading as a place of discussion.
I find it interesting how, seemingly amongst one group of people, "it isn't illegal" is the go-to defense for organizations like Kiwi Farms while "it isn't illegal" is considered woefully insufficient for justifying the behavior of organizations like Cloudflare.
> But I fully expect the libertarians of HN in full swing explaining to us how it’s the death of free speech and justifying the worst exploitative behaviours because freedom as libertarians like to do.
I don’t think that was the particular aspect of the aforementioned thread GP was referring to (maybe in part)
> knowingly exploiting underage and non consenting women.
Has a court ruled that yet? If not, that's a pretty ridiculous claim. The site has user submitted content, and perfect moderation is not a simple technical (or even human curated) problem at all.
People are basically upset that PH doesn't have perfect moderation, and want them to moderate better, fine. But that's moving the goal posts.
At the beginning I though I was just going to stay silent but now actually I feel to deeply about that to even respect the rule. Let me clear: pretending until you are skewered in the press that leaving videos of rapes up for a decade, not caring about revenge porn or video of underage girls being posted by their idiotic teenager boyfriends and ruining their life is just a problem of moderation makes you a terrible, disgusting, awful human being. Seriously if that what you believe I hope you will change someday because gosh that’s sad.
Why? Both of them are just a bunch of engineers ignoring reality and clinging to extremist universalist positions while ignoring the details and that the law is actually clear here, and just nobody wants to sue CloudFlare into following the law
> The plaintiff in the case against MindGeek that names Visa as a defendent is Serena Fleites, who, when she was 13, said she was pressured by her then-boyfriend into making a sexually explicit video — which he allegedly uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent.
So if someone uploads porn video on Dropbox, should it be banned too?
I believe safe harbor laws cover this for the platform, but perhaps some platforms are pushing the limits and litigation will likely still be how we decide upon that. It would be surprising if there isn't precedent on this already, I would be surprised if it goes anywhere.
He uploaded it. She asked for it to be removed… but those mindgeek scummy leadership folks ignored it initially.
Nothing wrong with adults showing others how they are rubbing their various body parts together and exchanging fluids (aka porn)… as long as it’s consensual and nobody is getting exploited or hurt.
Worth noting that pornhub and other mindgeek properties actually attempts extensive moderation of their platforms and err on the side of caution about complaints on videos.
It’s exceptionally easy to deplatform someone on pornhub as flagged videos are almost instantly removed and put up for review.
They even made the controversial move of only allowing verified accounts to post on pornhub for precisely this reason.
In 2021, the company was subject to a massive lawsuit and PR disaster after PornHub failed to remove a video of a rape for over 10 fucking years. Not rape as in "sex that turned out to be not consensual after examining the fine points", no. Dragged into a van and gang-raped is what we are talking about.
The victim's story finally got picked up by NYT [0] after the victims pleas, legal attempts etc. to the company fell on deaf ears for, again, over a decade.
After this became widely known, they reluctantly made the change you are talking about.
2) the original source was upset by the fact the video kept recirculating, not that pornhub refused to take it offline, a lot fo
I'm not saying more couldn't be done, but in that context it makes things slightly different.
There are other problems where filters don't work against everything, you can filter "rape" but "forced", "coerced", "tricked", "rpe", "r4pe" etc; ad infinitum and including greedy matching ("grapeseed"?) would be a near impossible task; though they do try. So the Op-Ed saying they can search '14yo' and get results doesn't surprise me, but that's been quashed by the verified-only system now.
You should also know: A large part of the media backlash against PornHub was the fact that a show called "girls do porn", an otherwise normal seeming show complete with F.B.I warnings and notices about consent: was featuring girls who did not consent and/or were underage. -- in fact most of those stories from the op-ed that I managed to trace were from this.
The issue with the second thing here is that if a business entity looks legitimate and has their paperwork completely in order: there's very little you can do except deciding that you don't want to service them for some other more personal reason.
If you own Pornhub and the same non consensual videos are being uploaded repeatedly, despite complaints from those depicted in the videos, you need to improve your software to recognize the duplicates. If you can't do that, you need to stop accepting unverified videos. In other words, exactly what they did, except only after the pressure campaign.
Your post leaves the impression that the NYT article is about Rose Kalemba and about having search results for '14yo', when in fact each of those are one-liner throwaway references. The article is replete with examples of women trying to have non consensual content removed, only to have their efforts not honored in good faith:
> “Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.
> Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.
> “It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.” That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable. Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.
Pornhub wasn't punished because searching "14yo" finds results, or because they got duped by GDP. Pornhub was kneecapped because they repeatedly failed to demonstrate good faith in honoring takedown requests, over many years. The silver lining is that now, even though they're much more strict (read: applying a level of moderation that anyone with even the thinnest of moral fiber would expect), the payment processors haven't forgiven them.
Exactly. Always amazed at how people use reverse logic to excuse their unlawful behavior.
All successful social networking platforms use the cost of monitoring user content as their excuse for not monitoring unlawful content: they don't deal with the problem from start, then they pretend solving the problem with solutions that any sane person knows it will not scale, and finally they become big enough to be granted the excuse "that would cost too much".
A good analogy for this would be a car manufacturer, who is eventually asked to install airbags after putting 6 million vehicles on the road, and responds that it would ruin the company.
These businesses navigate with their seed money, ostensibly put monitoring costs aside, and everyone with vested interests applauds when the owner calls for the magic "auto-regulated community crowdsourced content reporting mechanism" (they all invoke this feature, for years, and it always works).
PornHub executives should be fined personally and in jail. There is absolutely zero chance that they didn't understand this cost was part of the business model and the responsibility on their shoulders. It is criminal negligence and they should be in jail.
As long as we don't put one executive in jail, every other executive will continue damaging people's lives individually because he knows that he doesn't risk anything.
<The police collected victim impact statements from Rose and her family. The attackers' lawyers argued that Rose had consented to sex, and the men were charged not with rape but "contributions towards the delinquency of a minor" - a misdemeanour - and received a suspended sentence.>
From a judge's (scathing) denial of Visa and Mindgeek's motion to dismiss:
>Why would MindGeek allow Plaintiff’s first video to be posted despite its title clearly indicating Plaintiff was well below 18 years old? Why would MindGeek stall before removing the video, which Plaintiff alleges had advertisements running alongside it? Why would MindGeek take the video and upload it to its other porn websites? Why, after being alerted by Plaintiff that the video was child porn, would it allow the video to be reuploaded, whereafter advertisements were again featured alongside the reuploaded videos? And why did Plaintiff have to fight for years to have her videos removed from MindGeek’s sites?
Regarding dropbox, if dropbox publicly hosts a video titled childpornography.mp4 that contains child pornography, indexes it so people searching for it can find it, automatically tags and categorizes it for easy discovery, stalls for weeks when asked to remove it, runs ads alongside it in the meantime, distributes it to a myriad of other file hosting services, allows any file matching the hash of that file to be uploaded again, and then take years to finally purge it from their systems, they should 100% be held liable for distributing child pornography.
And instagram should ban them.
As an aside, WTF is wrong with people? Just get a paid membership to Dorcel and jerk off to sexy flight attendants seducing pilots and passengers and frustrated 40 year old housewives cheating with their gardeners like a normal fucking human being. If you can't afford that you should probably be doing something other than viewing pornography.
Since we've asked you more than once to stop breaking the site guidelines and you're not only still breaking them but doing it in almost every comment you post, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(This is not a comment on the current issue in any way. I just needed a place to hang this comment, and picked this one arbitrarily.)
Good, all these e-pimps are totally unscrupulous when it comes making money with child porn and revenge porn, and it also concerns websites like Only Fans, Twitter or Reddit...
Is there anything specific from that podcast you'd like to share that is related to large content platforms like Facebook deleting accounts for other large adult content platforms like MindGeek? Or are we supposed to listen through ~4 hours of audio content to get the gist of what you're saying?
You're supposed to listen to it obviously but if you want spoilers then payment processors police porn, porn sites have to follow their rules or lose all money. The way around this used by some is to become their own payment processors. It's more nuanced than that and covers lots more stuff in a better explained fashion than I'm doing here but you get the point.
I didn't take notes so forgive any inaccuracies, I tend to listen to podcasts when walking the dog and doing the cleaning.
Thank you for pointing this out. It is apparently difficult to understand for some people. Let me spell it out in more detail:
* There is a community ("HN") with many individuals. The individuals are independent of each other. Each can form and express their own opinion on each subject. There is no reason to expect that any two individuals should agree or be consistent on anything. They may agree on some things, or not.
* Therefore, when several individuals from the community express opinions that are inconsistent with each other, this does not constitute hypocrisy.
Not true. The upvote/downvote system creates the hive mind. It's maybe less noticeable than on Reddit, but on the other hand HN attracts certain kinds of people so there's already a degree of self selection.
Imagine if the population of the world voted for equality for all, but also death to the Jews. Those votes represent the average opinion (AKA the hive mind). That hive mind would be hypocritical even though it is made up of individuals.
Because invoking Godwin's Law tends to shut down discussion rather than further it. It also undermines your own argument because choosing such a jarring example makes it harder for the reader to interpret your argument as having been made in good faith, which is a shame because overall I think your point is correct.
I think only these comments you've made have attempted to shut down discussion. You're just bikeshedding. If an extreme example throws a point into sharp relief, rather than exaggerates a point, then that's good.
This isn't about majority votes, though. If 10% of Hacker News believes one thing and 10% believes the other--and even with 80% hating the topic entirely and refusing to participate--you will get weird juxtapositions of stories on either side hitting and holding the front page. You aren't even guaranteed to get a mix of comments, because the kind of people who show up to talk about one issue and the kind of people who show up to talk about another issue might have less overlap than you would expect from being on the same website.
If anyone had the time I highly recommend the podcast “The Last Days of August”by Jon Ronson. It chronicles the suicide of a pornstar in conjunction with the rise of mindgeek.
Pornhub is already a dead place since they removed those videos after lawsuit, what a pity, there were a ton of gems there, so I guess, its gone forever, no one saved those for preservation purpose.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadSnapchat and Twitter on the other hand are full of CP and adolescents posting questionable pictures. And Whatsapp seems to be the go-to app for groups people sharing links to material like this.
Even in my country where the media love to hype and profess the American social media and content giants, they find that competitors like OnlyFans, TikTok, Line etc. are on a completely different level when it comes to safety and quickly responding to illegal content.
About the particular situation you’re describing—wouldn’t care, as I would have full deniability.
They are, in a sense, a FinTech company after all.
My sister could sign up, and I could appear on the videos. This is going to be hard to prevent, especially in cases of 17year olds like in the story where it's not immediately clear from the material itself they're under 18.
I can't really think of any system that would prevent this while also not being highly invasive.
It's only substantive example is a single individual who was able to fool a moderator that family members passport was theirs, and that pales in comparison to... Well literally anything you might compare to.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57255983
https://popwrapped.com/onlyfans-a-breeding-ground-for-child-...
the "checks" onlyfans implements are easily bypassed by minors or their adult pimps.
Not sure about that claim, but Twitter still is distributing CP on their platform and they are still unable to remove it, which means they are indeed breaking the law. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...
But you are right, mindgeek will probably shut down at some point , leaving the space open for a new porn king, which will probably (?) be in Russia, and it will use cryptocurrency out of necessity. In that sense, i m kind of rooting for it tbh
There's a clear pattern that is becoming very visible now, where the US attacks European or Asian owned companies in the social/content media space by leveraging baseless accusations about wrongdoings or some crime committed, then disturbing the service by threatening to ban it, or withdrawing access to payment methods.
It doesn't matter what space or type of company it is. If it is large enough and owns a big piece of a lucrative market, then it will be attacked.
The goal is to put pressure and allowing US-based investment firms to acquire the company, or to make it fold so US-based competitors can absorb the market share, and thus finally owning and controlling what is typically tens of billions of market share and steering the revenue into the US.
TikTok, Pornhub/Mindgeek, Spotify, and OnlyFans are some recent examples where exactly this method is being applied.
In reality the US government and people are so anti tech they prefer to stifle silicon valley as much as possible.
They are not competent enough to really be doing what you claim.
But the people who are attacking them are, much, much worse. Thanks to things like SESTA, sex workers had to go back to their pimps.
What more than removing everything of which uploader doesn't have an identification that involved parties are over 18?
I could certainly build the replacement product if I wanted to.
Hosting videos at scale is an easy problem these days. Pornhub solves the niche and hard problems of handling user uploads, transcoding from a variety of upload types, content recognition, validating legality, and search over poorly defined user metadata.
A new entrant could centrally generate a human millennia of videos and richly tag them by every searchable dimension.
Pornhub won't exist in ten years because the entire need for that type of software will be reduced to near zero.
A new startup with less baggage will generate images and video at scale and destroy them. No user uploads, no legal issues, no infrastructural problems of scale for transcoding and caching arbitrary uploads, doing safety checks, etc.
Voltaire was simply wrong about what an enlightened society looks like. It's basic paradox of tolerance stuff. Some things shouldn't exist anywhere.
* Free Speech exists to protect and guarantee disagreeable speech, because guess what: Nobody's going to censor speech they like or agree with; agreeable speech by its very nature does not need Free Speech protections.
* You have no Right to Not Be Offended, such a right does not exist period. Grow some skin and git gud.
I don't think you've actually read what Popper said about the paradox of tolerance. For your education:
> If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
"You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into."
Perhaps we should stop treating Popper or anyone else as an oracle of truths. He was a smart man, you can disagree with him nevertheless - in both directions.
I disagree 100%, and the fact that atheism is steadily growing, even among formerly devout Christians, the admirable success of Daryl Davis convincing KKK members to renounce their own hate, and the numerous examples of collaboration for a common cause between groups that should hate each other, like the KKK and the black Panthers, all demonstrate that this claim is flat out wrong.
Instead, what your cute catchphrase typically represents is an excuse to justify your own hate for an outgroup. Often understandably borne of frustration from impatience to learn about or inability to understand the motivations or experiences of an outgroup, and a subsequent assignment of negative qualities to them, because obviously you're not the problem (the "bias blind spot").
> The legitimacy of government follows from the consent of the governed.
Here, your neckbeard is showing.
A pluralistic world that doesn't have room is not pluralistic.
Much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is neither democratic nor people's, despite its name.
And the more similar your enemy is to you in this quality, the more likely this becomes a vicious circle that eventually lets everyone compromise everything.
"The bad guys are doing the same thing that we're doing, so isn't it good that us good guys are keeping up? Would you rather this be done by the good guys, or just the bad guys? Are you working for the bad guys?"
It’s not an absence of rational ethics, it’s an absence of certainty when faced with imperfect data.
Sadly, if people play by the rules and unfair stuff keeps happening, you teach people to use tactics that they find personally revolting. Welcome to what happens when you move from "I must act honorably" to "the end justifies the means". Never push people to the thin ice unless you are prepared for the consequences as those powerless peons you hurt might just not be so powerless.
There's a dichotomy of support within the left. Some absolutely consider it to be empowerment, while others consider it to be exploitation.
The main issue is that the largest corporate actors of the porn industry like to hide themselves behind the idea of women empowerment while profiting from exploitation. Between the New York Times investigation on Pornhub and the numerous trials for rape which have emerged in the past few years, it’s becoming very hard to deny the harm the industry is doing.
Yeah, someone will need to explain that to me - because it just looks like a fundamentally misogynistic view of the ‘use value’ of a woman, and at odds with socialist thought on the value of individuals and the undesirability of them being physically exploited as a consequence of a capitalist market economy.
(And is it even lucrative? Doesn’t it often just support a lifestyle of subsistence drug addiction?)
To be blunt, progressive -> inclusive -> sex work is morally fine just doesn’t cut it if the real politic is socially marginalised women having horrible sex with horrible men to fund their drug addictions, and I’m kind of shocked so many men who doubtless see themselves are right-thinkers manage to affect blindness to that because they enjoy watching pornography.
Keep in mind this is all IP tracking, so not that telling. Not that I'm aware of any Vatican proxies.
Looks like you know what you are talking about
The good thing about both is, that noone is making you consume any of it.
Oh man, I'm not particularly susceptible to porn, but I'm a bit conflicted on the sugary drinks side. And, generally, on the related "junk foods" (think Snickers bars, etc.).
When I was in college, I used to eat a lot of those, and figured that I wasn't able to control myself whenever I had them in the house. If ate one, I would need to keep on eating. Even now, that I absolutely know better and have first-hand experience with how good I feel when I don't eat those, whenever I get a pack "because surely, I can control myself now, and they sure taste good" I'm bitterly disappointed.
Sure, no one holds a gun to my head forcing me to eat another candy bar, but boy, is there no need for that.
Now, I don't agree with sugary drink bans, nor even with the sugar tax some governments implement. But I do think that maybe some things are inherently dangerous, and perhaps we should make sure everyone knows it. Possibly, a label like "Warning! This may be highly addictive".
That's a ridiculous mischaracterization of libertarians.
As for defending porn, widespread availability of porn has been associated with reductions in all kinds of sexual assault. Furthermore, "the left" is a small portion of "liberals", and moderates who consider the legality of porn to have been decided long ago.
The Kiwifarms owners should be in jail for inciting others to commit psychological harm on people while the Pornhub owners should be in jail for knowingly exploiting underage and non consenting women.
That’s two very different reasons. But I fully expect the libertarians of HN in full swing explaining to us how it’s the death of free speech and justifying the worst exploitative behaviours because freedom as libertarians like to do.
I don’t think that was the particular aspect of the aforementioned thread GP was referring to (maybe in part)
Has a court ruled that yet? If not, that's a pretty ridiculous claim. The site has user submitted content, and perfect moderation is not a simple technical (or even human curated) problem at all.
People are basically upset that PH doesn't have perfect moderation, and want them to moderate better, fine. But that's moving the goal posts.
So if someone uploads porn video on Dropbox, should it be banned too?
He uploaded it. She asked for it to be removed… but those mindgeek scummy leadership folks ignored it initially.
Nothing wrong with adults showing others how they are rubbing their various body parts together and exchanging fluids (aka porn)… as long as it’s consensual and nobody is getting exploited or hurt.
But Mindgeek are / were exploitative.
https://traffickinghub.com/
It’s exceptionally easy to deplatform someone on pornhub as flagged videos are almost instantly removed and put up for review.
They even made the controversial move of only allowing verified accounts to post on pornhub for precisely this reason.
In 2021, the company was subject to a massive lawsuit and PR disaster after PornHub failed to remove a video of a rape for over 10 fucking years. Not rape as in "sex that turned out to be not consensual after examining the fine points", no. Dragged into a van and gang-raped is what we are talking about.
The victim's story finally got picked up by NYT [0] after the victims pleas, legal attempts etc. to the company fell on deaf ears for, again, over a decade.
After this became widely known, they reluctantly made the change you are talking about.
So yeah.
[0](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...)
However two things are apparent:
1) this is of course really one-sided, especially the op-ed which punches up the source quite a lot. Here is the source of the 10y story: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/432/ETHI/Brief/B...
2) the original source was upset by the fact the video kept recirculating, not that pornhub refused to take it offline, a lot fo
I'm not saying more couldn't be done, but in that context it makes things slightly different.
There are other problems where filters don't work against everything, you can filter "rape" but "forced", "coerced", "tricked", "rpe", "r4pe" etc; ad infinitum and including greedy matching ("grapeseed"?) would be a near impossible task; though they do try. So the Op-Ed saying they can search '14yo' and get results doesn't surprise me, but that's been quashed by the verified-only system now.
You should also know: A large part of the media backlash against PornHub was the fact that a show called "girls do porn", an otherwise normal seeming show complete with F.B.I warnings and notices about consent: was featuring girls who did not consent and/or were underage. -- in fact most of those stories from the op-ed that I managed to trace were from this.
The issue with the second thing here is that if a business entity looks legitimate and has their paperwork completely in order: there's very little you can do except deciding that you don't want to service them for some other more personal reason.
If you own Pornhub and the same non consensual videos are being uploaded repeatedly, despite complaints from those depicted in the videos, you need to improve your software to recognize the duplicates. If you can't do that, you need to stop accepting unverified videos. In other words, exactly what they did, except only after the pressure campaign.
Your post leaves the impression that the NYT article is about Rose Kalemba and about having search results for '14yo', when in fact each of those are one-liner throwaway references. The article is replete with examples of women trying to have non consensual content removed, only to have their efforts not honored in good faith:
> “Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.
> Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.
> “It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.” That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable. Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.
Pornhub wasn't punished because searching "14yo" finds results, or because they got duped by GDP. Pornhub was kneecapped because they repeatedly failed to demonstrate good faith in honoring takedown requests, over many years. The silver lining is that now, even though they're much more strict (read: applying a level of moderation that anyone with even the thinnest of moral fiber would expect), the payment processors haven't forgiven them.
Exactly. Always amazed at how people use reverse logic to excuse their unlawful behavior.
All successful social networking platforms use the cost of monitoring user content as their excuse for not monitoring unlawful content: they don't deal with the problem from start, then they pretend solving the problem with solutions that any sane person knows it will not scale, and finally they become big enough to be granted the excuse "that would cost too much".
A good analogy for this would be a car manufacturer, who is eventually asked to install airbags after putting 6 million vehicles on the road, and responds that it would ruin the company.
These businesses navigate with their seed money, ostensibly put monitoring costs aside, and everyone with vested interests applauds when the owner calls for the magic "auto-regulated community crowdsourced content reporting mechanism" (they all invoke this feature, for years, and it always works).
PornHub executives should be fined personally and in jail. There is absolutely zero chance that they didn't understand this cost was part of the business model and the responsibility on their shoulders. It is criminal negligence and they should be in jail.
As long as we don't put one executive in jail, every other executive will continue damaging people's lives individually because he knows that he doesn't risk anything.
<The police collected victim impact statements from Rose and her family. The attackers' lawyers argued that Rose had consented to sex, and the men were charged not with rape but "contributions towards the delinquency of a minor" - a misdemeanour - and received a suspended sentence.>
Not South America, not Africa, Ohio!
"But that doesn't scale..."
So fucking what? Deal with it.
From a judge's (scathing) denial of Visa and Mindgeek's motion to dismiss:
>Why would MindGeek allow Plaintiff’s first video to be posted despite its title clearly indicating Plaintiff was well below 18 years old? Why would MindGeek stall before removing the video, which Plaintiff alleges had advertisements running alongside it? Why would MindGeek take the video and upload it to its other porn websites? Why, after being alerted by Plaintiff that the video was child porn, would it allow the video to be reuploaded, whereafter advertisements were again featured alongside the reuploaded videos? And why did Plaintiff have to fight for years to have her videos removed from MindGeek’s sites?
https://pershingsquarefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022...
Regarding dropbox, if dropbox publicly hosts a video titled childpornography.mp4 that contains child pornography, indexes it so people searching for it can find it, automatically tags and categorizes it for easy discovery, stalls for weeks when asked to remove it, runs ads alongside it in the meantime, distributes it to a myriad of other file hosting services, allows any file matching the hash of that file to be uploaded again, and then take years to finally purge it from their systems, they should 100% be held liable for distributing child pornography.
And instagram should ban them.
As an aside, WTF is wrong with people? Just get a paid membership to Dorcel and jerk off to sexy flight attendants seducing pilots and passengers and frustrated 40 year old housewives cheating with their gardeners like a normal fucking human being. If you can't afford that you should probably be doing something other than viewing pornography.
Stop it
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(This is not a comment on the current issue in any way. I just needed a place to hang this comment, and picked this one arbitrarily.)
That shouldn‘t be such a surprise.
Well worth a listen.
I didn't take notes so forgive any inaccuracies, I tend to listen to podcasts when walking the dog and doing the cleaning.
Deplatform KiwiFarms for their harassment, don’t deplatform PornHub from Instagram for having almost-useless non-consensual upload prevention systems.
* There is a community ("HN") with many individuals. The individuals are independent of each other. Each can form and express their own opinion on each subject. There is no reason to expect that any two individuals should agree or be consistent on anything. They may agree on some things, or not.
* Therefore, when several individuals from the community express opinions that are inconsistent with each other, this does not constitute hypocrisy.
Imagine if the population of the world voted for equality for all, but also death to the Jews. Those votes represent the average opinion (AKA the hive mind). That hive mind would be hypocritical even though it is made up of individuals.
How will we react in 10 years when we "discover" that Onlyfans' verification system can be duped with fake documents?