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Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published

by twic 5y ago

Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking. How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company changes its rules'? In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. Was there legal advice? Political pressure? Regulatory pressure? All of those would be much more material than a piece in a newspaper.

dqv 5y ago
Rumor has it that OF is the next target of Exodus Cry
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry “ Exodus Cry is a non-profit advocacy organization seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. The organization originally developed out of a weekly prayer group founded in 2007 by Benjamin Nolot, a filmmaker and member of the charismatic Christian International House of Prayer.”
  - sschueller 5y ago
    Maybe we should get a law passed making it illegal to fund any non-profit church with a credit card...
    - hulitu 5y ago
      You cannot abolish the church.
    - brodouevencode 5y ago
      In the churches of which I've been a member, most tithes and donations come in cash. More orthodox Christians won't even have credit cards because the consumerist nature is contrary to scripture.
      - sschueller 5y ago
        OK, we pass strict money laundry requirements for non profit churches.
  - SauciestGNU 5y ago
    As an interesting aside, the Christian International House of Prayer was a substantial mover behind the proposed Ugandan law to execute LGBTQIA+ people.
imglorp 5y ago
Yes, there was funded pressure; see the tweet thread.
_fat_santa 5y ago
You could say that the NYT piece was the spark that eventually led to the rule change. I doubt someone read the column and made the rule change immediately, but it probably sparked dialog within MasterCard that eventually led to the rule change.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  The tweet that comes right after is much more relevant imo: > One of the primary sources in Kristof’s article is Traffickinghub founder Laila Mickelwait. She also works for the group Exodus Cry, a Christian group that is among other things anti-sex, anti-homosexuality and, naturally, anti-semitic. While the article itself was a spark, this group has been lobbying for years and pushing from every imaginable direction, including lobbying payment processors and suing companies left and right. So yes, the article was just one tiny piece of the puzzle, but Exodus Cry is the real puppet master.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    Are they anti-semitic, or is it just ad hominem?
    - profgerm 5y ago
      I'm not terribly familiar with the group, but that whole list appears to be ad-hominems demanding absolute purity. Or at the very least should be taken with a large grain of salt. I suspect the "anti-Semitic" bit comes from the founder comparing abortion to the Holocaust [0], which is... a deeply stretched interpretation. As far as anti-LGBT goes... yeah, they're a conservative Christian organization, they're not likely to have a Pride float. But it's not a common "anti-" group that goes out of their way to have a Statement of Inclusion [1] included in their FAQs, in my opinion. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry [1]: https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf
- hulitu 5y ago
  Or was paid by these people to justify the purge.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cm277 5y ago
Genuine question: are the payment processors legally exposed because of the purpose of transactions going on in their system? If so, this seems to be the main problem --I mean if social media platforms can absolve responsibility for content, Mastercard/Visa absolutely should as well....
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  The issue is that EU and Australia have regulated interchange fees for MasterCard/Visa, costing them gobs of money and value. The US doesn’t need to fine or litigate them if they want to penalize them heavily, they can just pass a “consumer protection bill” (so Walmart and others can pay <1% instead of ~2% on all credit card payments).
  - hocuspocus 5y ago
    The interchange goes to the card issuer, not to the scheme. Visa and MasterCard fees are the smallest part of the overall fee charged by the payment processor. (That said it might be higher in the US, I don't know).
    - Scoundreller 5y ago
      A lot of the incentive to pay by card evaporates if the vendor pushes the fee to the customer. The incentive to issue cards evaporates when there’s less fee to collect. Both would be bad upstream for visa/Mc/Amex.
    - JackFaker 5y ago
      Works mostly the same in the US
masklinn 5y ago
> How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company changes its rules'? In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill. By acting "proactively" on anything which smells of controversial or bad PR (and nothing does that more than accusations of child trafficking, not even actual child trafficking), regulators see "self regulation" and go look at something else.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  > The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill. The actual profit in this specific case might be small but there are lot of money in things related to adult content. They are all now looking for a trustworthy processor. Also even for non adult content lot of people will prefer having payment processing partner who will not kick you out based on some newspaper image. There are lot of grey area in most of the business, specially the biggest ones.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  Very insightful comment. When you run a gazillion dollar company, you don't care about a billion here or there from porn sites, you care about not losing your gazillion dollar business. There are plenty of examples where CEOs were not conservative enough and it cost them big time - just look at Facebook's loosey goosey approach to political advertising, which in the end turned the entire country against them. From a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial hit but continue to run your business without any additional regulatory oversight.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > From a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial hit but continue to run your business without any additional regulatory oversight. Indeed, staying on the down low and out of regulator minds (and crosshairs) is one of those "cost of doing business" things older companies do.
Mindwipe 5y ago
Specifically the how is covered here. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-pornhub-millions-unauthorized-video-removed-mastercard-visa-2021-6 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-...
barnacled 5y ago
>huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. The same newspaper ran similar tactics against YouTube which resulted in colossal changes. These kinds of stories have an enormous impact, magnified I think by company's (in the case of YouTube, advertisers, in the case of OF, payment providers and investors) being terrified of snowballing bad PR in social media. It's strange but in the modern world yes, 'old media' can have transformative impact on corporations.
- hulitu 5y ago
  it has nothing to do with media. They just use the media to justify their strategy.
webkike 5y ago
According to the thread > Which, to be clear, they kinda were. PornHub was notoriously bad among the tube sites for its reckless lack of content moderation and exploitation of the people whose videos ended up there. Because of the story, Visa and MasterCard both cut PornHub off. This should be fairly easy to verify and would corroborate the thread
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  NYT article came out on Friday, December 4. By Thursday of the next week, December 10th, Visa and MC had cut them off. Discover had followed the next day, the 11th. The Washington Post article linked below includes a statement from MC which reads: "Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site. As a result, and in accordance with our policies, we instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance." See: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/pornhub-crackdown-credit-card-companies-cuts-sex-workers-livelihoods-n1251246 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/pornhub-crack... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/10/pornhub-mastercard-ban-mindgeek/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/10/pornhub-m...
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  The issue is that they "were" in the same way that the ocean does indeed "contain" fecal matter in it. I doubt their moderation was "reckless" For how many actual offending videos they are compared to the sheer amount of uploads the site had. Any and all websites that allow user published content runs into this issue. It's just a matter of how fine a comb the investigations want to put on it.
  - webkike 5y ago
    You’re missing that this is in comparison to other tube sites. There is a direct comparison here between the moderation or porn hub and other websites, and the claim is that porn hubs moderation was worse. It’s fine to say that content moderation is hard, but it’s much harder to justify doing a crappy job in comparison to other content moderators, especially those in the same space as you.
runawaybottle 5y ago
There’s more money to be made as an acceptable platform that isn’t seen as a porn site. Many women on Twitch already do sexualized streams. Twitch is not seen as taboo. It’s just a bigger market when people can feel like they aren’t a complete sex worker, and can actually share that they are on OnlyFans, same way they can share their Twitch.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  The not being seen as a porn site ship has sailed for OnlyFans.
crazygringo 5y ago
Honestly, in this particular case huge companies did make changes on the basis of this newspaper column. It's not common, but it's what happened here. It was an incredibly visible and influential accusation that seemingly came out of nowhere from arguably the most prestigious newspaper in the country, and legitimate businesses like PornHub and MasterCard are terrified of brand association with child porn and sex trafficking -- if those stuck, it's corporate suicide. You're right that most opinion pieces don't make a shred of difference. But this particular one, because of the seriousness of the allegation combined with its plausibility, did in a big way.
- fouric 5y ago
  You say "it's what happened here" and "But this particular one, because of the seriousness of the allegation combined with its plausibility, did in a big way" - but you haven't actually provided any evidence for it, just repeated assertions that it's true. Can you show anything aside from just speculation?
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    It's literally been all over the news, with journalists and analysts directly linking the column with the changes at both PornHub in December and at MasterCard in April -- and these are the people who follow this professionally. You can Google it yourself trivially, you don't need to ask someone on HN to get it. But if you somehow don't trust that and you're asking for someone to report on the confidential goings-on of internal meetings at MasterCard and nothing else will satisfy you, you're not going to get that here on HN.
    - navait 5y ago
      Ok, well for those of us that didn't read the exact same set of articles you did, you sound like a guy making stuff up...so send some links.
      - angus-prune 5y ago
varelse 5y ago
All it took was one useful billionaire... https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr/Bill-Ackman-Sent-a-Text-to-the-CEO-of-Mastercard-What-Happened-Next-Is-a-Parable-for-ESG https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr...
- throwawayay02 5y ago
  Insane.
- ectopod 5y ago
  That's the problem with wealth inequality: outsize wealth comes with outsize political power. The money doesn't matter.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > Mickelwait, however, says there was a “fatal flaw in that they put a download button on every video.” Under current law, any site that transfers pornographic content is responsible for verifying the age of the people in it. > “Because they had a download button that actually transfers from their servers onto the devices of millions — I think it was up to 130 million a day in 2020 — of visitors to the site, they have been responsible this whole time for record keeping. So what that means is they violated the criminal code of the United States millions of times, tens of millions of times,” she says. Is this actually true? How is streaming not transferring under the law? Edit: This article is also interesting in that it characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things.
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    > How is streaming not transferring under the law? I'm not sure if this has been tested in courts, but there seems to be a legal theory that a streaming function corresponds to broadcasting (only creating transient copies, if any, by default) while a download function corresponds to publication (creating a permanent copy by default). I'm not sure which definitions apply to 2257, but US copyright law says that copies are "material objects [...] in which a work is fixed". So if your system is only designed to transfer into volatile/transient storage, you can apparently argue that you're not responsible for creating copies. I suspect a similar distinction is being made here. > Edit: This article is also interesting in that it characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things. This kind of laundering is common in opinionated outlets, and ostensibly neutral ones aren't immune either. Keep an eye out for sources being described with phrases like "concerned parent" or "concerned resident", for example.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
relax88 5y ago
This is how: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Trafficker...
jarcane 5y ago
It's not entirely just because of the NYT article, but the article was the big PR victory for a massive and almost entirely fabricated campaign against Pornhub run by a religious wingnut masquerading as a human rights activist. Kristof's piece wasn't the first I'd heard of the "Traffickinghub" campaign but it seemed to be the first time a lot of people around me did. What wasn't widely known at the time was that basically all their "data" was either exaggerated or outright fabrication, with near-zero sources, and backed by religious fundamentalists. That didn't start coming out until the damage had already been done. "Won't somebody think of the children?!" works every fucking time though.
vlunkr 5y ago
That's the first leap in logic, the second is this: > The new MasterCard rules are a direct result of this, which basically means an overwrought Christian anti-sex fever dream is now dictating sexual content online. That's right, the state of everything was "dictated" by a guy writing an article.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  The article itself was also a side-effect, not the source. Exodus Cry has been lobbying everyone such as payment processors, rich donors, advertisers, as well as NYT (getting them to write the article). So article wasn't the source, it was just another piece in the path of Exodus Cry's rampage. They have a huge legal team and they've been attacking this from every imaginable angle.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    So the article was paid and that in itself is no problem ?
    - ehsankia 5y ago
      I didn't claim it was necessarily paid, just that they were convinced or tricked into it. The piece itself isn't problematic at the surface, putting an end to human trafficking is a good thing, it issue is the people behind the organization and their motives, which NYT either didn't know or ignored.
tootie 5y ago
I understand the thread, but if Kristof's reporting is accurate, then you can hardly blame him. He's not responsible if payment providers decide to freak out over potential liability. Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  I don't blame the reporting rather than usual human understanding that never learned how statistics worked. Someone peed in the ocean and they are draining the entire sea to "fix it". That's not the fault of the pee-er nor even the person who yelled "someone peed". It's the fault of people who didn't understand what that meant before draining some 20% of the matter on earth. Until that happens, pretty much every single website with user generated content is at risk in some degree. >Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators. OG does in fact verify every creator. The problem is no company at that scale is going to site down and review every single piece of content they post after that verification which may or may not include other participants that they could not verify. That's what this policy change wants to enforce (which any webmaster would know is prohibitively expensive to do without being Google).
surge 5y ago
It's the same crap as the ad-pocalypse. Journalists with an agenda use a disingenuous tactic, if they have a problem with a person or entity, they'll call up their sponsors, business partners, vendors, etc, and say "we're writing an article on X's platform which has been found to have (controversial material framed in a negative context), are we to believe that you're supportive and would your company care to comment." This leads to the company panicking, going completely defensive, and killing all contracts, services, and pulling sponsors or place of employment from the person whose being targeted in what is often just a hit piece with unverified out of context accusations. So yes, journalists, especially those that work for outlets like the NYT's can have someone's sponsors, money streams, etc pulled out from them by asking so called "innocent" questions in a passive aggressive way. They've done this numerous times not even giving those accused to respond, sometimes the article never even comes out. It's one of the abuses of power you can see in journalism today, where agenda driven journalism is used as a weapon to get someone removed from society, bank accounts closed, etc. Some targets are too big for it to work, or can lose a few sponsors, but they do it all the time.
- bostonalt 5y ago
  Defending CP and revenge porn is such an odd hill to die on. Please tell me what was wrong about the NYT's opinion piece? That it painted a visceral picture of a literal child whose exploitations continued to be put on PornHub to profit off of? You give a lot of generic accusations without anything substantial. Are you upset that companies now have to answer for their actions? Why is that a bad thing? A private company isn't a government, if MasterCard or Visa doesn't want to do business with certain risk prone sectors why should they be forced to? Your reason for being upset is frankly odd and extremely dismissive of real issues, that companies are profiting off of CP, but decide to get upset that a news story can effect the public zeitgeist?
  - Stevvo 5y ago
    Nobody is defending CP and revenge porn.
  - dbspin 5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
Child sexual exploitation is pretty much the worst thing you can do as far as society is concerned. Such people are considered low in prison. So I think the possible brand damage alone could have caused a panic, simply because this particular type of damage could be absolutely horrendous.
acdha 5y ago
The other question to ask is whether that piece came out of the blue or because someone was talking it up with Kristof. The author of that twitter thread thinks it’s inspired by an evangelical group (Exodus Cry) and it seems highly unlikely that they’d only be talking with him. It seems more likely that companies like MasterCard are hearing from them, politicians who are getting lobbied by their supporters, etc. and the NYT editorial was more like the final straw than the trigger. It’s important to note that this isn’t wrong or malicious: many things most of us approve of (e.g. ending child labor, environmental reforms, banning dogfights, etc.) followed the same process. The concern is transparency and whether it’s effective at the stated goals: for example, I think trafficking is evil but I also think that the best way to support it is by ensuring fewer people are financially desperate rather than driving them underground where abuse is more likely and harder to prevent.
- xg15 5y ago
  But the thread wasn't defending trafficking. It's claiming that the forces that push the anti-trafficking rules have a hidden agenda, which is not about trafficking at all: They want to get rid of the whole sex industry for religious reasons, specifically including the legal and consensual part. That's a different goal altogether.
  - acdha 5y ago
    I’m aware: that’s the reason why I mentioned that topic - transparency is what helps the reader know why a topic is getting a spike in coverage and let’s them decide whether they share all of the goals of the groups pushing it.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The problem with that kind of argument is that these rules are what everyone pushes to deter traffickers. No one has seriously managed to come up with a viable alternate policy that averts this kind of collateral damage on bona-fide sex work. It's much like saying that all the efforts that are now saving elephants from being poached to extinction are just some shadowy "anti-ivory agenda" rather than being undertaken for the sake of the elephants. Terribly bad faith argument.
ballenf 5y ago
I'd never heard of Exodus Cry mentioned in the thread, so looked at their website. They seem to have made themselves a target of accusations from Pornhub as a result of the NYT article. Here is their statement on the site that addresses some of the things presented as fact in the Twitter thread: https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf I'm sure there's much more to the story, but thought it worth at least looking at the vision, etc. from this company given the accusations made against them.
nindalf 5y ago
> In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. You'd think, but no. In my experience working at a large tech company, executives cared a lot about what the New York Times in particular thought. A piece published by them would have immediate attention from those executives, and it'd be our problem to respond, even if the original article wasn't well founded. Once I figured out how much leadership cared about NYT, I even justified one engineering decision based on "what would NYT say". And it worked. It doesn't surprise me in the least that MasterCard cares so much about what the NYT prints. > Political pressure? Regulatory pressure? You're on the right track. If you think (correctly IMO) that politicians and regulators read NYT, then pressure from these groups is going to come soon after the NYT piece is published. Best take action before that happens.
- Terretta 5y ago
  I intended to post this, but this is well said. Such an article is forwarded to “leadership” and “the board”. Boards in particular, who hire and fire the leadership, prefer collecting advisory cheques without getting any side looks at the country club.
stefantalpalaru 5y ago
> Political pressure? Probably. Hunter Biden had a PornHub account where he uploaded incest porn with his underage niece: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/huge-breaking-exclusive-hunter-biden-pornhub-account-uploaded-personal-porn-including-family-members/ https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/huge-breaking-exclu...
dzonga 5y ago
journalists, are in a position of major influence but never having skin in the game. these are the same NYT journalists wo advocated for the Iraqi war. yet never been to Iraq and speak of whiff or arabic. it's a system where itself reinforces, the gvt / other actors influence the media and the media influences policy. yet those people don't suffer any consequences at all. those are the same people at NYT that slandered Bernie and propped up HC and wake up amused that Trump won. I'm all for freedom of speech, however journalists should be held to a higher standard. coz honestly most journalists except the local ones doing groundwork are pure scum.
plusbryan 5y ago
Agreed. Onlyfans is probably large enough that if they told their customers they could only accept visa or crypto payments that they would lose a lot less business than if they jettisoned their (core?) business. In fact, MasterCard might lose enough business that they might reconsider. So this can’t be the full story.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company changes its rules'? Easy. the reporter isnt just launching the page and waiting for a reaction. They probably used those accounts to report to authorities and timed their story with an expected result from the investigation. There's no magic to it except for the ability to post the news piece and have the public think "they are just reporting on it"

by twic 5y ago

dqv 5y ago

Rumor has it that OF is the next target of Exodus Cry

Pet_Ant 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry “ Exodus Cry is a non-profit advocacy organization seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. The organization originally developed out of a weekly prayer group founded in 2007 by Benjamin Nolot, a filmmaker and member of the charismatic Christian International House of Prayer.”
- sschueller 5y ago
  Maybe we should get a law passed making it illegal to fund any non-profit church with a credit card...
  - hulitu 5y ago
    You cannot abolish the church.
  - brodouevencode 5y ago
    In the churches of which I've been a member, most tithes and donations come in cash. More orthodox Christians won't even have credit cards because the consumerist nature is contrary to scripture.
    - sschueller 5y ago
      OK, we pass strict money laundry requirements for non profit churches.
- SauciestGNU 5y ago
  As an interesting aside, the Christian International House of Prayer was a substantial mover behind the proposed Ugandan law to execute LGBTQIA+ people.

imglorp 5y ago

Yes, there was funded pressure; see the tweet thread.

_fat_santa 5y ago

You could say that the NYT piece was the spark that eventually led to the rule change. I doubt someone read the column and made the rule change immediately, but it probably sparked dialog within MasterCard that eventually led to the rule change.

ehsankia 5y ago
The tweet that comes right after is much more relevant imo: > One of the primary sources in Kristof’s article is Traffickinghub founder Laila Mickelwait. She also works for the group Exodus Cry, a Christian group that is among other things anti-sex, anti-homosexuality and, naturally, anti-semitic. While the article itself was a spark, this group has been lobbying for years and pushing from every imaginable direction, including lobbying payment processors and suing companies left and right. So yes, the article was just one tiny piece of the puzzle, but Exodus Cry is the real puppet master.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  Are they anti-semitic, or is it just ad hominem?
  - profgerm 5y ago
    I'm not terribly familiar with the group, but that whole list appears to be ad-hominems demanding absolute purity. Or at the very least should be taken with a large grain of salt. I suspect the "anti-Semitic" bit comes from the founder comparing abortion to the Holocaust [0], which is... a deeply stretched interpretation. As far as anti-LGBT goes... yeah, they're a conservative Christian organization, they're not likely to have a Pride float. But it's not a common "anti-" group that goes out of their way to have a Statement of Inclusion [1] included in their FAQs, in my opinion. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry [1]: https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf
hulitu 5y ago
Or was paid by these people to justify the purge.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cm277 5y ago

Genuine question: are the payment processors legally exposed because of the purpose of transactions going on in their system? If so, this seems to be the main problem --I mean if social media platforms can absolve responsibility for content, Mastercard/Visa absolutely should as well....

Scoundreller 5y ago
The issue is that EU and Australia have regulated interchange fees for MasterCard/Visa, costing them gobs of money and value. The US doesn’t need to fine or litigate them if they want to penalize them heavily, they can just pass a “consumer protection bill” (so Walmart and others can pay <1% instead of ~2% on all credit card payments).
- hocuspocus 5y ago
  The interchange goes to the card issuer, not to the scheme. Visa and MasterCard fees are the smallest part of the overall fee charged by the payment processor. (That said it might be higher in the US, I don't know).
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    A lot of the incentive to pay by card evaporates if the vendor pushes the fee to the customer. The incentive to issue cards evaporates when there’s less fee to collect. Both would be bad upstream for visa/Mc/Amex.
  - JackFaker 5y ago
    Works mostly the same in the US

masklinn 5y ago

> How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company changes its rules'? In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill. By acting "proactively" on anything which smells of controversial or bad PR (and nothing does that more than accusations of child trafficking, not even actual child trafficking), regulators see "self regulation" and go look at something else.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago
> The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill. The actual profit in this specific case might be small but there are lot of money in things related to adult content. They are all now looking for a trustworthy processor. Also even for non adult content lot of people will prefer having payment processing partner who will not kick you out based on some newspaper image. There are lot of grey area in most of the business, specially the biggest ones.
aerosmile 5y ago
Very insightful comment. When you run a gazillion dollar company, you don't care about a billion here or there from porn sites, you care about not losing your gazillion dollar business. There are plenty of examples where CEOs were not conservative enough and it cost them big time - just look at Facebook's loosey goosey approach to political advertising, which in the end turned the entire country against them. From a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial hit but continue to run your business without any additional regulatory oversight.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > From a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial hit but continue to run your business without any additional regulatory oversight. Indeed, staying on the down low and out of regulator minds (and crosshairs) is one of those "cost of doing business" things older companies do.

Mindwipe 5y ago

Specifically the how is covered here. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-pornhub-millions-unauthorized-video-removed-mastercard-visa-2021-6 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-...

barnacled 5y ago

>huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. The same newspaper ran similar tactics against YouTube which resulted in colossal changes. These kinds of stories have an enormous impact, magnified I think by company's (in the case of YouTube, advertisers, in the case of OF, payment providers and investors) being terrified of snowballing bad PR in social media. It's strange but in the modern world yes, 'old media' can have transformative impact on corporations.

hulitu 5y ago
it has nothing to do with media. They just use the media to justify their strategy.

webkike 5y ago

According to the thread > Which, to be clear, they kinda were. PornHub was notoriously bad among the tube sites for its reckless lack of content moderation and exploitation of the people whose videos ended up there. Because of the story, Visa and MasterCard both cut PornHub off. This should be fairly easy to verify and would corroborate the thread

lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
NYT article came out on Friday, December 4. By Thursday of the next week, December 10th, Visa and MC had cut them off. Discover had followed the next day, the 11th. The Washington Post article linked below includes a statement from MC which reads: "Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site. As a result, and in accordance with our policies, we instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance." See: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/pornhub-crackdown-credit-card-companies-cuts-sex-workers-livelihoods-n1251246 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/pornhub-crack... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/10/pornhub-mastercard-ban-mindgeek/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/10/pornhub-m...
johnnyanmac 5y ago
The issue is that they "were" in the same way that the ocean does indeed "contain" fecal matter in it. I doubt their moderation was "reckless" For how many actual offending videos they are compared to the sheer amount of uploads the site had. Any and all websites that allow user published content runs into this issue. It's just a matter of how fine a comb the investigations want to put on it.
- webkike 5y ago
  You’re missing that this is in comparison to other tube sites. There is a direct comparison here between the moderation or porn hub and other websites, and the claim is that porn hubs moderation was worse. It’s fine to say that content moderation is hard, but it’s much harder to justify doing a crappy job in comparison to other content moderators, especially those in the same space as you.

runawaybottle 5y ago

There’s more money to be made as an acceptable platform that isn’t seen as a porn site. Many women on Twitch already do sexualized streams. Twitch is not seen as taboo. It’s just a bigger market when people can feel like they aren’t a complete sex worker, and can actually share that they are on OnlyFans, same way they can share their Twitch.

colinmhayes 5y ago
The not being seen as a porn site ship has sailed for OnlyFans.

crazygringo 5y ago

Honestly, in this particular case huge companies did make changes on the basis of this newspaper column. It's not common, but it's what happened here. It was an incredibly visible and influential accusation that seemingly came out of nowhere from arguably the most prestigious newspaper in the country, and legitimate businesses like PornHub and MasterCard are terrified of brand association with child porn and sex trafficking -- if those stuck, it's corporate suicide. You're right that most opinion pieces don't make a shred of difference. But this particular one, because of the seriousness of the allegation combined with its plausibility, did in a big way.

fouric 5y ago
You say "it's what happened here" and "But this particular one, because of the seriousness of the allegation combined with its plausibility, did in a big way" - but you haven't actually provided any evidence for it, just repeated assertions that it's true. Can you show anything aside from just speculation?
- crazygringo 5y ago
  It's literally been all over the news, with journalists and analysts directly linking the column with the changes at both PornHub in December and at MasterCard in April -- and these are the people who follow this professionally. You can Google it yourself trivially, you don't need to ask someone on HN to get it. But if you somehow don't trust that and you're asking for someone to report on the confidential goings-on of internal meetings at MasterCard and nothing else will satisfy you, you're not going to get that here on HN.
  - navait 5y ago
    Ok, well for those of us that didn't read the exact same set of articles you did, you sound like a guy making stuff up...so send some links.
    - angus-prune 5y ago

varelse 5y ago

All it took was one useful billionaire... https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr/Bill-Ackman-Sent-a-Text-to-the-CEO-of-Mastercard-What-Happened-Next-Is-a-Parable-for-ESG https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr...

throwawayay02 5y ago
Insane.
ectopod 5y ago
That's the problem with wealth inequality: outsize wealth comes with outsize political power. The money doesn't matter.
formerly_proven 5y ago
> Mickelwait, however, says there was a “fatal flaw in that they put a download button on every video.” Under current law, any site that transfers pornographic content is responsible for verifying the age of the people in it. > “Because they had a download button that actually transfers from their servers onto the devices of millions — I think it was up to 130 million a day in 2020 — of visitors to the site, they have been responsible this whole time for record keeping. So what that means is they violated the criminal code of the United States millions of times, tens of millions of times,” she says. Is this actually true? How is streaming not transferring under the law? Edit: This article is also interesting in that it characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  > How is streaming not transferring under the law? I'm not sure if this has been tested in courts, but there seems to be a legal theory that a streaming function corresponds to broadcasting (only creating transient copies, if any, by default) while a download function corresponds to publication (creating a permanent copy by default). I'm not sure which definitions apply to 2257, but US copyright law says that copies are "material objects [...] in which a work is fixed". So if your system is only designed to transfer into volatile/transient storage, you can apparently argue that you're not responsible for creating copies. I suspect a similar distinction is being made here. > Edit: This article is also interesting in that it characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things. This kind of laundering is common in opinionated outlets, and ostensibly neutral ones aren't immune either. Keep an eye out for sources being described with phrases like "concerned parent" or "concerned resident", for example.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

relax88 5y ago

This is how: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Trafficker...

jarcane 5y ago

It's not entirely just because of the NYT article, but the article was the big PR victory for a massive and almost entirely fabricated campaign against Pornhub run by a religious wingnut masquerading as a human rights activist. Kristof's piece wasn't the first I'd heard of the "Traffickinghub" campaign but it seemed to be the first time a lot of people around me did. What wasn't widely known at the time was that basically all their "data" was either exaggerated or outright fabrication, with near-zero sources, and backed by religious fundamentalists. That didn't start coming out until the damage had already been done. "Won't somebody think of the children?!" works every fucking time though.

vlunkr 5y ago

That's the first leap in logic, the second is this: > The new MasterCard rules are a direct result of this, which basically means an overwrought Christian anti-sex fever dream is now dictating sexual content online. That's right, the state of everything was "dictated" by a guy writing an article.

ehsankia 5y ago
The article itself was also a side-effect, not the source. Exodus Cry has been lobbying everyone such as payment processors, rich donors, advertisers, as well as NYT (getting them to write the article). So article wasn't the source, it was just another piece in the path of Exodus Cry's rampage. They have a huge legal team and they've been attacking this from every imaginable angle.
- hulitu 5y ago
  So the article was paid and that in itself is no problem ?
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    I didn't claim it was necessarily paid, just that they were convinced or tricked into it. The piece itself isn't problematic at the surface, putting an end to human trafficking is a good thing, it issue is the people behind the organization and their motives, which NYT either didn't know or ignored.

tootie 5y ago

I understand the thread, but if Kristof's reporting is accurate, then you can hardly blame him. He's not responsible if payment providers decide to freak out over potential liability. Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
I don't blame the reporting rather than usual human understanding that never learned how statistics worked. Someone peed in the ocean and they are draining the entire sea to "fix it". That's not the fault of the pee-er nor even the person who yelled "someone peed". It's the fault of people who didn't understand what that meant before draining some 20% of the matter on earth. Until that happens, pretty much every single website with user generated content is at risk in some degree. >Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators. OG does in fact verify every creator. The problem is no company at that scale is going to site down and review every single piece of content they post after that verification which may or may not include other participants that they could not verify. That's what this policy change wants to enforce (which any webmaster would know is prohibitively expensive to do without being Google).

surge 5y ago

It's the same crap as the ad-pocalypse. Journalists with an agenda use a disingenuous tactic, if they have a problem with a person or entity, they'll call up their sponsors, business partners, vendors, etc, and say "we're writing an article on X's platform which has been found to have (controversial material framed in a negative context), are we to believe that you're supportive and would your company care to comment." This leads to the company panicking, going completely defensive, and killing all contracts, services, and pulling sponsors or place of employment from the person whose being targeted in what is often just a hit piece with unverified out of context accusations. So yes, journalists, especially those that work for outlets like the NYT's can have someone's sponsors, money streams, etc pulled out from them by asking so called "innocent" questions in a passive aggressive way. They've done this numerous times not even giving those accused to respond, sometimes the article never even comes out. It's one of the abuses of power you can see in journalism today, where agenda driven journalism is used as a weapon to get someone removed from society, bank accounts closed, etc. Some targets are too big for it to work, or can lose a few sponsors, but they do it all the time.

bostonalt 5y ago
Defending CP and revenge porn is such an odd hill to die on. Please tell me what was wrong about the NYT's opinion piece? That it painted a visceral picture of a literal child whose exploitations continued to be put on PornHub to profit off of? You give a lot of generic accusations without anything substantial. Are you upset that companies now have to answer for their actions? Why is that a bad thing? A private company isn't a government, if MasterCard or Visa doesn't want to do business with certain risk prone sectors why should they be forced to? Your reason for being upset is frankly odd and extremely dismissive of real issues, that companies are profiting off of CP, but decide to get upset that a news story can effect the public zeitgeist?
- Stevvo 5y ago
  Nobody is defending CP and revenge porn.
- dbspin 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

Child sexual exploitation is pretty much the worst thing you can do as far as society is concerned. Such people are considered low in prison. So I think the possible brand damage alone could have caused a panic, simply because this particular type of damage could be absolutely horrendous.

acdha 5y ago

The other question to ask is whether that piece came out of the blue or because someone was talking it up with Kristof. The author of that twitter thread thinks it’s inspired by an evangelical group (Exodus Cry) and it seems highly unlikely that they’d only be talking with him. It seems more likely that companies like MasterCard are hearing from them, politicians who are getting lobbied by their supporters, etc. and the NYT editorial was more like the final straw than the trigger. It’s important to note that this isn’t wrong or malicious: many things most of us approve of (e.g. ending child labor, environmental reforms, banning dogfights, etc.) followed the same process. The concern is transparency and whether it’s effective at the stated goals: for example, I think trafficking is evil but I also think that the best way to support it is by ensuring fewer people are financially desperate rather than driving them underground where abuse is more likely and harder to prevent.

xg15 5y ago
But the thread wasn't defending trafficking. It's claiming that the forces that push the anti-trafficking rules have a hidden agenda, which is not about trafficking at all: They want to get rid of the whole sex industry for religious reasons, specifically including the legal and consensual part. That's a different goal altogether.
- acdha 5y ago
  I’m aware: that’s the reason why I mentioned that topic - transparency is what helps the reader know why a topic is getting a spike in coverage and let’s them decide whether they share all of the goals of the groups pushing it.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The problem with that kind of argument is that these rules are what everyone pushes to deter traffickers. No one has seriously managed to come up with a viable alternate policy that averts this kind of collateral damage on bona-fide sex work. It's much like saying that all the efforts that are now saving elephants from being poached to extinction are just some shadowy "anti-ivory agenda" rather than being undertaken for the sake of the elephants. Terribly bad faith argument.

ballenf 5y ago

I'd never heard of Exodus Cry mentioned in the thread, so looked at their website. They seem to have made themselves a target of accusations from Pornhub as a result of the NYT article. Here is their statement on the site that addresses some of the things presented as fact in the Twitter thread: https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf I'm sure there's much more to the story, but thought it worth at least looking at the vision, etc. from this company given the accusations made against them.

nindalf 5y ago

> In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. You'd think, but no. In my experience working at a large tech company, executives cared a lot about what the New York Times in particular thought. A piece published by them would have immediate attention from those executives, and it'd be our problem to respond, even if the original article wasn't well founded. Once I figured out how much leadership cared about NYT, I even justified one engineering decision based on "what would NYT say". And it worked. It doesn't surprise me in the least that MasterCard cares so much about what the NYT prints. > Political pressure? Regulatory pressure? You're on the right track. If you think (correctly IMO) that politicians and regulators read NYT, then pressure from these groups is going to come soon after the NYT piece is published. Best take action before that happens.

Terretta 5y ago
I intended to post this, but this is well said. Such an article is forwarded to “leadership” and “the board”. Boards in particular, who hire and fire the leadership, prefer collecting advisory cheques without getting any side looks at the country club.

stefantalpalaru 5y ago

> Political pressure? Probably. Hunter Biden had a PornHub account where he uploaded incest porn with his underage niece: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/huge-breaking-exclusive-hunter-biden-pornhub-account-uploaded-personal-porn-including-family-members/ https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/huge-breaking-exclu...

dzonga 5y ago

journalists, are in a position of major influence but never having skin in the game. these are the same NYT journalists wo advocated for the Iraqi war. yet never been to Iraq and speak of whiff or arabic. it's a system where itself reinforces, the gvt / other actors influence the media and the media influences policy. yet those people don't suffer any consequences at all. those are the same people at NYT that slandered Bernie and propped up HC and wake up amused that Trump won. I'm all for freedom of speech, however journalists should be held to a higher standard. coz honestly most journalists except the local ones doing groundwork are pure scum.

plusbryan 5y ago

Agreed. Onlyfans is probably large enough that if they told their customers they could only accept visa or crypto payments that they would lose a lot less business than if they jettisoned their (core?) business. In fact, MasterCard might lose enough business that they might reconsider. So this can’t be the full story.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

>How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company changes its rules'? Easy. the reporter isnt just launching the page and waiting for a reaction. They probably used those accounts to report to authorities and timed their story with an expected result from the investigation. There's no magic to it except for the ability to post the news piece and have the public think "they are just reporting on it"