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Honest question. If you found out your client was making money from child porn would you continue to do business with them?

by neaden 6y ago

powersnail 6y ago
If they had been diligently trying to remove them from the website, I don’t see anything wrong with it.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > If they had been diligently trying to remove them from the website, I don’t see anything wrong with it. But what if their diligent efforts failed or proved to be inadequate, and they still kept their site up? If there's a fundamental flaw in their model that allowed horrible things to persist despite their efforts, they can't just throw up their hands and continue with the excuse that "they tried." That's a situation where the right thing to do is shut the whole thing down.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    That seems excessive. By the same logic we should shut down the Postal Service because they have less than 100% success stopping people from sending child porn through the mail.
  - monokh 6y ago
    Should we take this approach, there would be nothing left, including the internet on which we conversate here. There were these exact arguments present against it. It's unfortunate but the reality is that every advancement in society can and will be used for illegal and immoral activity. It is a matter of the greater good.
  - powersnail 6y ago
    Cash also has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing criminal activity to be funded. Should the government stop printing cash? Encryption has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing terrorists to communicate freely. Should a back door be installed everywhere? PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content. I’m not saying PH is definitely doing enough; I can’t possibly know that. But whether their effort is enough should be judged in the court. If they aren’t doing what the law requires them to do, they should be prosecuted.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      >> If there's a fundamental flaw in their model that allowed horrible things to persist despite their efforts, they can't just throw up their hands and continue with the excuse that "they tried." That's a situation where the right thing to do is shut the whole thing down. > Cash also has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing criminal activity to be funded. Should the government stop printing cash? Your comparisons are apples and oranges to this PornHub situation. It's not a rebuttal to mechanically list other things that might have some associated negative tradeoffs. You have weigh both the severity of the problem, the benefits, and the alternatives. > PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content. PornHub has taken a "laissez faire with cleanup" model for their porn uploads, which frankly invites abuse that's difficult to clean up (as the Kristof outlined). That might work for a site like Facebook, which bans porn outright, so it doesn't have to worry so much about the distinction between underage and of-age porn, since it's all forbidden. PornHub's a porn site, however, so their moderation already starts at a disadvantage. A preclearance model (with identity verification), while more expensive, doesn't have the abuse potential of laissez faire; and given the severity of abuse here, is for more appropriate.
      - powersnail 6y ago
        I was not comparing PH to cash. It was not a metaphor. The parent of my comment has the following reasoning: 1) If a model has a fundamental flaw that allows horrible things to persist despite their effort, the whole thing should be shut down. 2) PH has a model that allows horrible things to persist despite their effort 3) Therefore, PH should shut themselves down My cash example was a counter-example to 1). I was not saying that PH should definitely not be shutdown, but that the manner the parent came to such a conclusion was flawed. Specifically for PH, we don't know exactly what's happening on their servers. How many illegal videos have been taken down? How many fell through the cracks? How many accounts have been banned? That's why I suggested that PH should be challenged in court, where evidence can be presented and an informed conclusion can be made. Otherwise, you are not weighing severity against benefits; you are just weighing your intuitions.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    It's horrible and unfortunate, but there are a lot of people who actively try and engage in these behaviors and will spend effort to work around and within these systems/moderation efforts. Shutting it down would only cause something else to spring up
elric 6y ago
I doubt PH is making money from CP. It's probably hard to break down the revenue generated by individual videos, but I'm assuming that what little CP there is on PH is in the unverified user generated pool. Users can't pay for that on PH, and I suspect that if PH makes money in other ways (advertising and whatnot), that the audience watching these videos is not big enough to make them any money.
kelnos 6y ago
Straw man. We're talking about copyright infringement, not child porn. Invoking "think of the children" is a cheap way to inflame emotions about a topic to get the knee-jerk reaction you want. Regardless... it depends. Are they making a good-faith effort to remove that content from their platform, but sometimes come up short? That's to be expected, but I'd want some commitment that they're working to improve. Did they email me and say "hey, we like child porn and making money off of it"? Ok, yeah, then I'd cut them off. If I suspected something fishy was going on but wasn't sure? I'd report what I knew to the police and let them do a proper investigation. I wouldn't want to destroy someone's business based only on my suspicions. It's not ok for the legal system to do that, so why would it be ok for me to do that? The burden of proof should still be "beyond a reasonable doubt", and the best place to determine that is still the courts, as imperfect as they can be at times.
- neaden 6y ago
  "Mastercard Inc and Visa Inc on Thursday stopped processing payments on Pornhub after a New York Times article said many videos posted on the adult website depicted sexual assault of children" Child Porn is explicitly the reason they did this.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Not sure what your point is, here. I was responding to a question about what I would do if I found out that a hypothetical client of mine was making money off child porn. And regardless, my questions still stand: was PornHub removing those videos promptly when made aware of them, and making a good-faith effort to ensure they didn't get re-uploaded? Article doesn't dive into those details. If they were, I think a private entity taking an action that could cripple their business would be akin to law enforcement shutting them down without due process or the ability to appeal. Again, it seems "child porn" is just being used as the "can't argue with our actions because think of the children" conversation-ender it's usually used as. Edit: Re-reading my response, I'm not sure where I got the bit about how we're talking about copyright infringement. Possible I was reading HN a lot that day and got my wires crossed between articles. But I think the rest of my comment stands on its own.
iamben 6y ago
A quick Google reveals it to be a real problem on Facebook, their properties and their messenger services. 12 million images removed last year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mnunez/2019/11/13/facebook-instagram-child-porn-removal-mark-zuckerberg-ook-and-instagram-was-wider-than-believed/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mnunez/2019/11/13/facebook-inst... - but it hasn't stopped people advertising on FB. Surely here it's a case of people rolling the two into one - "people who look at/work with porn must be sleazy" - rather than objectively seeing PH as a business that doesn't want illegal content on its platform anymore than FB does?

Honest question. If you found out your client was making money from child porn would you continue to do business with them?

by neaden 6y ago

Honest question. If you found out your client was making money from child porn would you continue to do business with them?

powersnail 6y ago

If they had been diligently trying to remove them from the website, I don’t see anything wrong with it.

ardy42 6y ago
> If they had been diligently trying to remove them from the website, I don’t see anything wrong with it. But what if their diligent efforts failed or proved to be inadequate, and they still kept their site up? If there's a fundamental flaw in their model that allowed horrible things to persist despite their efforts, they can't just throw up their hands and continue with the excuse that "they tried." That's a situation where the right thing to do is shut the whole thing down.
- philwelch 6y ago
  That seems excessive. By the same logic we should shut down the Postal Service because they have less than 100% success stopping people from sending child porn through the mail.
- monokh 6y ago
  Should we take this approach, there would be nothing left, including the internet on which we conversate here. There were these exact arguments present against it. It's unfortunate but the reality is that every advancement in society can and will be used for illegal and immoral activity. It is a matter of the greater good.
- powersnail 6y ago
  Cash also has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing criminal activity to be funded. Should the government stop printing cash? Encryption has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing terrorists to communicate freely. Should a back door be installed everywhere? PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content. I’m not saying PH is definitely doing enough; I can’t possibly know that. But whether their effort is enough should be judged in the court. If they aren’t doing what the law requires them to do, they should be prosecuted.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    >> If there's a fundamental flaw in their model that allowed horrible things to persist despite their efforts, they can't just throw up their hands and continue with the excuse that "they tried." That's a situation where the right thing to do is shut the whole thing down. > Cash also has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing criminal activity to be funded. Should the government stop printing cash? Your comparisons are apples and oranges to this PornHub situation. It's not a rebuttal to mechanically list other things that might have some associated negative tradeoffs. You have weigh both the severity of the problem, the benefits, and the alternatives. > PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content. PornHub has taken a "laissez faire with cleanup" model for their porn uploads, which frankly invites abuse that's difficult to clean up (as the Kristof outlined). That might work for a site like Facebook, which bans porn outright, so it doesn't have to worry so much about the distinction between underage and of-age porn, since it's all forbidden. PornHub's a porn site, however, so their moderation already starts at a disadvantage. A preclearance model (with identity verification), while more expensive, doesn't have the abuse potential of laissez faire; and given the severity of abuse here, is for more appropriate.
    - powersnail 6y ago
      I was not comparing PH to cash. It was not a metaphor. The parent of my comment has the following reasoning: 1) If a model has a fundamental flaw that allows horrible things to persist despite their effort, the whole thing should be shut down. 2) PH has a model that allows horrible things to persist despite their effort 3) Therefore, PH should shut themselves down My cash example was a counter-example to 1). I was not saying that PH should definitely not be shutdown, but that the manner the parent came to such a conclusion was flawed. Specifically for PH, we don't know exactly what's happening on their servers. How many illegal videos have been taken down? How many fell through the cracks? How many accounts have been banned? That's why I suggested that PH should be challenged in court, where evidence can be presented and an informed conclusion can be made. Otherwise, you are not weighing severity against benefits; you are just weighing your intuitions.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  It's horrible and unfortunate, but there are a lot of people who actively try and engage in these behaviors and will spend effort to work around and within these systems/moderation efforts. Shutting it down would only cause something else to spring up

elric 6y ago

I doubt PH is making money from CP. It's probably hard to break down the revenue generated by individual videos, but I'm assuming that what little CP there is on PH is in the unverified user generated pool. Users can't pay for that on PH, and I suspect that if PH makes money in other ways (advertising and whatnot), that the audience watching these videos is not big enough to make them any money.

kelnos 6y ago

Straw man. We're talking about copyright infringement, not child porn. Invoking "think of the children" is a cheap way to inflame emotions about a topic to get the knee-jerk reaction you want. Regardless... it depends. Are they making a good-faith effort to remove that content from their platform, but sometimes come up short? That's to be expected, but I'd want some commitment that they're working to improve. Did they email me and say "hey, we like child porn and making money off of it"? Ok, yeah, then I'd cut them off. If I suspected something fishy was going on but wasn't sure? I'd report what I knew to the police and let them do a proper investigation. I wouldn't want to destroy someone's business based only on my suspicions. It's not ok for the legal system to do that, so why would it be ok for me to do that? The burden of proof should still be "beyond a reasonable doubt", and the best place to determine that is still the courts, as imperfect as they can be at times.

neaden 6y ago
"Mastercard Inc and Visa Inc on Thursday stopped processing payments on Pornhub after a New York Times article said many videos posted on the adult website depicted sexual assault of children" Child Porn is explicitly the reason they did this.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Not sure what your point is, here. I was responding to a question about what I would do if I found out that a hypothetical client of mine was making money off child porn. And regardless, my questions still stand: was PornHub removing those videos promptly when made aware of them, and making a good-faith effort to ensure they didn't get re-uploaded? Article doesn't dive into those details. If they were, I think a private entity taking an action that could cripple their business would be akin to law enforcement shutting them down without due process or the ability to appeal. Again, it seems "child porn" is just being used as the "can't argue with our actions because think of the children" conversation-ender it's usually used as. Edit: Re-reading my response, I'm not sure where I got the bit about how we're talking about copyright infringement. Possible I was reading HN a lot that day and got my wires crossed between articles. But I think the rest of my comment stands on its own.

iamben 6y ago

A quick Google reveals it to be a real problem on Facebook, their properties and their messenger services. 12 million images removed last year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mnunez/2019/11/13/facebook-instagram-child-porn-removal-mark-zuckerberg-ook-and-instagram-was-wider-than-believed/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mnunez/2019/11/13/facebook-inst... - but it hasn't stopped people advertising on FB. Surely here it's a case of people rolling the two into one - "people who look at/work with porn must be sleazy" - rather than objectively seeing PH as a business that doesn't want illegal content on its platform anymore than FB does?