If it was about some "religious anti-sex work movement," then the credit card companies wouldn't still process payments for the legal brothels in Nevada. Which they do.

> Internet Watch Foundations number of 118 cases of CSAM over 3 years

If there is millions of them, I'm sure you can do better than 118 cases over 3 years...

That's called deflection. Or in HN-speak: "Whataboutism."

Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram:

I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly. https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973...

And this is called a “straw man”!

Pointing out that the actor listed is applying their standards here unequally and therefore the standard might not be what's publicly said isn't deflection or whataboutism.

The amount the term "whataboutism" is used in an attempt to not have to address an empirical counterargument is getting old.

Don't know about brothels, but even in the strip clubs I went to years ago they didn't process cards. Instead you had to go to the corner ATM with ridiculous fees to withdraw some cash.

I am also aware of many other businesses that refuse to take credit cards, and work cash-only.

It's an article. It just happens to be an article you disagree with.

written by a known agitator not a journalist

That's why it's in the Editorial section, not the News section. Also, "agitator" is a loaded term that is in the eye of the beholder. Some people might use "activist" or "hero."

at a time when the religious anti PH movement is at it's crescendo.

If you believe this is true, nobody on the planet change your mind. But I will tell you it comes out like hysterical raving.

As for it being religiously motivated, I don't believe that it is exclusively religious. I think that regular, average people and people with religious convictions can both be against rape videos and child pornography. If you're not, then I suggest you seek mental health counseling.

I've been "tracking this issue" and "digging into the details of it" because I'm a pornhub performer who has had payment issues since earlier this year when this campaign kicked off out of nowhere. My partner and I went through Pornhub's verification process (for which we uploaded current government issued IDs and signed forms, and were initially rejected and had to appeal). My partner and I have millions of video views in the last year, and yet despite the fun and monetary benefit of it all, I happen to view myself as a good person who is conscious of how my actions can impact others negatively, often unwittingly. So I've naturally wondered whether I should ethically be involved with Pornhub at all.

So apologies for my snark, but this campaign is not rational, and me and others like me are fatigued at those jumping to all sorts of non-sequitur conclusions based on fearmongering which is in turn based on shoddy (and at times obviously manipulated) statistics. Even IF pornhub had a verification issue (which will never be perfect), it is not AT ALL clear who has responsibility in this new age of information sharing, how morality should be controlled (god I hope it's obvious it shouldn't be controlled by finance execs), etc. Who is financing the campaign against Pornhub?

Dig into this campaign and it's obvious it's not motivated by sound understanding and reason and has its roots in religiously affiliated action groups.

I wonder how consistent most HNers are wrt this statement about The New York Times.

1. Nicholas Kristof to have a tenuous grasp on reality and to launch unfounded moral panics, and

2. PornHub has a lot of serious issues that should be dealt with.

You know the sayings about broken clocks...

(And for that matter, while I trust The NY Times more than the average newspaper on some topics, like science reporting, it has SERIOUS issues with being driven by political access rather than journalism, doing "both sides" too much, and not being willing to question Trump very much. That and their massive support for pretty much any war, to the point of open lying about stuff. I have cancelled my subscription in the past and will not subscribe again.)

But yes, I think we agree :)

We can’t let the abuse that happens on platforms like pornhub become a partisan issue. It’s grotesque and tortuous to the people who are affected by it. This has zero to do with being sex positive.

And, maybe there is a little bit of child porn on PornHub, it is bound to happen since users can upload anything. I could probably upload child porn on YouTube if I wanted to, that would be short lived and it would get me into trouble but I can probably get a few hundred views before it gets caught. But the thing is, I never stumbled upon it. In fact, I pretty much only get illegally uploaded content from legitimate studios or "PornHub originals".

That anti-sex work groups attack PornHub is ironic. It would be like being against the record industry and attacking The Pirate Bay.

Here's an anecdote from Carrie Goldberg about how Pornhub compares to FB and Instagram:

I'm a victims rights lawyer. For every 1 case involving a rape tape on Pornhub, I have 50 involving rape and CSAM being disseminated on Insta and FB. Pornhub is far from perfect. But mainstream big tech is far worse and have a built-in mechanism for harassing victims directly. https://twitter.com/cagoldberglaw/status/1337026875441491973

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation...

2257 requirements even on primary producers have been struck down on First Amendment grounds for material containing a wide class of performers; Free Speech Coalition vs. Attorney General of the United States (3d Cir. 2020.) And, serious Constitutional issues have been raised about the application of 2257 to “secondary producers” like individual users.

And, even under 2257, covered “secondary producers” aren’t required to provide their ID, they are required to have specific information about the maintenance of records related to the perfomers age affixed to the content.

Edit: The comment I replied to has been edited and originally explained the owner was Canadian but serves US customers and so should abide by US law.

I don't want to claim to agree or disagree, I'm just not sure how to work out what's right.

To be fair, MindGeek has an office in the US. Now, if they closed that office, the argument that they were subject to US law would be weaker.

EDIT: I edited my comment as I'm not willing to argue the merits of cross border law enforcement actions in this thread.

Really though, how does it work for a business like this? How do you not serve a specific country on the internet? I'm not aware of any technical solution to this - geoip databases simply aren't accurate.

For businesses where most customers pay, perhaps you can gate the site and verify payment details but that plainly doesn't work for the business model we're discussing as most people surely don't pay anything by design? This isn't Netflix?

In this case, MasterCard no longer has plausible deniability. This increases their liability.

Imagine someone at a liquor store sells beer to someone. Then, they learn the ID is fake and the person is lying about their age. Once they know someone is doing something illegal they can be held liable if they continue to sell the person beer.

Note, I'm not getting into right an wrong here. I'm getting into legal liabilities. Large companies like MasterCard are conservative (legally speaking) in how they handle this stuff.

That is factually untrue (as I also pointed out in the other sub-thread where you made the same claim): they do fact check their opinion section:

The below quote is from a previous NYT Op-ed editor that describes their editorial process. Emphasis is mine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.htm...:

> What happens when your article is accepted? First, you’ll get a contract giving us the right to publish it and laying out some of your responsibilities. The most important ones have to do with originality and truthfulness. You can’t plagiarize yourself, or someone else, and we won’t run something that has appeared in another publication, either print or digital. We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise: Did you invest in a company that you praise in passing? Did you once work with a public official you mention in flattering or critical terms? Could you or an organization or company you represent benefit from the stance you take in an Op-Ed? We need to know. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.

[1] https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta...

I also hope you're not saying that the US should allow child sexual assault which is the issue in this case.

On the other side, we have something so unequivocally and fundamentally immoral that many countries place it on the same level as murder, and even typical murderers draw their own moral line against it.

The two can't be spoken with in the same sentence.

If PornHub is complicit in child pornography, every single executive involved should go to prison. If MasterCard has evidence, or suspicion that PornHub is complicit then they must turn such evidence over to the authorities immediately, and have a moral (not legal) duty to ensure that all the PornHub executives they dealt with are prosecuted. This is a poison barrel issue from which no one must escape.

However, the way MasterCard is acting is as if they merely want to break ties with a high-fraud risk client, whose risk profile may have changed during the COVID crisis. It reeks of a company protecting profit margins, and not of a company hurriedly running away from a tarpit of felonies and turpitude.

I may be wrong, and PornHub will be destroyed within 2021 like BackPage was, but right now I doubt it. VISA was their primary payment processor, and they only cut off access after MasterCard made public allegations. VISA has their own evaluations team, and I know from experience they're quite strict. The question is how could they not catch this before MasterCard?

CP is illegal everywhere.

VISA International isn't going to let you pay for this stuff in the EU either.