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This is a huge victory for the religious anti-sex work movement. Some backstory to how this happened: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-w

This is a huge victory for the religious anti-sex work movement. Some backstory to how this happened: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war-pornhub https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war... I suspect Mastercard will pull processing on many adult platforms now. I wonder what this means for Twitter and Reddit that allow UGC adult content.

sebmellen 6y ago
Pornhub is full of child porn and does very little about it. This is a good choice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra....
- rhizome 6y ago
  Facebook is full of sedition and does nothing about it.
  - mfer 6y ago
    Sexual assault of children is illegal. Sedition is only illegal in rare circumstances. In the US anyway.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      Do you think any of those circumstances are happening on FB? Does the supposed rarity make them harder or easier to find?
      - mfer 6y ago
        If FB is unaware of the illegal sedition they have plausible deniability. In this case, MasterCard no longer has plausible deniability. This increases their liability. Imagine someone at a liquor store sells beer to someone. Then, they learn the ID is fake and the person is lying about their age. Once they know someone is doing something illegal they can be held liable if they continue to sell the person beer. Note, I'm not getting into right an wrong here. I'm getting into legal liabilities. Large companies like MasterCard are conservative (legally speaking) in how they handle this stuff.
- friend-monoid 6y ago
  How do you know they dont do anything about it though? I’d wager they try
  - abawany 6y ago
    FTA, the amount of hires they have to weed out visually intensive and traumatic material was listed at 80 worldwide. The article compares it to Facebook's hires for similar weeding out and there was a couple of orders of magnitude difference. I recommend reading the article - it was sobering how bad it is and how it continues to traumatize its victims.
    - fredophile 6y ago
      Given the sizes of the two companies I'd expect Facebook to have one or two orders of magnitude more employees for most roles.
- tomwill656 6y ago
  They do as much as any UGC platform (auto scanning with photoDNA, reviewing, flags etc) and just committed to doing even more like forcing users to give ID to upload https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002934613 https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002934613 This was a long campaign by anti-sex work campaigners. Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram: I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly. https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973 https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Users who desire to upload content should be forced to provide ID to comply with US law as it relates to age verification of adult talent (2257 Regulation) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulations#2257_regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation...
    - pricechild 6y ago
      Should they also comply with $pick_a_dictatorship_you_find_reprehensible 's laws? Edit: The comment I replied to has been edited and originally explained the owner was Canadian but serves US customers and so should abide by US law. I don't want to claim to agree or disagree, I'm just not sure how to work out what's right.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Yes. You comply with the laws of the jurisdiction you operate in. You have the freedom to not operate where you don't want to obey local law. EDIT: I edited my comment as I'm not willing to argue the merits of cross border law enforcement actions in this thread.
        6y ago
- anotherman554 6y ago
  Did you notice that article is in the opinion section? That implies it's a work of fiction. No fact checking needed.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Did you notice that article is in the opinion section? That implies it's a work of fiction. No fact checking needed. That is factually untrue (as I also pointed out in the other sub-thread where you made the same claim): they do fact check their opinion section: The below quote is from a previous NYT Op-ed editor that describes their editorial process. Emphasis is mine. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.htm...: > What happens when your article is accepted? First, you’ll get a contract giving us the right to publish it and laying out some of your responsibilities. The most important ones have to do with originality and truthfulness. You can’t plagiarize yourself, or someone else, and we won’t run something that has appeared in another publication, either print or digital. We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise: Did you invest in a company that you praise in passing? Did you once work with a public official you mention in flattering or critical terms? Could you or an organization or company you represent benefit from the stance you take in an Op-Ed? We need to know. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.
reaperducer 6y ago
It sounds like you haven't read the NY Times article. It's not about religion. It's not about some anti-sex worker movement. It's about content that is illegal and reprehensible. If it was about some "religious anti-sex work movement," then the credit card companies wouldn't still process payments for the legal brothels in Nevada. Which they do.
- tus88 6y ago
  It's not an article, it's a hit piece, written by a known agitator not a journalist at a time when the religious anti PH movement is at it's crescendo.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    > It's not an article, it's a hit piece, written by a known agitator not a journalist I wonder how consistent most HNers are wrt this statement about The New York Times.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - epistasis 6y ago
      It's important to remember that official Opinion pieces are not fact checked, and don't even have the semblance of being fact-based. And this particular opinion writer is well known for being really bad at facts. That being said, it is simultaneously possible for: 1. Nicholas Kristof to have a tenuous grasp on reality and to launch unfounded moral panics, and 2. PornHub has a lot of serious issues that should be dealt with. You know the sayings about broken clocks... (And for that matter, while I trust The NY Times more than the average newspaper on some topics, like science reporting, it has SERIOUS issues with being driven by political access rather than journalism, doing "both sides" too much, and not being willing to question Trump very much. That and their massive support for pretty much any war, to the point of open lying about stuff. I have cancelled my subscription in the past and will not subscribe again.)
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
US VISA also does not process porn or sex-work related charges, but VISA international does. Hence things like CC bill (source: I tried to become a cc provider for sex workers and porn sites, and found out it is a trainwreck). I'm not defending PornHub at all, I'm pointing out religious conservatives still have significant power when there is such a credit-card monopoly.
- mfer 6y ago
  There is a subtle element here... US lawmakers have control over what is legal and illegal. US VISA won't process activities that are illegal in the particular country. It's not that religious conservatives have power over the credit card companies. I also hope you're not saying that the US should allow child sexual assault which is the issue in this case.
  - dismantlethesun 6y ago
    Porn isn't illegal in the US, so I'm not sure why US VISA won't process it.
    - mfer 6y ago
      Child porn is. In this case the issue is one dealing with children. To understand this case we need to keep it in context.
      - dismantlethesun 6y ago
        I think that's mixing issues. On the one side, we have a beautiful thing memorializing the most basic, and instinctually pleasant of human activities (sex between adults). On the other side, we have something so unequivocally and fundamentally immoral that many countries place it on the same level as murder, and even typical murderers draw their own moral line against it. The two can't be spoken with in the same sentence. If PornHub is complicit in child pornography, every single executive involved should go to prison. If MasterCard has evidence, or suspicion that PornHub is complicit then they must turn such evidence over to the authorities immediately, and have a moral (not legal) duty to ensure that all the PornHub executives they dealt with are prosecuted. This is a poison barrel issue from which no one must escape. However, the way MasterCard is acting is as if they merely want to break ties with a high-fraud risk client, whose risk profile may have changed during the COVID crisis. It reeks of a company protecting profit margins, and not of a company hurriedly running away from a tarpit of felonies and turpitude. I may be wrong, and PornHub will be destroyed within 2021 like BackPage was, but right now I doubt it. VISA was their primary payment processor, and they only cut off access after MasterCard made public allegations. VISA has their own evaluations team, and I know from experience they're quite strict. The question is how could they not catch this before MasterCard?
rosywoozlechan 6y ago
It's not "anti-sex work" to want to stop people from being abused. Are they targeting onlyfans too? No. Just these exploitative sites that enable bad behavior.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  Not to be cynical, but they're probably working their way down the list. CESTA/FOSTA was also ostensibly about stopping people from being abused and has instead harmed sex workers[1]. [1] https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta-2020/ https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta...
pluc 6y ago
The first nail came in January 2019: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mastercard-bans-automatic-billing-after-free-trials https://www.pcmag.com/news/mastercard-bans-automatic-billing...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
GuB-42 6y ago
From what I've seen, PornHub is one of the worst thing that happened to the porn industry. It is a piracy hub, 90% of it is illegal with regards to copyright, the rest is fueled by predatory business practices. If it was mainstream media, it would have been sued to oblivion, or, like YouTube, forced to adopt aggressive anti-piracy measures. And, maybe there is a little bit of child porn on PornHub, it is bound to happen since users can upload anything. I could probably upload child porn on YouTube if I wanted to, that would be short lived and it would get me into trouble but I can probably get a few hundred views before it gets caught. But the thing is, I never stumbled upon it. In fact, I pretty much only get illegally uploaded content from legitimate studios or "PornHub originals". That anti-sex work groups attack PornHub is ironic. It would be like being against the record industry and attacking The Pirate Bay.
- Wingman4l7 6y ago
  It also has a dark history -- it basically managed to dominate by initially causing pornography publishers/producers to go under due to its rampant and unchecked hosting of pirated content, and then, in the ultimate ironic twist, it would turn around and cheaply acquire them: https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/mindgeek-porn-monopoly-its-dominance-is-a-cautionary-tale-for-other-industries.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/mindgeek-porn-monopoly-...
- tomwill656 6y ago
  They have hundreds of thousands of sex workers uploading and making ad revenue, and selling content, which they now won't be able to. They also announced a few days ago that uploads would only be for people in their model program and partners, so this is a huge blow to those sex workers.
  - spoopyskelly 6y ago
    Think of the children or think of the porn stars? Which sets of pearls are we clutching?

sebmellen 6y ago

Pornhub is full of child porn and does very little about it. This is a good choice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra....

rhizome 6y ago
Facebook is full of sedition and does nothing about it.
- mfer 6y ago
  Sexual assault of children is illegal. Sedition is only illegal in rare circumstances. In the US anyway.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    Do you think any of those circumstances are happening on FB? Does the supposed rarity make them harder or easier to find?
    - mfer 6y ago
      If FB is unaware of the illegal sedition they have plausible deniability. In this case, MasterCard no longer has plausible deniability. This increases their liability. Imagine someone at a liquor store sells beer to someone. Then, they learn the ID is fake and the person is lying about their age. Once they know someone is doing something illegal they can be held liable if they continue to sell the person beer. Note, I'm not getting into right an wrong here. I'm getting into legal liabilities. Large companies like MasterCard are conservative (legally speaking) in how they handle this stuff.
friend-monoid 6y ago
How do you know they dont do anything about it though? I’d wager they try
- abawany 6y ago
  FTA, the amount of hires they have to weed out visually intensive and traumatic material was listed at 80 worldwide. The article compares it to Facebook's hires for similar weeding out and there was a couple of orders of magnitude difference. I recommend reading the article - it was sobering how bad it is and how it continues to traumatize its victims.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    Given the sizes of the two companies I'd expect Facebook to have one or two orders of magnitude more employees for most roles.
tomwill656 6y ago
They do as much as any UGC platform (auto scanning with photoDNA, reviewing, flags etc) and just committed to doing even more like forcing users to give ID to upload https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002934613 https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002934613 This was a long campaign by anti-sex work campaigners. Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram: I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly. https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973 https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Users who desire to upload content should be forced to provide ID to comply with US law as it relates to age verification of adult talent (2257 Regulation) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulations#2257_regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation...
  - pricechild 6y ago
    Should they also comply with $pick_a_dictatorship_you_find_reprehensible 's laws? Edit: The comment I replied to has been edited and originally explained the owner was Canadian but serves US customers and so should abide by US law. I don't want to claim to agree or disagree, I'm just not sure how to work out what's right.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Yes. You comply with the laws of the jurisdiction you operate in. You have the freedom to not operate where you don't want to obey local law. EDIT: I edited my comment as I'm not willing to argue the merits of cross border law enforcement actions in this thread.
      - 6y ago
anotherman554 6y ago
Did you notice that article is in the opinion section? That implies it's a work of fiction. No fact checking needed.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Did you notice that article is in the opinion section? That implies it's a work of fiction. No fact checking needed. That is factually untrue (as I also pointed out in the other sub-thread where you made the same claim): they do fact check their opinion section: The below quote is from a previous NYT Op-ed editor that describes their editorial process. Emphasis is mine. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.htm...: > What happens when your article is accepted? First, you’ll get a contract giving us the right to publish it and laying out some of your responsibilities. The most important ones have to do with originality and truthfulness. You can’t plagiarize yourself, or someone else, and we won’t run something that has appeared in another publication, either print or digital. We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise: Did you invest in a company that you praise in passing? Did you once work with a public official you mention in flattering or critical terms? Could you or an organization or company you represent benefit from the stance you take in an Op-Ed? We need to know. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.

reaperducer 6y ago

It sounds like you haven't read the NY Times article. It's not about religion. It's not about some anti-sex worker movement. It's about content that is illegal and reprehensible. If it was about some "religious anti-sex work movement," then the credit card companies wouldn't still process payments for the legal brothels in Nevada. Which they do.

tus88 6y ago
It's not an article, it's a hit piece, written by a known agitator not a journalist at a time when the religious anti PH movement is at it's crescendo.
- busterarm 6y ago
  > It's not an article, it's a hit piece, written by a known agitator not a journalist I wonder how consistent most HNers are wrt this statement about The New York Times.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - epistasis 6y ago
    It's important to remember that official Opinion pieces are not fact checked, and don't even have the semblance of being fact-based. And this particular opinion writer is well known for being really bad at facts. That being said, it is simultaneously possible for: 1. Nicholas Kristof to have a tenuous grasp on reality and to launch unfounded moral panics, and 2. PornHub has a lot of serious issues that should be dealt with. You know the sayings about broken clocks... (And for that matter, while I trust The NY Times more than the average newspaper on some topics, like science reporting, it has SERIOUS issues with being driven by political access rather than journalism, doing "both sides" too much, and not being willing to question Trump very much. That and their massive support for pretty much any war, to the point of open lying about stuff. I have cancelled my subscription in the past and will not subscribe again.)

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

US VISA also does not process porn or sex-work related charges, but VISA international does. Hence things like CC bill (source: I tried to become a cc provider for sex workers and porn sites, and found out it is a trainwreck). I'm not defending PornHub at all, I'm pointing out religious conservatives still have significant power when there is such a credit-card monopoly.

mfer 6y ago
There is a subtle element here... US lawmakers have control over what is legal and illegal. US VISA won't process activities that are illegal in the particular country. It's not that religious conservatives have power over the credit card companies. I also hope you're not saying that the US should allow child sexual assault which is the issue in this case.
- dismantlethesun 6y ago
  Porn isn't illegal in the US, so I'm not sure why US VISA won't process it.
  - mfer 6y ago
    Child porn is. In this case the issue is one dealing with children. To understand this case we need to keep it in context.
    - dismantlethesun 6y ago
      I think that's mixing issues. On the one side, we have a beautiful thing memorializing the most basic, and instinctually pleasant of human activities (sex between adults). On the other side, we have something so unequivocally and fundamentally immoral that many countries place it on the same level as murder, and even typical murderers draw their own moral line against it. The two can't be spoken with in the same sentence. If PornHub is complicit in child pornography, every single executive involved should go to prison. If MasterCard has evidence, or suspicion that PornHub is complicit then they must turn such evidence over to the authorities immediately, and have a moral (not legal) duty to ensure that all the PornHub executives they dealt with are prosecuted. This is a poison barrel issue from which no one must escape. However, the way MasterCard is acting is as if they merely want to break ties with a high-fraud risk client, whose risk profile may have changed during the COVID crisis. It reeks of a company protecting profit margins, and not of a company hurriedly running away from a tarpit of felonies and turpitude. I may be wrong, and PornHub will be destroyed within 2021 like BackPage was, but right now I doubt it. VISA was their primary payment processor, and they only cut off access after MasterCard made public allegations. VISA has their own evaluations team, and I know from experience they're quite strict. The question is how could they not catch this before MasterCard?

rosywoozlechan 6y ago

It's not "anti-sex work" to want to stop people from being abused. Are they targeting onlyfans too? No. Just these exploitative sites that enable bad behavior.

AlexandrB 6y ago
Not to be cynical, but they're probably working their way down the list. CESTA/FOSTA was also ostensibly about stopping people from being abused and has instead harmed sex workers[1]. [1] https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta-2020/ https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta...

pluc 6y ago

The first nail came in January 2019: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mastercard-bans-automatic-billing-after-free-trials https://www.pcmag.com/news/mastercard-bans-automatic-billing...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

GuB-42 6y ago

From what I've seen, PornHub is one of the worst thing that happened to the porn industry. It is a piracy hub, 90% of it is illegal with regards to copyright, the rest is fueled by predatory business practices. If it was mainstream media, it would have been sued to oblivion, or, like YouTube, forced to adopt aggressive anti-piracy measures. And, maybe there is a little bit of child porn on PornHub, it is bound to happen since users can upload anything. I could probably upload child porn on YouTube if I wanted to, that would be short lived and it would get me into trouble but I can probably get a few hundred views before it gets caught. But the thing is, I never stumbled upon it. In fact, I pretty much only get illegally uploaded content from legitimate studios or "PornHub originals". That anti-sex work groups attack PornHub is ironic. It would be like being against the record industry and attacking The Pirate Bay.

Wingman4l7 6y ago
It also has a dark history -- it basically managed to dominate by initially causing pornography publishers/producers to go under due to its rampant and unchecked hosting of pirated content, and then, in the ultimate ironic twist, it would turn around and cheaply acquire them: https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/mindgeek-porn-monopoly-its-dominance-is-a-cautionary-tale-for-other-industries.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/mindgeek-porn-monopoly-...
tomwill656 6y ago
They have hundreds of thousands of sex workers uploading and making ad revenue, and selling content, which they now won't be able to. They also announced a few days ago that uploads would only be for people in their model program and partners, so this is a huge blow to those sex workers.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  Think of the children or think of the porn stars? Which sets of pearls are we clutching?