7 ms·

Pornhub bans uploads by unidentified users amid child-abuse investigations

37 points by recursion 6y ago

amir734jj 6y ago
They are such a large player in this business. I wonder what would the impact be on competitor websites.
- rasz 6y ago
  Their main competitor is 2x the size (wgcz).
badconvincer 6y ago
I hate this. I feel like segments of the population that dislike porn will use this as a wedge to demonize the entire experience over time. There is nothing wrong with taking down illegal content as it’s reported especially if the parent company is highly receptive to doing so which pornhub almost certainly is.
- meowface 6y ago
  I'd recommend the NYT article that led to this recent pushback: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra... It's not at all anti-porn, and addresses what you're referring to. This is just my own two cents independent of the article, but I think for any platform that allows anyone to upload anything, a blacklist system is inevitably doomed to fail once the platform is beyond a certain size. The only feasible option in that case is to whitelist, which is what Pornhub seems to now be doing going forward.
  - tomwill656 6y ago
    That op-ed is anti-porn though. The only source is Exodus Cry, an evangelical group trying to shut down the entire sex industry. The author briefly mentions the Internet Watch Foundation's objective stats and then dismisses it when they say they don't know why it's so low compared to Facebook and Twitter. Maybe because it just is? Why are Mastercard and Visa not "investigating" Facebook and other sites for allow child abuse uploads in the millions?
    - meowface 6y ago
      Let's try to stay at the higher levels of Graham's hierarchy pyramid. What's the specific stat or claim you disagree with? If you read the article, you can see both the author and several interview subjects explicitly clarify severe times they're perfectly fine with porn, as long as it's of age and consensual. What's a source on Facebook having millions of child pornography videos? If they did, I'm sure NYT would report on them and Mastercard and Visa would investigate them, too.
      - tomwill656 6y ago
        The author of the op-ed mentions the Internet Watch Foundations's stat of 118 csam cases over 3 years on PornHub, and then says he asked them why it's so low dimisses their objective stats and says they couldn't explain. Maybe it's because it IS low? The times did an actual investigation into the csam on Facebook and other big teach and it's a massive problem. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... No Visa and Mastercard weren't forced in a moral panic to investigate.
        meowface 6y ago
        >Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material This suggests the majority of it was exchanged privately, which means it mostly may have been automatically detected by systems matching content hashes. On Pornhub, it's all available to the public rather than in private messages, which makes the problem a lot more evident and visible, and arguably more damaging (e.g. if you were raped as a child, you potentially may find it more damaging if one million people see the video compared to ten people). If Facebook hadn't taken appropriate measures, Visa and Mastercard certainly should have investigated them if they were in a position to. Another issue here is Pornhub is directly profiting off of the CSAM and non-consensual porn by plastering ads all over the page displaying the content and encouraging premium account registrations. Facebook isn't directly monetizing that content. Of course I know Pornhub isn't doing this deliberately, but 1) they're not financially incentivized to take things down too aggressively (due to loss of ad revenue and premium registrations), 2) even if they were incentivized to do it, the problem is too big and too evasive to tackle with just blacklisting, manual reporting, and a small team of moderators. The only workable solution at this point is a whitelist, which sensibly seems to be the approach they're now taking.
- whoknew1122 6y ago
  The idea that they were highly receptive to extensive moderation is questionable at best. But one major problem is they allowed anyone to upload AND download. So userA would upload child abuse imagery. userB would download it. PornHub would delete video uploaded by userA. userB would reupload with different video name. userC would download the reupload. It's playing whack-a-mole with illegal child abuse imagery. Interestingly PornHub only really started caring when payment processors started looking into things. But better late than never.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - strbean 6y ago
    > It's playing whack-a-mole with illegal child abuse imagery. As opposed to the alternatives? Have a moderator sitting in a chair behind every single person using a computer? Outlaw storing/transmitting any user generated data, and turn the internet into Cable TV 2.0? Playing whack-a-mole with law breakers is a fact of life in a non-totalitarian society.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - gizmo686 6y ago
    As a practical matter, how is this different from copyright enforcement? Simply disabling downloads is not enough, they would need either an effective DRM system, or to kill off third party downloaders such as youtube-dl. I'm sure the RIAA would love to be able to go after youtube-dl on child porn charges instead of just cppyright charges. They could attempt to implement a content-ID system to detect re-uploads. I suspect this could work better for child porn than copyright, because you will not have adversarial parties trying to claim that you uploaded their child porn. The difficulty in such an approach is that the mere possession of child porn is a crime, which makes developing and maintaining such a technology far more difficult and expensive (even with the law enforcement support that would be necessary to make such development legal). The more insideous effect is that putting this requirement on pornhub also puts requirements on every platform supporting user generated material. In order to avoid getting caught up in the child-porn minefield it creates, platforms would need to censor all porn and porn-adjecent content.

37 points by recursion 6y ago

amir734jj 6y ago

They are such a large player in this business. I wonder what would the impact be on competitor websites.

rasz 6y ago
Their main competitor is 2x the size (wgcz).

badconvincer 6y ago

I hate this. I feel like segments of the population that dislike porn will use this as a wedge to demonize the entire experience over time. There is nothing wrong with taking down illegal content as it’s reported especially if the parent company is highly receptive to doing so which pornhub almost certainly is.

meowface 6y ago
I'd recommend the NYT article that led to this recent pushback: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra... It's not at all anti-porn, and addresses what you're referring to. This is just my own two cents independent of the article, but I think for any platform that allows anyone to upload anything, a blacklist system is inevitably doomed to fail once the platform is beyond a certain size. The only feasible option in that case is to whitelist, which is what Pornhub seems to now be doing going forward.
- tomwill656 6y ago
  That op-ed is anti-porn though. The only source is Exodus Cry, an evangelical group trying to shut down the entire sex industry. The author briefly mentions the Internet Watch Foundation's objective stats and then dismisses it when they say they don't know why it's so low compared to Facebook and Twitter. Maybe because it just is? Why are Mastercard and Visa not "investigating" Facebook and other sites for allow child abuse uploads in the millions?
  - meowface 6y ago
    Let's try to stay at the higher levels of Graham's hierarchy pyramid. What's the specific stat or claim you disagree with? If you read the article, you can see both the author and several interview subjects explicitly clarify severe times they're perfectly fine with porn, as long as it's of age and consensual. What's a source on Facebook having millions of child pornography videos? If they did, I'm sure NYT would report on them and Mastercard and Visa would investigate them, too.
    - tomwill656 6y ago
      The author of the op-ed mentions the Internet Watch Foundations's stat of 118 csam cases over 3 years on PornHub, and then says he asked them why it's so low dimisses their objective stats and says they couldn't explain. Maybe it's because it IS low? The times did an actual investigation into the csam on Facebook and other big teach and it's a massive problem. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... No Visa and Mastercard weren't forced in a moral panic to investigate.
      - meowface 6y ago
        >Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material This suggests the majority of it was exchanged privately, which means it mostly may have been automatically detected by systems matching content hashes. On Pornhub, it's all available to the public rather than in private messages, which makes the problem a lot more evident and visible, and arguably more damaging (e.g. if you were raped as a child, you potentially may find it more damaging if one million people see the video compared to ten people). If Facebook hadn't taken appropriate measures, Visa and Mastercard certainly should have investigated them if they were in a position to. Another issue here is Pornhub is directly profiting off of the CSAM and non-consensual porn by plastering ads all over the page displaying the content and encouraging premium account registrations. Facebook isn't directly monetizing that content. Of course I know Pornhub isn't doing this deliberately, but 1) they're not financially incentivized to take things down too aggressively (due to loss of ad revenue and premium registrations), 2) even if they were incentivized to do it, the problem is too big and too evasive to tackle with just blacklisting, manual reporting, and a small team of moderators. The only workable solution at this point is a whitelist, which sensibly seems to be the approach they're now taking.
whoknew1122 6y ago
The idea that they were highly receptive to extensive moderation is questionable at best. But one major problem is they allowed anyone to upload AND download. So userA would upload child abuse imagery. userB would download it. PornHub would delete video uploaded by userA. userB would reupload with different video name. userC would download the reupload. It's playing whack-a-mole with illegal child abuse imagery. Interestingly PornHub only really started caring when payment processors started looking into things. But better late than never.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- strbean 6y ago
  > It's playing whack-a-mole with illegal child abuse imagery. As opposed to the alternatives? Have a moderator sitting in a chair behind every single person using a computer? Outlaw storing/transmitting any user generated data, and turn the internet into Cable TV 2.0? Playing whack-a-mole with law breakers is a fact of life in a non-totalitarian society.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- gizmo686 6y ago
  As a practical matter, how is this different from copyright enforcement? Simply disabling downloads is not enough, they would need either an effective DRM system, or to kill off third party downloaders such as youtube-dl. I'm sure the RIAA would love to be able to go after youtube-dl on child porn charges instead of just cppyright charges. They could attempt to implement a content-ID system to detect re-uploads. I suspect this could work better for child porn than copyright, because you will not have adversarial parties trying to claim that you uploaded their child porn. The difficulty in such an approach is that the mere possession of child porn is a crime, which makes developing and maintaining such a technology far more difficult and expensive (even with the law enforcement support that would be necessary to make such development legal). The more insideous effect is that putting this requirement on pornhub also puts requirements on every platform supporting user generated material. In order to avoid getting caught up in the child-porn minefield it creates, platforms would need to censor all porn and porn-adjecent content.