One of the largest issues is jurisdictional issues. These internet sites are global, but most law enforcement have fairly restrained jurisdictions. A victim may go to their local police, but the local police then have to interact with agencies potentially all over the globe to actually build a case, make an arrest, etc. Which isn't to say they don't try, but it can be very difficult and take a very long time.

Even if you can track down someone's ex-boyfriend (likely to be more local) and charge them, once the video is out on the Internet, random people all over the globe can continue to share and distribute it. And large scale video platforms have little desire to put meaningful controls on uploading videos as it would negatively impact their ad revenue. Furthermore, these platforms can claim that they didn't upload it, a user did, so they shouldn't be held responsible.

I don't think this applies here; from the story, it sounds like both Pornhub and the victims are in the US, and Pornhub is bound by US law on these matters (which is decidedly unfriendly to CP).

>Furthermore, these platforms can claim that they didn't upload it, a user did, so they shouldn't be held responsible.

Not true. They're required to take down stuff when notified it's illegal, and CP is very illegal. So taking 2 weeks to remove something this blatantly illegal sure looks a lot like criminal negligence.

For comparison, how does YouTube handle this kind of thing? I'm pretty sure CP videos would never stay on YT for more than a day at the very most. And Pornhub can't claim to not have the generous resources Google has; Pornhub is a gigantic website.

I wouldn't be too surprised to see some zealous federal prosecutor nail them for this stuff, especially with a GOP presidential administration.

The article states that Pornhub did comply and take down the videos. Like most companies, they also reported these cases to the FBI or other appropriate agencies.

What, exactly, do you want them to do?

> we told the company that she was underage, that she didn’t consent to being on their website and still it took several weeks to remove it

Maybe remove the video when it's reported to be child porn, and not "several weeks" later.

And what happens if someone falsely reports a legal video as CP?

Then appeal it. Child porn is definitely the realm where the correct answer is to shoot first, and ask later. The "damage done" by incorrectly taking down a single adult film video is not significant. The damage done by keeping a child porn video up, available to millions of users for several weeks, is immeasurable, especially to the victim.

And I am sure in those several weeks from the article, PornHub was not actually conducting an in-depth investigation on whether or not the video was, in fact, child porn.

It wouldn’t strike me as entirely unreasonable to require distributors to keep records in the same way producers do. Alternatively, know-your-customer style identity verification for uploaders would work.

Sure, that would preclude some of the amateur porn and likely reduce the scale of pornography online.

As it is now, people are harmed by not only being raped, but again when video of it appears online. Pornhub should face consequences at about the same scale of “pain” when they fail to adequately vet an upload.

That way, the harm created by their business is internalized. And if it turns out the business is unsustainable under those terms, than maybe it was never meant to be.

I’m pretty sure that’s where the law will be trending over the medium-term future, and it’s the industry’s own fault of not even caring enough to react to complaints within reasonable amounts of time.

Pornhub should be required to prevent illegal content (specifically in this case child porn) from being hosted on the site at all. They should be held responsible for content they make available.

Presumably this would require human intervention to greenlight the video once all the necessary verification has been sought.

All platforms should be held to this standard frankly. I don't understand how we've gotten to the point where it is acceptable for anything less.

Should Hacker News be responsible for stopping you and everyone else from posting possibly illegal material?

The same law that protects HN protects PornHub.

HN has competent moderators that do a reasonable job removing illegal or harmful content. (Hi dang <3)

Section 230 protects bad actors, not good ones. Platforms that invoke Section 230 as a defensive measure are generally either refusing to moderate, or entrusting moderation entirely to algorithms, claiming they're "too big" to moderate their content.

> Section 230 protects bad actors, not good ones

Section 230 is why you can comment here without dang having to approve every comment you make first. It's why Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and HN can exist. It protects all actors.

This is completely untrue. Legal cases already have the concept of intent and liability. Section 230 provides blanket immunity for abuses that would otherwise be clearly defined as criminally negligent or willful behavior.

For example, without Section 230, one could define dang removing a harmful post shortly after it was flagged (usually within hours, I imagine) as best effort for a two-man moderation team, and find that PornHub, one of the most valuable web properties in the world with a significant amount of manpower, taking several weeks to take down a child porn video criminally negligent, and holding the company responsible. (Arguably, SESTA-FOSTA already enables the latter, as Section 230 no longer applies to sexual exploitation of children.)

Why not? Make them all responsible for curating the content they provide. Yes, that sounds fine.

Maybe I'm naive to the law you mention. What law applies here that protects HN and Pornhub?

> Why not? Make them all responsible for curating the content they provide. Yes, that sounds fine.

If that were the case, you'd have to wait for a moderator to approve this post. This site probably just wouldn't exist, because it would be far too hard for the moderators to do that.

> Maybe I'm naive to the law you mention. What law applies here that protects HN and Pornhub?

DMCA Safe Harbor and Section 230.

Thank you. I'm in the UK, I'll have to find out if we have similar rules here but broadly speaking my initial reaction is that this legislation is a bad thing and platforms should all be considered publishers and required to moderate the content they make available.

In the UK you guys have very interesting laws around this stuff. Your "tabloid culture" as it is exists primarily because of the protections your publishers get, but at the same time, people in the UK have much greater recourse against such things if they choose to invoke it.

Classic example, in the UK you can have bad feedback about you removed from eBay because your laws about libel and slander are so favorable to the target of those attacks, to the point where even truthful information may not be allowed.

In most of the world people have no problem with holding the site responsible for hosting images of child sexual abuse, even if those images were posted by users.

And in most of the world, criticizing a leader may have criminal offenses associated.

There's a reason the US is unique and that most of these companies are founded there.

> There's a reason the US is unique and that most of these companies are founded there.

The fact that businesses tend to be founded in the country with the least regulation and protection for consumers and public interest is probably not something we should really be proud of. It's kinda the worst part of unchecked capitalism.

Arizona proudly bragged about being the least hindrance to self-driving car testing in their state. Which is why businesses moved their self-driving operations there, an honor they can brag about. And now they also get the dubious honor of being the first to have a resident murdered by a corporation's self-driving car program.

How are they supposed to prevent these videos from being posted? The ones doing the posting are anonymous users, not port hub. Any site that has user submitted content faces this issue. It is generally in feasible for them to manually review every submission so they are dependent on other users reporting the violations.

On the other hand, they should be very responsive when content is reported and at least block it until they can do some review. Waiting for an extended period of time is unacceptable.

> It is generally [infeasible] for them to manually review every submission so they are dependent on other users reporting the violations.

It may be economically infeasible for them to moderate, but economics is not a "get out of ethics free" card. IMHO, we've gotten too comfortable with tech companies passing the buck on negative externalities that they create or profit from.

We wouldn't accept a "can't do it, not economically feasible" answer from an industrial chemicals company that's been asked to stop polluting a river, and I don't see why PornHub should be any different.

If it's infeasible for the business to operate ethically, the business shouldn't operate.

But the resolution isn't impossible, especially for a company of MindGeek's scale: Remove anonymous uploads entirely. Require channels establish their and their performers legal identity (which for monetization, many have to do anyways), and require metadata on all performers in any video (presumably allowing them to publicly display as anonymous or with a stage name as adequate), and verify the consent of those performers to be posted on that channel.

So let's change the law and force them to moderate the content before it's published. They'll have to slow the rate of new content being made available until their moderators can keep up.

Once they've removed a video they could add a hash of it to filters, making the reupload a bit harder.

DMCA safe harbor. The same law that protects this very website, and others like it.

User content is a double edged sword. You want to allow the free exchange of ideas, but you also want to protect victims.

It's a fine line to walk.

That being said, PornHub could probably do more to police themselves, at the very least auto removing content that lists the names of people who have asked them to take content down.