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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 beli
by 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.
- jchw 3y ago> 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. This is absolutely insane logic. Pornhub didn't commit the crime. Did you know murder happens every day? A lot more than three times. Perfect moderation is impossible. You're saying that they would have to have a success rate of 99.99+% at catching this, when again, it can be nearly impossible to actually tell just by looking. What exactly do you expect them to have done? What exactly do you think Twitter does? Are you really suggesting that because this stuff exists and is impossible to prevent with 100% success, no website should ever allow user generated pornographic content without having some rigorous and highly invasive process for validating each video's provenance? (Not that it matters: doing this kind of thing will just make backchannels the defacto channels. Not a good outcome for improving enforcement overall.) (Come to think of it, if this is the actual logic of someone who worked in the adult entertainment industry, then I no longer have any difficulty understanding how dystopian chat/encryption/social media legislation manages to continue to be proposed and sometimes even become law.)