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I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site

I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site on the web would be immune to such a piece, but I guess I was wrong. How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably a majority of them, but that wasn't enough to stop the moral panic I guess. As a side note, I think Reddit should now tread very carefully. PornHub had a lot more verification in place for people uploading porn, and even they've now been neutered by a hit piece. Hell, Reddit is somehow still in the iOS App Store despite having copious amounts of porn (and yes, underage porn too even if Reddit will deny it). They're just an opinion columnist's penstroke away from the mob coming to roost.

bnt 6y ago
What’s worse, Reddit disables NSFW/porn content in Incognito on iOS Safari and prompts you to install the app. How that got past Apple is beyond me.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  More evidence that Reddit hate their users. Make something people don't want and force them to use it by building an evil moat?
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    Every platform that grows large/ is successful will eventually "hate it's users" as it needs to be profitable. Currently that means, at least for the solved version, invading privacy/showing ads/selling user information.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  Apple don't have any editorial control of iOS Safari, and I doubt they'd ever reject an app because of a website trying to force you to use it.
  - pr0zac 6y ago
    I believe the point they are trying to make is Reddit is tying access to pornography to installing the app, thus making an explicit connection between porn and their app, while Apple bans apps featuring adult content from the app store completely.
    - ascagnel_ 6y ago
      That ban has been leaky for a while -- HBO & Cinemax have carried pornographic content for decades, yet both have apps in the App Store. On top of that, you could buy HBO & Cinemax directly from Apple before the launch of HBO MAX earlier this year.
      - barbecue_sauce 6y ago
        It’s a stretch to call anything on HBO or Cinemax pornographic.
        310260 6y ago
        I dunno. Cinemax had the reputation of being "Skinemax" for a while. They've moved out of the business though.
        bigbubba 6y ago
        Cinemax at least shows content that is softcore erotica by any definition. Though from what my [dead] sibling comment says, maybe they no longer have this sort of programming.
        ascagnel_ 6y ago
        From looking over their Wikipedia entry, it looks like Cinemax has backed away from adult content, but the last time I was a subscriber (around 2016/2017), their app had a less-than-obvious "late night" section buried in its navigation.
- tt433 6y ago
  Does Safari have a "use desktop site" option?
  - bnt 6y ago
    Interesting, forcing mobile Safari to pretend it’s a desktop solves the issue.
    - tt433 6y ago
      Yes, unfortunately reddit pays engineers to obfuscate use cases so they can push notifications and steal your attention. The mobile app didn't even have (lasi I checked) a (n intuitive) way to get to r/friends short of actually clicking on a link to that feed a user has posted. The lights are on but it seems no one is home
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Best of all, it promises it's anonymous if you install the app.
  - mtnygard 6y ago
    That seems to be both an implausible claim and hard for a user to verify.
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  IIRC iOS rule is that adult content can’t be discoverable. That’s why NSFW subreddits don’t autocomplete, for example.
- dutchmartin 6y ago
  They do for their current site, but old.Reddit.com is still available with all content unblocked.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  That websites can tell whether a user is using incognito mode is an egregious browser bug.
lrae 6y ago
Wouldn't be the worst thing to happen though, would be great to have a reddit alternative that isn't full of expelled extremists.
Bootvis 6y ago
Why do you consider it a hit piece? The main allegation that illegal content was on PornHub is based on facts, right?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- miracle2k 6y ago
  Illegal content is on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. The question is if and when it is removed. There are people accusing all of those sites of irresponsibility when it comes to moderating. But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of. More generally, the question is if a porn-site that allows anyone to upload stuff should be legally viable. You may feel that it should not. But make no mistake, Laila Mickelwait wants to shutdown the porn industry, not improve Pornhub.
  - Raphmedia 6y ago
    > But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of. There seem to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did remove illegal content they became aware of.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    > But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of. It's delusional to think that Pornhub did not know about this content. They only cared when the credit card companies threatened to withhold payments.
    - totony 6y ago
      This is clearly false, they've claimed to be using a lot of technologies to preventively detect these issues. Visa has threatened to destroy not only Pornhub, but the whole parent company now. They'll just shut down Pornhub before destroying their company. Looking forward to the next russian-hosted site. It will surely be better, right?
Raphmedia 6y ago
To say this is a hit piece against PornHub is to oversimplify the issue. The parent company MindGeek (Revenue: 460 million USD) formerly known as ManWin has been receiving such criticisms for years now. This is not a hit-piece against a small streaming start-up. It's a wake-up call to monitor a tech giant. https://nymag.com/news/features/70985/ https://nymag.com/news/features/70985/ 2011 https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/porn-corporations-stop-selling-rape-fantasies https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/porn-corporations-sto... 2012 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-... 2014 etc.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Jon Ronson's podcast "The Butterfly Effect" also does a great job of breaking down how damaging MindGeek's practices have been to workers and legitimate players in the industry: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ronson-Audiobook/B073JS84YF?qid=1500046538&sr=1-4 https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...
- miracle2k 6y ago
  These seem all very different critiques. The Nick Kristof article is based on the work of Laila Mickelwait, who has for the last couple of years worked tirelessly on her campaign to shutdown Pornhub. I twas her who has surfaced all the victims in the article. Though I doubt she will succeed now, she is very clear that the end-goal is not to monitor Pornhub, but to criminally charge it's owners. This is because a criminal case against them, similar to Backpage, would essentially make all tube-porn sites legal unviable.
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    And a very quick google search confirmed what I suspected: she works for a christian organization. I thought that we had effectively neutered the religious right.
    - Andrex 6y ago
headmelted 6y ago
I might be missing something here, but if that kind of stuff really is on Reddit then I would want them to be made to take responsibility for having it on their site and suffer the consequences if it is not removed and reported to the authorities.
- disiplus 6y ago
  i don't think reddit is hosting underage porn, and im sure there is some subreddit somewhere that has questionable content (the same as there is copyrighted material somewhere deep on youtube) but i don't think that it is so widespread.
  - 9dev 6y ago
    ...just go ahead and scroll through r/gonewild, and you know what the OP meant.
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    Minors are 100% uploading to popular porn subreddits. There might not be a specific r/jailbait any more(and there probably is), but it's definetely still happening. They just have "18" in the title now.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Genuine question: how do you scale content moderation to millions of posts without hiring millions of workers at astronomical cost (who can make mistakes, like we’ve seen with DMCA take down notices, YouTube censorship when not justified, AppStore censorship,even GitHub made these mistakes, etc... some of these mistakes ruin peoples’ livelihoods). Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone?
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    This question presumes that they have some inalienable right to scale despite not having solved this problem
slg 6y ago
You seem to admit that the accusations are valid, but are also claiming that this type of reporting is a hit piece. How do you square those two? Also Reddit has been on the receiving end of this reporting before. That has often resulted in incremental improvements as the worst offending subreddits are banned (there used to be an /r/jailbait for example), but their model often doesn't kill that content or the demand for it and can result in that same content being dispersed among smaller and more niche communities that are able to glide under the radar. Reddit has still thrived throughout all that controversy so I don't think it is as big an existential threat as you claim.
- enumjorge 6y ago
  The entire comment borders on nonsensical. Something about how board members should watch videos of alleged sexual abuse, some of it involving minors, before their companies make decisions that could impact PornHub? What??
  - slg 6y ago
    I think that is an uncharitable interpretation of that comment. I read it as OP saying that those people likely watched unverified content that is now down, not necessarily illegal content. It is basically an accusation of puritanical hypocrisy. However the problem with that accusation is that it is extremely difficult to distinguish the unverified and illegal content, especially at scale, and it is why Pornhub went with this extreme measure to remove all unverified content.
RIMR 6y ago
I don't think that the takeaway from this story should be "sites hosting child pornography should be careful of journalists exposing them". I think the takeaway should be "sites hosting child pornography should stop doing that".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 6y ago
> How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably fewer than have financial interests in Facebook. Probably the most damaging thing PornHub did in response was pointing to the nearly 6 orders of magnitude difference in instances of child sex abuse between themselves and Facebook. Had they not been willing to point out the hypocrisy and how much worse a far more mainstream (and more American) company like Facebook is, they wouldn't need to be destroyed, just mildly symbolically punished as a distraction from the real problem areas.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> They're just an opinion columnist's penstroke away from the mob coming to roost. If Reddit is not doing anything about content with underaged actors, rape, and non-consenting participants, then they should face scrutiny. If someone opened a video store in our city with videos of people's underaged kids, portraying rape, or using footage released without consent. You can bet the local PD would be knocking on their door eventually. There is no reason a corporation should be exempt here.
- OJFord 6y ago
  > If someone opened a video store in our city with videos of people's underaged kids Comparing to Reddit though, I think it's fairer to say something like 'if someone opened a cafe where paedophiles liked to hang out and chat'. Yes you'd absolutely expect police might visit in plain clothes to try to eavesdrop, or even raid the cafe, or whatever, but generally assuming there's no reason to suspect the cafe owner's involvement they'd do so minimising disruption to the business so far as reasonable/practical.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > Comparing to Reddit though, I think it's fairer to say something like 'if someone opened a cafe where paedophiles liked to hang out and chat'. The difference here is Reddit content is persistent and public. If you are in a cafe, your conversations are transient and can only be overheard by your nearest neighbor. Your cafe would have to have a bulletin board or file cabinets where descriptions of content is posted along with where you can get it. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't last too long either.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      Hmm.. Or a 'graffiti wall' where customers are allowed to contribute to the cafes eclectic art, but it's not exactly curated? What I'm getting at is Reddit wasn't started with the idea that it had to vet content, if you put the responsibility for content on the website owner/operator.. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think it's hard to draw a parallel on the high street, just because of the scale of the internet I suppose. A debate society perhaps, that keeps rigorous records - in parliament for example, if a Member said something egregious they'd be personally called out on it, apologies (or resignation) demanded, etc. - but it wouldn't be struck from record. People might also think the Speaker ought to have stepped in sooner, etc., but then I suppose that's the problem again - there is and always has been the expectation of moderation there, the record keeping isn't some passive web form -> database, it's human presence. (I'm honestly not sure where I stand on it, I'm not arguing one way or the other; just thinking - and putting those thoughts into a passive web form -> database that has only some light retrospective moderation. ;))
nipponese 6y ago
Mastercard blocked charges from them and VISA signaled they would do the same. Pretty simple.
manfredo 6y ago
Reddit's strategy is to shift blame to the moderators of the subreddit in question. This is really their biggest innovation, delegating the burden of moderation to the users. Then the Reddit administrators effectively need to manage a much narrower set of users. They don't need to manage the hundreds of thousands of users in /r/news, just the few active moderators. If the NYT or another big outlet publishes a hit pieces, Reddit will just ban or quarantine that particular subreddit. We already saw this play out with The_Donald and a few other subreddits (one on hating fat people, and one with a derogatory slur based on racoons come to mind).
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  In the case of criminal liability, that won't work. That's almost the first lesson you learn as a first year back in law school. You can't contract away criminal liability. If there were child porn found on a sub-reddit for instance, the executives are liable. So you have to work overtime to make sure that stuff isn't on your servers. Or if it is, that you are reporting it in a timely fashion. A situation where a video with 10 views that was on your server for 1 day before you reported to law enforcement will be looked at very differently than dozens of videos, with thousands of views, that were all on your site for an average of 3 months before being reported to law enforcement.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    No, this is why section 230 exists. Sites are not liable for user generated content. Nobody would ever, ever risk of assuming liability for all of the of millions or even billions of users on a web platform.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
twblalock 6y ago
> I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site on the web would be immune to such a piece, but I guess I was wrong. The NYT is among a small subset of papers that is read by elites and captains of industry. Most of the people at the top of large credit card companies heard this from the NYT, not from customer complaints or lower-level employees, and they immediately thought about the PR implications. > How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably a majority of them, but that wasn't enough to stop the moral panic I guess. Who knows? But that's not why they are cutting off payments. They are cutting off payments because associating with a pornography site that was called out in an NYT op-ed is a bad look.
jonnycomputer 6y ago
I think a lot of readers and visitors to Pornhub assumed that Pornhub was reputable (as reputable as a porn site could be), and were shocked by the expose. They could also have legitimate reason to worry that they might be culpable for inadvertently viewing illegal material, and would be angry at Pornhub for exposing them to that risk. And lets' be frank. Most people are pretty uncomfortable about talking about their porn habits. Talking knowledgeably about what is on the site reveals them as a visitor. This is something that is difficult for people to discuss, and will only do so from the most defensible position possible. I am angry at Pornhub too. Stolen content is one thing. But rape and pedophilia is another.
sumedh 6y ago
Its the NY Times article and then Mastercard threatened to cut access to their payment platform which is why Pornhub acted so fast.

bnt 6y ago

What’s worse, Reddit disables NSFW/porn content in Incognito on iOS Safari and prompts you to install the app. How that got past Apple is beyond me.

andy_ppp 6y ago
More evidence that Reddit hate their users. Make something people don't want and force them to use it by building an evil moat?
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Every platform that grows large/ is successful will eventually "hate it's users" as it needs to be profitable. Currently that means, at least for the solved version, invading privacy/showing ads/selling user information.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
Apple don't have any editorial control of iOS Safari, and I doubt they'd ever reject an app because of a website trying to force you to use it.
- pr0zac 6y ago
  I believe the point they are trying to make is Reddit is tying access to pornography to installing the app, thus making an explicit connection between porn and their app, while Apple bans apps featuring adult content from the app store completely.
  - ascagnel_ 6y ago
    That ban has been leaky for a while -- HBO & Cinemax have carried pornographic content for decades, yet both have apps in the App Store. On top of that, you could buy HBO & Cinemax directly from Apple before the launch of HBO MAX earlier this year.
    - barbecue_sauce 6y ago
      It’s a stretch to call anything on HBO or Cinemax pornographic.
      - 310260 6y ago
        I dunno. Cinemax had the reputation of being "Skinemax" for a while. They've moved out of the business though.
      - bigbubba 6y ago
        Cinemax at least shows content that is softcore erotica by any definition. Though from what my [dead] sibling comment says, maybe they no longer have this sort of programming.
        ascagnel_ 6y ago
        From looking over their Wikipedia entry, it looks like Cinemax has backed away from adult content, but the last time I was a subscriber (around 2016/2017), their app had a less-than-obvious "late night" section buried in its navigation.
tt433 6y ago
Does Safari have a "use desktop site" option?
- bnt 6y ago
  Interesting, forcing mobile Safari to pretend it’s a desktop solves the issue.
  - tt433 6y ago
    Yes, unfortunately reddit pays engineers to obfuscate use cases so they can push notifications and steal your attention. The mobile app didn't even have (lasi I checked) a (n intuitive) way to get to r/friends short of actually clicking on a link to that feed a user has posted. The lights are on but it seems no one is home
rootsudo 6y ago
Best of all, it promises it's anonymous if you install the app.
- mtnygard 6y ago
  That seems to be both an implausible claim and hard for a user to verify.
TechBro8615 6y ago
IIRC iOS rule is that adult content can’t be discoverable. That’s why NSFW subreddits don’t autocomplete, for example.
dutchmartin 6y ago
They do for their current site, but old.Reddit.com is still available with all content unblocked.
quotemstr 6y ago
That websites can tell whether a user is using incognito mode is an egregious browser bug.

lrae 6y ago

Wouldn't be the worst thing to happen though, would be great to have a reddit alternative that isn't full of expelled extremists.

Bootvis 6y ago

Why do you consider it a hit piece? The main allegation that illegal content was on PornHub is based on facts, right?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
miracle2k 6y ago
Illegal content is on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. The question is if and when it is removed. There are people accusing all of those sites of irresponsibility when it comes to moderating. But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of. More generally, the question is if a porn-site that allows anyone to upload stuff should be legally viable. You may feel that it should not. But make no mistake, Laila Mickelwait wants to shutdown the porn industry, not improve Pornhub.
- Raphmedia 6y ago
  > But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of. There seem to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did remove illegal content they became aware of.
- twblalock 6y ago
  > But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of. It's delusional to think that Pornhub did not know about this content. They only cared when the credit card companies threatened to withhold payments.
  - totony 6y ago
    This is clearly false, they've claimed to be using a lot of technologies to preventively detect these issues. Visa has threatened to destroy not only Pornhub, but the whole parent company now. They'll just shut down Pornhub before destroying their company. Looking forward to the next russian-hosted site. It will surely be better, right?

Raphmedia 6y ago

To say this is a hit piece against PornHub is to oversimplify the issue. The parent company MindGeek (Revenue: 460 million USD) formerly known as ManWin has been receiving such criticisms for years now. This is not a hit-piece against a small streaming start-up. It's a wake-up call to monitor a tech giant. https://nymag.com/news/features/70985/ https://nymag.com/news/features/70985/ 2011 https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/porn-corporations-stop-selling-rape-fantasies https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/porn-corporations-sto... 2012 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-... 2014 etc.

claudeganon 6y ago
Jon Ronson's podcast "The Butterfly Effect" also does a great job of breaking down how damaging MindGeek's practices have been to workers and legitimate players in the industry: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ronson-Audiobook/B073JS84YF?qid=1500046538&sr=1-4 https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...
miracle2k 6y ago
These seem all very different critiques. The Nick Kristof article is based on the work of Laila Mickelwait, who has for the last couple of years worked tirelessly on her campaign to shutdown Pornhub. I twas her who has surfaced all the victims in the article. Though I doubt she will succeed now, she is very clear that the end-goal is not to monitor Pornhub, but to criminally charge it's owners. This is because a criminal case against them, similar to Backpage, would essentially make all tube-porn sites legal unviable.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  And a very quick google search confirmed what I suspected: she works for a christian organization. I thought that we had effectively neutered the religious right.
  - Andrex 6y ago

headmelted 6y ago

I might be missing something here, but if that kind of stuff really is on Reddit then I would want them to be made to take responsibility for having it on their site and suffer the consequences if it is not removed and reported to the authorities.

disiplus 6y ago
i don't think reddit is hosting underage porn, and im sure there is some subreddit somewhere that has questionable content (the same as there is copyrighted material somewhere deep on youtube) but i don't think that it is so widespread.
- 9dev 6y ago
  ...just go ahead and scroll through r/gonewild, and you know what the OP meant.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  Minors are 100% uploading to popular porn subreddits. There might not be a specific r/jailbait any more(and there probably is), but it's definetely still happening. They just have "18" in the title now.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
Genuine question: how do you scale content moderation to millions of posts without hiring millions of workers at astronomical cost (who can make mistakes, like we’ve seen with DMCA take down notices, YouTube censorship when not justified, AppStore censorship,even GitHub made these mistakes, etc... some of these mistakes ruin peoples’ livelihoods). Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone?
- Larrikin 6y ago
  This question presumes that they have some inalienable right to scale despite not having solved this problem

slg 6y ago

You seem to admit that the accusations are valid, but are also claiming that this type of reporting is a hit piece. How do you square those two? Also Reddit has been on the receiving end of this reporting before. That has often resulted in incremental improvements as the worst offending subreddits are banned (there used to be an /r/jailbait for example), but their model often doesn't kill that content or the demand for it and can result in that same content being dispersed among smaller and more niche communities that are able to glide under the radar. Reddit has still thrived throughout all that controversy so I don't think it is as big an existential threat as you claim.

enumjorge 6y ago
The entire comment borders on nonsensical. Something about how board members should watch videos of alleged sexual abuse, some of it involving minors, before their companies make decisions that could impact PornHub? What??
- slg 6y ago
  I think that is an uncharitable interpretation of that comment. I read it as OP saying that those people likely watched unverified content that is now down, not necessarily illegal content. It is basically an accusation of puritanical hypocrisy. However the problem with that accusation is that it is extremely difficult to distinguish the unverified and illegal content, especially at scale, and it is why Pornhub went with this extreme measure to remove all unverified content.

RIMR 6y ago

I don't think that the takeaway from this story should be "sites hosting child pornography should be careful of journalists exposing them". I think the takeaway should be "sites hosting child pornography should stop doing that".

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dragonwriter 6y ago

> How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably fewer than have financial interests in Facebook. Probably the most damaging thing PornHub did in response was pointing to the nearly 6 orders of magnitude difference in instances of child sex abuse between themselves and Facebook. Had they not been willing to point out the hypocrisy and how much worse a far more mainstream (and more American) company like Facebook is, they wouldn't need to be destroyed, just mildly symbolically punished as a distraction from the real problem areas.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> They're just an opinion columnist's penstroke away from the mob coming to roost. If Reddit is not doing anything about content with underaged actors, rape, and non-consenting participants, then they should face scrutiny. If someone opened a video store in our city with videos of people's underaged kids, portraying rape, or using footage released without consent. You can bet the local PD would be knocking on their door eventually. There is no reason a corporation should be exempt here.

OJFord 6y ago
> If someone opened a video store in our city with videos of people's underaged kids Comparing to Reddit though, I think it's fairer to say something like 'if someone opened a cafe where paedophiles liked to hang out and chat'. Yes you'd absolutely expect police might visit in plain clothes to try to eavesdrop, or even raid the cafe, or whatever, but generally assuming there's no reason to suspect the cafe owner's involvement they'd do so minimising disruption to the business so far as reasonable/practical.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Comparing to Reddit though, I think it's fairer to say something like 'if someone opened a cafe where paedophiles liked to hang out and chat'. The difference here is Reddit content is persistent and public. If you are in a cafe, your conversations are transient and can only be overheard by your nearest neighbor. Your cafe would have to have a bulletin board or file cabinets where descriptions of content is posted along with where you can get it. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't last too long either.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Hmm.. Or a 'graffiti wall' where customers are allowed to contribute to the cafes eclectic art, but it's not exactly curated? What I'm getting at is Reddit wasn't started with the idea that it had to vet content, if you put the responsibility for content on the website owner/operator.. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think it's hard to draw a parallel on the high street, just because of the scale of the internet I suppose. A debate society perhaps, that keeps rigorous records - in parliament for example, if a Member said something egregious they'd be personally called out on it, apologies (or resignation) demanded, etc. - but it wouldn't be struck from record. People might also think the Speaker ought to have stepped in sooner, etc., but then I suppose that's the problem again - there is and always has been the expectation of moderation there, the record keeping isn't some passive web form -> database, it's human presence. (I'm honestly not sure where I stand on it, I'm not arguing one way or the other; just thinking - and putting those thoughts into a passive web form -> database that has only some light retrospective moderation. ;))

nipponese 6y ago

Mastercard blocked charges from them and VISA signaled they would do the same. Pretty simple.

manfredo 6y ago

Reddit's strategy is to shift blame to the moderators of the subreddit in question. This is really their biggest innovation, delegating the burden of moderation to the users. Then the Reddit administrators effectively need to manage a much narrower set of users. They don't need to manage the hundreds of thousands of users in /r/news, just the few active moderators. If the NYT or another big outlet publishes a hit pieces, Reddit will just ban or quarantine that particular subreddit. We already saw this play out with The_Donald and a few other subreddits (one on hating fat people, and one with a derogatory slur based on racoons come to mind).

bilbo0s 6y ago
In the case of criminal liability, that won't work. That's almost the first lesson you learn as a first year back in law school. You can't contract away criminal liability. If there were child porn found on a sub-reddit for instance, the executives are liable. So you have to work overtime to make sure that stuff isn't on your servers. Or if it is, that you are reporting it in a timely fashion. A situation where a video with 10 views that was on your server for 1 day before you reported to law enforcement will be looked at very differently than dozens of videos, with thousands of views, that were all on your site for an average of 3 months before being reported to law enforcement.
- manfredo 6y ago
  No, this is why section 230 exists. Sites are not liable for user generated content. Nobody would ever, ever risk of assuming liability for all of the of millions or even billions of users on a web platform.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

twblalock 6y ago

> I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site on the web would be immune to such a piece, but I guess I was wrong. The NYT is among a small subset of papers that is read by elites and captains of industry. Most of the people at the top of large credit card companies heard this from the NYT, not from customer complaints or lower-level employees, and they immediately thought about the PR implications. > How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably a majority of them, but that wasn't enough to stop the moral panic I guess. Who knows? But that's not why they are cutting off payments. They are cutting off payments because associating with a pornography site that was called out in an NYT op-ed is a bad look.

jonnycomputer 6y ago

I think a lot of readers and visitors to Pornhub assumed that Pornhub was reputable (as reputable as a porn site could be), and were shocked by the expose. They could also have legitimate reason to worry that they might be culpable for inadvertently viewing illegal material, and would be angry at Pornhub for exposing them to that risk. And lets' be frank. Most people are pretty uncomfortable about talking about their porn habits. Talking knowledgeably about what is on the site reveals them as a visitor. This is something that is difficult for people to discuss, and will only do so from the most defensible position possible. I am angry at Pornhub too. Stolen content is one thing. But rape and pedophilia is another.

sumedh 6y ago

Its the NY Times article and then Mastercard threatened to cut access to their payment platform which is why Pornhub acted so fast.