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While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot themselves in the foot but hurt the entire ind

While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage content found on their site. I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years, in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were closing our commercial accounts and we couldn't find a single other bank or credit union in this country that would take our business despite a pristine 18 year track record. The only thing that had changed was the MindGeek scandal. Maybe the media misrepresented it, maybe the content issues were fabricated by "anti-pornography" groups. But one day everything is fine, the next day MindGeek (a Canadian company) is in the news and the next day we're shut down despite having done nothing wrong. It's hard for me to scapegoat conservatives and anti-porn groups when they were WAY more vocal and active when I first started my business (back in 2004 this was when the George W Bush administration was prosecuting obscenity for the first time in decades, and passing USC 18 2557). By 2022 they had virtually gone away. Then MindGeek was caught allowing some some really shady shit on PornHub. Also this was just a year or two after the Girls Do Porn scandal (Google it if you're unaware). Those girls suing those assholes for sexual abuse and contractual misrepresentation was not "anti-porn groups." So my take, as a former business owner in the industry, was that it took a few public scandals and scares for the banks and corporate America to go "hmm... maybe we were wrong to get too liberal with this stuff." Some of that may have been fueled by the anti-porn lobby .. but if MindGeek had kept their nose clean it likely wouldn't have worked.

chimeracoder 3y ago
> While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage content found on their site. This itself is a misconception driven by those anti-pornography groups. MindGeek was incredibly good about removing CSAM from their platform, not just reactively but proactively. If you look at the numbers, Facebook is actually a much larger source of child sexual exploitation material than Pornhub was. However, Exodus Cry doesn't care about CSAM on Facebook, because their goal isn't to end CSAM: it's to end pornography. > It's hard for me to scapegoat conservatives and anti-porn groups when they were WAY more vocal and active when I first started my business Anti-porn groups are way more active today than they were in the early Bush years. The difference is that, unlike then, their campaigns aren't receiving any attention outside the business, which is part of why they're so successful: there's no real opposition. > if MindGeek had kept their nose clean it likely wouldn't have worked. Anti-porn groups aren't going after these companies because they have scandals. They're going after them because they oppose pornography, and it fits their agenda. If they cared about ending child exploitation, they would go after companies like Facebook - but they don't, because that doesn't accomplish their explict, stated goal of ending commercial sex work. It's missing the point to blame MindGeek for the "scandal" when they're nowhere near the worst offender - they're just being targeted by groups who have a specific political agenda. No matter how much work MindGeek does to eliminate CSAM, anti-porn groups will claim that it's not enough. The leader of the Exodus Cry campaign has literally said that they want to make it impossible for MindGeek to operate legally.
jimbob45 3y ago
I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years, in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were closing our commercial accounts and we couldn't find a single other bank or credit union in this country that would take our business despite a pristine 18 year track record. Was there no way around it? Maybe with a shell company to hide your real business? I know it didn’t end up working out, I’m just curious if there looked to be any way out or if you really were just locked out of banking.
- gspencley 3y ago
  Full story here: https://coedcherry.com/fuck-banks.html https://coedcherry.com/fuck-banks.html (NSFW domain, but no adult content on that particular page). TL;DR to answer your question: shell company would have been our best bet, but not something we could do logistically or ethically. It would have worked but we'd live every single day knowing that at any moment we could get flagged and go through it all over again. And with a full time job outside outside of running the company part-time there was no time, money, energy or will to set up such a front and figure out legitimate business activities to cover the revenue that was coming in from adult entertainment.
jchw 3y ago
Here's my problem. > numerous I dug into one such report that broke and apparently it was around 30 videos that they had found. When I checked Pornhub, I believe it currently had over 20,000 videos, and that was presumably after they'd been under quite a bit of scrutiny. IMO there is quite a mismatch in magnitude there. Of course, there probably were other illicit videos, but there is no reason, in my opinion, to suggest that Pornhub had an unusually large problem. Unfortunately though, a lot of the videos like this that wind up undetected likely have been spreading through the Internet for several years going unnoticed simply because it doesn't look particularly different from any other pornography. As it turns out, at least certainly late teens look a lot like young adults. This does create an unfortunate conundrum for anyone allowing user generated content that is pornographic. Even ignoring explicit abuse, teens are relentlessly horny and will upload inappropriate things to the Internet, or even try to sell it. Seriously short-sighted behavior, but you know... they're teenagers. We've all been there. It's not some alien condition. I understand that people have extremely strong emotions about this and want a zero-tolerance stance, but it's not possible. If you allow adult content, you inevitably get some ideally-infinitesimal trickle of illicit content, probably often strictly by accident. Best you can do is try to find it and clean it up as effectively as possible. I fully understand why it's treated like toxic waste, and I'm not trying to justify it, but no matter how despicable the crime is, you can't fully eliminate crime, it doesn't work that way. I think keeping "legitimate" pornography sites like Pornhub was actually likely slowing the amount of said toxic waste because Pornhub actually did moderate, clearly, whereas the back alleys that people are likely to fall back to are going to simply be less well-moderated by their nature. At the end of the day, most social media platforms proliferate a lot more CSAM than Pornhub has even if you estimate very generously. In the Omegle shutdown letter, the founder notes that Omegle's content moderation resulted in some criminals going to prison. Pornhub's moderation has undoubtedly done the same.
- gspencley 3y ago
  > , but there is no reason, in my opinion, to suggest that Pornhub had an unusually large problem. How many videos or images of child exploitation are required before it becomes an "unusually large problem" ? Again, as someone who worked in the industry, I can't even begin to tell you how fucking paranoid and diligent we were about that. One single instance would have been enough to shut us down and possibly land us in jail. Not to mention the ethics of it which are paramount! This was to the extent where I was never even comfortable with the concept of user-provided / generated content being hosted and distributed on/by my web servers at all. PornHub played with fire. They didn't just burn themselves, they burned all of us. It would have only taken ONE instance! Two becomes "numerous" by definition. But one would have been enough. I actually can't believe that you're trying to downplay the severity of what was at stake. I'm not typically one to be all "think of the children", but this is that one case where it really is literally that and most people don't find the level of diligence that I'm describing as being at all unreasonable. I mean you're basically saying "they only murdered like 3 people ... and were pretty good about making sure they didn't murder more... hardly 'numerous.'" And if you don't think that child sexual exploitation is on a similar level in terms of severity of the crime then I don't want to know you.

chimeracoder 3y ago

> While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage content found on their site. This itself is a misconception driven by those anti-pornography groups. MindGeek was incredibly good about removing CSAM from their platform, not just reactively but proactively. If you look at the numbers, Facebook is actually a much larger source of child sexual exploitation material than Pornhub was. However, Exodus Cry doesn't care about CSAM on Facebook, because their goal isn't to end CSAM: it's to end pornography. > It's hard for me to scapegoat conservatives and anti-porn groups when they were WAY more vocal and active when I first started my business Anti-porn groups are way more active today than they were in the early Bush years. The difference is that, unlike then, their campaigns aren't receiving any attention outside the business, which is part of why they're so successful: there's no real opposition. > if MindGeek had kept their nose clean it likely wouldn't have worked. Anti-porn groups aren't going after these companies because they have scandals. They're going after them because they oppose pornography, and it fits their agenda. If they cared about ending child exploitation, they would go after companies like Facebook - but they don't, because that doesn't accomplish their explict, stated goal of ending commercial sex work. It's missing the point to blame MindGeek for the "scandal" when they're nowhere near the worst offender - they're just being targeted by groups who have a specific political agenda. No matter how much work MindGeek does to eliminate CSAM, anti-porn groups will claim that it's not enough. The leader of the Exodus Cry campaign has literally said that they want to make it impossible for MindGeek to operate legally.

jimbob45 3y ago

I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years, in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were closing our commercial accounts and we couldn't find a single other bank or credit union in this country that would take our business despite a pristine 18 year track record. Was there no way around it? Maybe with a shell company to hide your real business? I know it didn’t end up working out, I’m just curious if there looked to be any way out or if you really were just locked out of banking.

gspencley 3y ago
Full story here: https://coedcherry.com/fuck-banks.html https://coedcherry.com/fuck-banks.html (NSFW domain, but no adult content on that particular page). TL;DR to answer your question: shell company would have been our best bet, but not something we could do logistically or ethically. It would have worked but we'd live every single day knowing that at any moment we could get flagged and go through it all over again. And with a full time job outside outside of running the company part-time there was no time, money, energy or will to set up such a front and figure out legitimate business activities to cover the revenue that was coming in from adult entertainment.

jchw 3y ago

Here's my problem. > numerous I dug into one such report that broke and apparently it was around 30 videos that they had found. When I checked Pornhub, I believe it currently had over 20,000 videos, and that was presumably after they'd been under quite a bit of scrutiny. IMO there is quite a mismatch in magnitude there. Of course, there probably were other illicit videos, but there is no reason, in my opinion, to suggest that Pornhub had an unusually large problem. Unfortunately though, a lot of the videos like this that wind up undetected likely have been spreading through the Internet for several years going unnoticed simply because it doesn't look particularly different from any other pornography. As it turns out, at least certainly late teens look a lot like young adults. This does create an unfortunate conundrum for anyone allowing user generated content that is pornographic. Even ignoring explicit abuse, teens are relentlessly horny and will upload inappropriate things to the Internet, or even try to sell it. Seriously short-sighted behavior, but you know... they're teenagers. We've all been there. It's not some alien condition. I understand that people have extremely strong emotions about this and want a zero-tolerance stance, but it's not possible. If you allow adult content, you inevitably get some ideally-infinitesimal trickle of illicit content, probably often strictly by accident. Best you can do is try to find it and clean it up as effectively as possible. I fully understand why it's treated like toxic waste, and I'm not trying to justify it, but no matter how despicable the crime is, you can't fully eliminate crime, it doesn't work that way. I think keeping "legitimate" pornography sites like Pornhub was actually likely slowing the amount of said toxic waste because Pornhub actually did moderate, clearly, whereas the back alleys that people are likely to fall back to are going to simply be less well-moderated by their nature. At the end of the day, most social media platforms proliferate a lot more CSAM than Pornhub has even if you estimate very generously. In the Omegle shutdown letter, the founder notes that Omegle's content moderation resulted in some criminals going to prison. Pornhub's moderation has undoubtedly done the same.

gspencley 3y ago
> , but there is no reason, in my opinion, to suggest that Pornhub had an unusually large problem. How many videos or images of child exploitation are required before it becomes an "unusually large problem" ? Again, as someone who worked in the industry, I can't even begin to tell you how fucking paranoid and diligent we were about that. One single instance would have been enough to shut us down and possibly land us in jail. Not to mention the ethics of it which are paramount! This was to the extent where I was never even comfortable with the concept of user-provided / generated content being hosted and distributed on/by my web servers at all. PornHub played with fire. They didn't just burn themselves, they burned all of us. It would have only taken ONE instance! Two becomes "numerous" by definition. But one would have been enough. I actually can't believe that you're trying to downplay the severity of what was at stake. I'm not typically one to be all "think of the children", but this is that one case where it really is literally that and most people don't find the level of diligence that I'm describing as being at all unreasonable. I mean you're basically saying "they only murdered like 3 people ... and were pretty good about making sure they didn't murder more... hardly 'numerous.'" And if you don't think that child sexual exploitation is on a similar level in terms of severity of the crime then I don't want to know you.