4 ms·

There's a difference between asking uncomfortable questions and asking loaded questions that misrepresent reality. The description of the CSAM & revenge porn is

There's a difference between asking uncomfortable questions and asking loaded questions that misrepresent reality. The description of the CSAM & revenge porn issue in mainstream media painted the picture that this was a substantial portion of the site's content. In reality few would ever encounter such content, and PornHub did everything feasible to try and remove and report it. No joke, outlets highlighted the fact that "dozens" of instances of this kind of illegal content was found as though this was some kind of epidemic. The fact that incidents measure in the dozens, when 6.8 million videos were uploaded to the site in 2019 alone[1] strikes me more as testament to the rarity of this content. 1. https://www.pcmag.com/news/pornhub-reveals-explicit-traffic-numbers?amp=true https://www.pcmag.com/news/pornhub-reveals-explicit-traffic-...

tablespoon 5y ago
> ...and PornHub did everything feasible to try and remove and report it. That's demonstrably not true, since PornHub did do more in response to the mainstream media coverage (e.g. finally require some kind of age verification for uploaders and purge unverified content). The only way they could be contextualized to have done "everything feasible" is within a fundamentally flawed model that they created, but it's precisely that model that needed to be reformed.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  I stand by what I actually wrote: that they did everything feasible to remove and report illegal content. Having more extensive verification of uploaders does not an expanded effort to remove and report illegal content that gets posted, but rather an effort to prevent said content from being uploaded in the first place. And as you pointed out, this comes with tradeoffs in the form of a more onerous sign up process. To be even more pedantic, they still haven't done everything they can do: they could shut down their whole site and eliminate 100% of illegal material with 100% confidence. Which, I suspect, is the goal of those propping up the narrative that PornHub was some sort of wild west where child pornography was welcome.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I stand by what I actually wrote: that they did everything feasible to remove and report illegal content. I mean they didn't even do that. Wasn't their enforcement team pretty small? The original op-ed said it was ~80 people. In any case it was inadequate. > but rather an effort to prevent said content from being uploaded in the first place. PornHub chose a model that made it impossible for them to deal with their illegal content problem. The distinction between legal an illegal porn is often too subtle for any solution that just looks at the content or relies on "someone else" to do the work for them. That's the core issue. It's like a factory that dumps toxic waste into a river, and then "solves" that problem by building a little filtration plant far downstream of the factory that only filters a fraction of the river water, just upstream of some city. Their solution can't work, for reasons that should be obvious. The only solution that has any chance of working is filtering the waste before it goes into the river at all, and that's essentially what PornHub has started to do with their more-thorough vetting process. Businesses don't have the right to make compliance optional or inadequate if it doesn't work for their business model. They have to pick a business model that can be compliant.
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      For the second time, out of the tens of millions of videos on the platform critics found illegal content numbering in the dozens. Their enforcement was sufficient to drive down illegal content to literally one in a million rate of occurrence. Weighted by number of views on videos, it's probably an even smaller fraction of that. The filter was sufficient to make illegal content something that the overwhelming majority of people - almost everyone - will never see when using their platform. By comparison, critics described pornhub as: > Human beings of all ages, races, genders, and sexualities are being abused while Pornhub pockets profits from selling said abuse and exploitation online. It's nearly impossible to stress strongly enough the fact that these cases are far from anomalies. https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf This is utterly disingenuous. If dozens of instances out of tens of millions isn't an anomaly, what is?
      - 5y ago

tablespoon 5y ago

> ...and PornHub did everything feasible to try and remove and report it. That's demonstrably not true, since PornHub did do more in response to the mainstream media coverage (e.g. finally require some kind of age verification for uploaders and purge unverified content). The only way they could be contextualized to have done "everything feasible" is within a fundamentally flawed model that they created, but it's precisely that model that needed to be reformed.

Manuel_D 5y ago
I stand by what I actually wrote: that they did everything feasible to remove and report illegal content. Having more extensive verification of uploaders does not an expanded effort to remove and report illegal content that gets posted, but rather an effort to prevent said content from being uploaded in the first place. And as you pointed out, this comes with tradeoffs in the form of a more onerous sign up process. To be even more pedantic, they still haven't done everything they can do: they could shut down their whole site and eliminate 100% of illegal material with 100% confidence. Which, I suspect, is the goal of those propping up the narrative that PornHub was some sort of wild west where child pornography was welcome.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I stand by what I actually wrote: that they did everything feasible to remove and report illegal content. I mean they didn't even do that. Wasn't their enforcement team pretty small? The original op-ed said it was ~80 people. In any case it was inadequate. > but rather an effort to prevent said content from being uploaded in the first place. PornHub chose a model that made it impossible for them to deal with their illegal content problem. The distinction between legal an illegal porn is often too subtle for any solution that just looks at the content or relies on "someone else" to do the work for them. That's the core issue. It's like a factory that dumps toxic waste into a river, and then "solves" that problem by building a little filtration plant far downstream of the factory that only filters a fraction of the river water, just upstream of some city. Their solution can't work, for reasons that should be obvious. The only solution that has any chance of working is filtering the waste before it goes into the river at all, and that's essentially what PornHub has started to do with their more-thorough vetting process. Businesses don't have the right to make compliance optional or inadequate if it doesn't work for their business model. They have to pick a business model that can be compliant.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    For the second time, out of the tens of millions of videos on the platform critics found illegal content numbering in the dozens. Their enforcement was sufficient to drive down illegal content to literally one in a million rate of occurrence. Weighted by number of views on videos, it's probably an even smaller fraction of that. The filter was sufficient to make illegal content something that the overwhelming majority of people - almost everyone - will never see when using their platform. By comparison, critics described pornhub as: > Human beings of all ages, races, genders, and sexualities are being abused while Pornhub pockets profits from selling said abuse and exploitation online. It's nearly impossible to stress strongly enough the fact that these cases are far from anomalies. https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf This is utterly disingenuous. If dozens of instances out of tens of millions isn't an anomaly, what is?
    - 5y ago