I’ve long hated money laundering and “know your customer” laws for many reasons. They’re a giant privacy violation. And for what? These laws measurably don’t work to stop big banks from financing terrorism and human trafficking. There are several reasons they don’t work. One is that, the DOJ will come down hard on small American businesses but refuses to actually investigate or prosecute large, offshore companies. They also can’t work because the vast majority of money laundering happens with cash. Even if these laws could meaningfully reduce money laundering, who does that benefit? The vast majority of money laundering is for victimless crimes, including the consensual adult sales of drugs, gambling, porn, and prostitution. These laws simply work to give large incumbents a regulatory advantage over their competitors.
Honest question: can the US goverent stop anyone from launching their banking/payment services?
Can you explain that? How do I take my illegal gained cash and convert it into enough clean money to buy a house? And why can't anti-money-laundering laws and agencies stop that?
> The vast majority of money laundering is for victimless crimes, including the consensual adult sales of drugs, gambling, porn, and prostitution
There's two things here. There is not believing that these crimes should be crimes- and in that, you and I likely agree. But the other thing is whether criminals should be allowed to make money for doing things that are against the law. And I don't agree.
If you think the laws should be changed, vote for that, fight for that, protest for that. But don't tell me that all criminals should be allowed to clean their money because some laws aren't just.
Most money that people make illegally (selling drugs, etc.) is cash, because you can’t trace cash transactions. The problem is that it’s hard to use cash, and just depositing vast sums of money in the bank raises the obvious question of where the money came from. At some point, even if they can’t prove that the money came from anything illicit, they can prove that you aren’t paying income taxes on it, which is a federal felony by itself.
So you need to operate a business that also deals largely in cash, slip your illicit cash into the businesses’ revenue, cook the books and make it look like the money came from your legitimate business and not your illegitimate one, and Bob’s your uncle, at least in theory. In practice, legitimate cash businesses are more and more rare as time goes on, and investigators are really good at noticing when some random nail salon or bar has a lot more revenue than they should.
Also, don’t be stupid enough to operate your illegal business out of your legal, money-laundering front. Seattle used to have an extremely sketchy but extremely good cash-only teriyaki joint downtown, but they got busted for fencing stolen iPads after hours. Which explains a lot about why they never accepted credit cards, I guess, but they were a thriving teriyaki joint and I kind of miss them.
I actually worked for 8 months as an intern at Fintrac, Canada's financial intel agency. This was 14 years ago now, but back then they were actually pretty good at what they did, for a group with ~300 people. They just had analysts going through vast amounts of data manually, but with plans to improve the tooling, automate more. I can only guess at how far along they've come now.
The reality is, if you're moving more money than you should you'll get it caught eventually. And the more you're moving, the more likely you are to be noticed.
(This is not advice.)
The amount of money you can launder in a given period of time is ultimately limited by how much real business you have. So if you need to launder an excessive amount of money eventually you’ll have to start metaphorically or literally pouring alcohol down the drain.
(According to a bar manager I once knew, bars inherently have higher shrinkage than other businesses anyway; in bartending, you don’t get fired for stealing the occasional bottle or giving away free drinks to your friends because every bartender will do one of those, but if you do both you will get fired. I don’t consider this guy a reliable source, but it seems plausible; stevedores were notorious for liquor theft prior to the invention of shipping containers, so why not bartenders?)
Every time you move more than $10,000 into or out of a bank account in a 24 hour period (presuming Canada or the US) your bank will report it to your country's financial intel agency.
They notice when a cafe is pulling in far more money than it ought to. Then they hand what they have over to the IRS/CRA, FBI/RCMP, and let them investigate further.
If you're moving any significant sum of money, you're on their radar. And they aren't stupid.
The real money in is stuff like real estate, which is pretty shady even when legit and much easier to buy and sell
It's like this: I buy a house for $500,000. What a great deal. A year later, I sell it for $600,000. Hey cool, I made $100,000 profit. Of course, quietly I've handed the original seller a briefcase with $110,000 cash in it. The extra $10k was to keep his mouth shut, but in return I've converted $110,000 of dirty money into $100,000 of clean money.
But maybe it's not just one house- maybe it's 10 houses. Maybe it's a huge mansion worth $5m (which I negotiated a great deal on at $4m). I'm not cleaning the full value of the asset, I'm cleaning some portion of it's value.
What those other parties do with the dirty money is up to them, but it's easier to deal with smaller amounts of it, spread out, than it is to deal with one big pile of dirty money. Maybe they work construction as a general contractor and buy their supplies for jobs using cash, but get paid in clean money. Many hands make short work when it comes to cleaning money.
All that said, every large purchase - homes, cars, boats, etc - leaves a trace. Financial Intel agencies get a report each time you move $10k or more. And if you move too much, too frequently, they start investigating- how come this guy bought 5 houses in 3 years, each one below market value? Sooner or later, someone under questioning by the police gives you up and then it all unravels.
This isn't a hunch, this is entire purpose of KYC and AML. Even something as simple as making a large deposit at the bank is enough to trigger reports going to places that might cause you concern.
You have a lot of claims there, do you have sources?
AML regulations do plenty, and they start with banks checking for sketchy transactions and not executing them. You can also look up several cases of very large penalties for breaking these laws. The US crushed a couple of Swiss banks a few years back, the longest operating bank which had been going for hundreds of years was effectively shut down by money laundering judgements.
It seems you want to have small financial businesses not be responsible for people using their services to commit crimes... well too bad, I say. You don't get a free pass to aid and abet crime because you're small. Like many things, the business of facilitating financial transactions isn't just keeping a ledger and presenting a nice interface to it... the real meat of the business is accurately keeping transactions on par with regulation and resolving disputes. The obvious part of the business is the easy part, the hard part is what you get paid for.
Here are billions in fines for HSBC. You can say financial regulators aren’t doing enough, but you can’t say they’re doing nothing.
Where did I say anything about fairness?
There is a problem where prosecutors are rated by success and they only take slam dunk cases. That problem really has nothing to do with the laws themselves,
The fact that vast swaths of victimless, consensual activity is criminalized is exactly the problem. When enough laws exist to make enforcement an impossibility, selective enforcement becomes the law.
Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime.
So financial processors who process payments indiscriminately can find themselves in court for the sins of their clients.
Most financial institutions are not willing to bear the expense of legal defense for questionable clientele.
Update: This is similar in a lot of ways to the issues Marijuana retailers have with banking: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...
Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it.
Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal.
I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity.
That doesn't seem to be a problem for payment processors, though.
Neither is a problem that some funky stuff shows on Youtube from time to time which is promptly taken down when somebody reports it.
The question is whether PH did this knowingly and whether it is Mastercard's responsibility to act on it and how much of this is realy up to Mastercard to judge.
If PH is taking down any content that is reported and deactivating accounts then that is basically the same thing as Youtube does and we are now in gray territory when PH is being punished for not being to Mastercard's liking for some reason.
Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal.
Normally what will happen is if the assistance in money laundering or funding criminal activity is incidental or the organization didn't know there was a problem and couldn't be reasonably expected to know, then it's not a crime. But if the organization knows or should have known, then it is. MasterCard is now in the knows or should have known state, so continuing to fund illegal activity could reasonably be considered a crime, at least based on the typical patterns of these laws.
If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube is likewise liable and Mastercard should stop serving Youtube knowing that at any point in time Youtube has some users that have illegal content.
It is different to stop payments for illegal activity and stopping payments to a large corporation that has huge user base that has some users engaging in illegal activity.
If it is ok to do that then practically no current large company that has large user base could be served by payment organizations.
You are missing the point here.
MasterCard doesn't care.
They have zero interest in fighting legal battles to retain PornHub's business.
> If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube
YouTube spends a ton of money building extensive controls to catch illegal content and remove it from their platform as quickly as possible. So much so a lot of should be legal content gets sucked up and blocked/ removed.
From the sounds of it, PornHub doesn't have similar controls even as they are in a business which neck deep in potential legal/ ethical challenges.
If this rule was enforced equally, it could be a good thing overall. Yes, it would probably destroy for example YT as it is now and I'm ok with that.
The real question (for a business) is whether the profit of doing business with a company is worth the potential liability. In this case, PornHub has a rather high profile legal overhang which makes the liability potentially very high.
> I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity.
Look at how quickly Google pulls content from YouTube based on the first sniff of a DMCA claim. Businesses have zero interest in fighting a legal battle for a third party.
Waiting to get conviction is not good way to live or business to operate.
Yes, but they don't fund crime. They just allow transactions between customers and sellers.
Especially in this case I think it's more appropriate if:
- the payment provider reports to the police
- the police is properly founded and equipped to handle such cases (hint it isn't in most countries I'm aware of).
- If after a initial short "check" the police believes a deeper investigation is adequate the payment provider might have to suspend service (temporary with time limited and telling the porn company why).
I thing this would be much more appropriate.
Furthermore: Requiring manual review of pron material and reasonable proof of consent/age if it's not obvious from the video.
No, they are not funding it, my wording was far from perfect.
This is very very similar to why Marijuana retailers have trouble with banking. There are a lot of laws around banking and criminal activity which make banks very averse to dealing with anything that remotely smells criminal.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...
Depends on what you mean by funding. If payment processor like Mastercard is considered 'funding', so does the 'treasury' if cash is used. the factory that printed the currency bill too? how far do you really want to go with this?
I posted a link above which helps explain it above since a few people had questions about this. Fundamentally, if you perform banking activities for criminal activities you open yourself up to a landslide of legal bullshit. Banks want to be as far from that as possible.
If there’s evidence that the site isn’t policing itself, they are gone.
They do have a tremendous aversion to people involved in criminal activity or at high risk of doing so. Once PH started publicly flirting with that threshold they got dumped.
It's a different scope. Porn shops sell product in one place and local authorities deal with that. A bigger entity with interstate impact is a federal matter and penalties are much more severe.
But in this case, the drunk in question just crashed his car on the street corner just outside the bar and is stumbling up to the bar to get a drink.
Given recent news, it's pretty clear that PornHub's controls on content were terrible. There is little evidence the measures they put in place are sufficient or even that they've effectively purged all media that features underaged or non-consenting participants.
PornHub needs to show they have implemented effective controls over content. Google did it with YouTube. Facebook deals with it. Even this forum has a mechanism for preventing illegal activity.
MasterCard doesn't need domain expertise when there is a smoking gun in public. It's up to PornHub at this point to prove they have effective controls.
The amount of sex trafficing content there makes pornhub look like a church going virgin.
In your example, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check, as they're doing to pornhub.
MasterCard should stay out of it, as they do in other situations.
no, a bartender is always obligated to verify the age of people who enter their establishment if in doubt, regardless of how they pay. You won't get off the hook selling booze to minors because they pay digitally.
And that is actually very reasonable for the exact reason I pointed out, if it was MC's responsibility they would have an immediate excuse to snoop into my purchasing history for every minor transaction. (which they already have to a far too large degree).
If an online liquor store was systematically ignoring ABC laws and shipping booze to underage customers across state lines, MC would probably act in a similar way.
MasterCard has nothing to do with verifying the legality of the transaction - pornhub, or whoever, should do their due diligence to validate everything is legal.
Vimeo
Snapchat
CashApp
Venmo
Every single one of these companies has trafficking minors problem. All of them dwarf pornhub's.
I was explaining why banks stay well clear of anything which might be criminal. Whether that is how things should be from an ethical or societal standpoint is a separate question.
Pornhub itself could use a similar defense to what you suggest. Is it their job to police the content instead of the police? If they were hosting content with minors and rape (and it seems highly likely they were), they were profiting from illegal activities.
I'm on the fence. At some point the law should hold people who profit from hurting people liable. While Master Card (or PornHub) were not necessarily active participants here, they both profited from criminal activity.
Where you draw the line is tough.
But, if you are aware of a customer using your service to perform illegal activities you can't claim plausible deniability.
It's not reasonable to expect police to be watching everyone all the time.
(Ignoring, for a second, KYC-type laws that can make MC criminally liable for not policing their own platform... laws I think are mostly garbage.)
Your analogy doesn't fit, because the current scenario (MC kicking PH off their platform) would be like if a daycare discovered criminal activity involving one of the kids they watch and then refused to watch the kid anymore. (Which would be a bad thing that might make the kid less safe!)
We need to distinguish between institutions so big that they are defacto system and institutions that are mere cogs of the system.
Your argument is a good one, but it ignores attributes of the parties.
MasterCard could similarly report these alleged (alleged!) crimes, while still processing their payments, and avoid damaging someone's business without due process.
Regulating what happens on your own private platform to ensure compliance with applicable laws is, and always has been, the job of the platform owner. It is not realistic to expect law enforcement to check every platform for compliance under every law.
Even if MC would ultimately win in court, litigation is not cheap and the brand damage alone would be massive.
MC is a massive, trusted financial household name. They would be very publicly fighting for their right to knowingly process payments for a company that is serving illegal sex videos on the largest porn website in the world.
I do not envy the PR agency that would be tasked to spin that one.
If you want a company to not have this option, you need to 1) absolve them of the responsibility to know their clients 2) prevent them from arbitrarily cutting off access. If you don't absolve them, it doesn't make sense to prevent them from cutting off access - how else can they comply with their legal responsibilities?
You don't!
That's where it all gets weird.
There is beyond a doubt a massive amount of illegal activity that flows through MasterCard transactions, but MasterCard can't reasonably detect all of it. But when there is a case like this where your dirty laundry is big public news, suddenly MC can't hide behind plausible deniability.
Which is why banks won't do businesses with legal cannabis dispensaries since on a federal level, its still illegal.
Legalizing cannabis at the federal level would give a large number of dispensaries some relief from this federal oversight of the banking laws.
Is processing payments between two entities equivalent to funding them?
For example, is the post office funding someone if he sends them a letter with cash or a check?
I agree, but this is another problem even if there is a link, and both are not mutually exclusive
> businesses should be allowed to act ethically (within the bounds of the law)
I don't get your point there. Who forces PornHub to act like they do?
But should they really? Because I am completely with you in that this is increasingly problematic in a world where certain services are so core to our lives, taking part is increasingly unavoidable and being shut out is actullay a disturbance to ones social or economic life. Considering how lopsided the power balance is, I do not think it is okay for companies to be allowed to in essence randomly terminate accounts and services that are vital for other businesses or private people to function, no matter what is stated in the ToS.
Surely here it's a case of people rolling the two into one - "people who look at/work with porn must be sleazy" - rather than objectively seeing PH as a business that doesn't want illegal content on its platform anymore than FB does?
But what if their diligent efforts failed or proved to be inadequate, and they still kept their site up?
If there's a fundamental flaw in their model that allowed horrible things to persist despite their efforts, they can't just throw up their hands and continue with the excuse that "they tried." That's a situation where the right thing to do is shut the whole thing down.
Encryption has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing terrorists to communicate freely. Should a back door be installed everywhere?
PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content.
I’m not saying PH is definitely doing enough; I can’t possibly know that. But whether their effort is enough should be judged in the court. If they aren’t doing what the law requires them to do, they should be prosecuted.
> Cash also has the fundamental “flaw” of allowing criminal activity to be funded. Should the government stop printing cash?
Your comparisons are apples and oranges to this PornHub situation. It's not a rebuttal to mechanically list other things that might have some associated negative tradeoffs. You have weigh both the severity of the problem, the benefits, and the alternatives.
> PH doesn’t seem to be throw their hands up, either. They deploy algorithms similar to other social media / video websites to detect illegal content.
PornHub has taken a "laissez faire with cleanup" model for their porn uploads, which frankly invites abuse that's difficult to clean up (as the Kristof outlined). That might work for a site like Facebook, which bans porn outright, so it doesn't have to worry so much about the distinction between underage and of-age porn, since it's all forbidden. PornHub's a porn site, however, so their moderation already starts at a disadvantage. A preclearance model (with identity verification), while more expensive, doesn't have the abuse potential of laissez faire; and given the severity of abuse here, is for more appropriate.
The parent of my comment has the following reasoning:
1) If a model has a fundamental flaw that allows horrible things to persist despite their effort, the whole thing should be shut down.
2) PH has a model that allows horrible things to persist despite their effort
3) Therefore, PH should shut themselves down
My cash example was a counter-example to 1). I was not saying that PH should definitely not be shutdown, but that the manner the parent came to such a conclusion was flawed.
Specifically for PH, we don't know exactly what's happening on their servers. How many illegal videos have been taken down? How many fell through the cracks? How many accounts have been banned?
That's why I suggested that PH should be challenged in court, where evidence can be presented and an informed conclusion can be made. Otherwise, you are not weighing severity against benefits; you are just weighing your intuitions.
It's unfortunate but the reality is that every advancement in society can and will be used for illegal and immoral activity. It is a matter of the greater good.
Regardless... it depends. Are they making a good-faith effort to remove that content from their platform, but sometimes come up short? That's to be expected, but I'd want some commitment that they're working to improve. Did they email me and say "hey, we like child porn and making money off of it"? Ok, yeah, then I'd cut them off.
If I suspected something fishy was going on but wasn't sure? I'd report what I knew to the police and let them do a proper investigation. I wouldn't want to destroy someone's business based only on my suspicions. It's not ok for the legal system to do that, so why would it be ok for me to do that? The burden of proof should still be "beyond a reasonable doubt", and the best place to determine that is still the courts, as imperfect as they can be at times.
And regardless, my questions still stand: was PornHub removing those videos promptly when made aware of them, and making a good-faith effort to ensure they didn't get re-uploaded? Article doesn't dive into those details. If they were, I think a private entity taking an action that could cripple their business would be akin to law enforcement shutting them down without due process or the ability to appeal.
Again, it seems "child porn" is just being used as the "can't argue with our actions because think of the children" conversation-ender it's usually used as.
Edit: Re-reading my response, I'm not sure where I got the bit about how we're talking about copyright infringement. Possible I was reading HN a lot that day and got my wires crossed between articles. But I think the rest of my comment stands on its own.
That said, the issue here is a "fishing expedition". I'm sure Pornhub makes some effort to screen content for illegality but the problem is some still gets through 'cause of scale and costs. I don't know if Pornhub has safe harbor protections or not but I suspect the main target is effectively porn in general.
Access to a reliable payments network (of which there are very few in the world, and even fewer in the western world) is required for doing any kind of online business. Whether or not to destroy a business based on their -- alleged! -- illegal activity should be decided by a court, not a corporate legal department.
Unfortunately, there are garbage laws around financial transactions that make MC liable if they don't do their own policing. IMO those laws need to go.
This is true. But the standards applied to financial transactions are way more stringent than other businesses. KYC/AML laws basically create an affirmative obligation for financial institutions to proactively determine whether each and every customer is engaged in illegal activity.
Unlike in other businesses, it's not enough to just say that you weren't aware of your customers intentions. Unless you've taken efforts to affirm that all their activity is legal, you can be criminally liable.
If some guy walks into a bakers and asks, "What's the best cannoli to bring alone to a mob hit", then the baker is obligated not to do business with him. But the equivalent of KYC/AML would require the baker to verify and document that none of the pastries are being used for illegal activity.
Would you risk your massive global business for one client? I wouldn’t. I agree that it would be nice to see due process happen first, but I don’t blame companies like MasterCard from proverbially yeeting this stuff away.
Money moves quickly, often between non-co-operative jurisdictions, often irretrievably. Money laundering activities exploit the points in the payments system where enforcement and traceability are slower and more difficult. Filing suspicious activity reports is all well and good, but enforcement is always a tradeoff between the expense of the prosecution and the prospect of obtaining a conviction.
Meanwhile more than a trillion dollars leaks into the global money laundry annually under the status quo[0]. That’s _with_ the threat of prosecution - and thousands of people working in AML/CTF prevention worldwide.
MC and Visa (JCB, UnionPay...) have to walk an awkward line between consumers’ and businesses’ demands for instantaneous global payments and countervailing demands that consumers be protected from deception, bad business practices and other forms of abuse. The policy is almost always to opt for the ounce of prevention, because most individuals can’t afford a pound of lawsuit.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/desa/tax-abuse-money-laundering-and-co...
Sometimes the only way to force a company to change is to use the market to force them to change. Attack their advertisers or payment processors and force them to do something.
> Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.
I'm usually on the same page. But it is really hard to feel sorry for Pornhub, they're not Good Guys. The whole normalisation of porn is not a net win for our civilisation. OnlyFans is a relationship simulator for lonely men and as such exploitative. Using the gray corporate term "sex work" mis-characterises the soul-sucking debasedness of it all. It turns everyone into a consumer along its path, and the effects it has on gender relations and family formation are devastating. But I'm fully aware this is a minority opinion on HN.
What PH is really bad at is content moderation. Should they improve that? Absolutely. Is this grounds for legal action? Maybe it is. Is this a good reason to boycott them as an individual? Go for it! But is this a reason for a payment processor to get involved? I think it's not. But you're free to disagree.
As for "soul-sucking debasedness", please stop imposing your sense of morality onto others. Yes, there are some people who are forced into porn for various reasons, and we as a society should try to prevent that -- just like we should try to prevent all kinds of abuses. But there are many people who enjoy working as porn stars. Don't judge them.
If tolerance is the highest value, you have arrived at the end of values itself, because everything must be acceptable. I do not subscribe to that point of view. I do not applaud that which I find to be destructive for a world worth living in.
And more importantly, it doesn't have to be any of those negative things. Sex work and pornography can be enjoyable for people on all sides of the equation. The fact that it often isn't is a problem to fix, not a reason to brutally narrow our perspective on what's acceptable in the realm of sex and sexuality.
Yes. This is not the limit of my criticism, far from it. There is a world of difference between sleeping with 15 truckers a night, ie physical prostitution, and a middle-class student selling nudes on OnlyFans. The problems with the middle-class version of prostitution are the second order effects. I briefly touched on those in another reply in this thread.
1. They don't feel "tremendous shame and grief about it", you're just projecting. They wouldn't be doing it in the first place if that was the case, at least for the middle-class ones that I'm talking about.
2. The "significant harm later in life" does not stem from the (imaginary) shame & grief, it comes from the discovery when they inevitably hit The Wall that no high-quality mate wants to marry them, and that they have tarnished their reputation forever for a short-lived boost in income and attention that is guaranteed to fade one day. The progressive culture and their friends will tell them about "sex positivity" and that prostitution is just "sex work" like any other work, which it isn't. You will not agree to that of course, "I don't own her body haha".
If there is one thing to take away, let it be this: look at the people around you and their relationships, and observe what works and what doesn't. Don't theorize, don't moralize, don't judge, just observe and make up your own mind.
It doesn't matter.
Or rather, if the only idea you have for solution to the situation is repression, it doesn't matter what you think of the impact of porn because you're not going to stop it, you're just going to create "porn and repression, together" just like the war on drugs created drugs and repression together.
Guns and small pox weren't net wins for a lot of societies they were introduced in but once things start with certain processes, you kind of need to find mitigation, not a heavy handed repression.
And sure, a better for people to relate together than exists currently would be great but shoving the genie back in the bottle isn't going to it.
You also paint the picture of a new porn-DEA. I don't know what to say to that, except that I don't favour Sharia Law.
I posit that the ever expanding scope of liberalism with regards to intra-sex dynamics is the (or, at one of the) causes of much despair and grief, because they inhibit pair-bonding, family formation and are deeply non-lindy for various reasons. We see this in the number of older women taking anti-depressives, we see this in levels of male celibacy unprecedent since the middle ages, and collapsing populations all over the western world. None of these questions and dilemmas are new, they are as old as time. The idea that the rules have suddenly become invalid is naive at best, and destructive at worst. This will be non-obvious if you approach this from the viewpoint of enlightenment philosophy. It will become quite obvious if take the historical perspective on human behaviour and how societies function.
Is porn/sex work really being "normalized" in a historically contextual way? Outside of about the last seventy years (maybe less), prostitution and sex work were extremely common, and, compared with the modern era, basically not criminalized. I'm not aware of a body of research that demonstrates a causal relationship between the consumption of porn and any social ill. I'm also not sure if I feel like I'm in a position to decide if OnlyFans customers would be better off without that outlet.
There’s also a dynamic where people quickly get bored with porn and start consuming increasingly extreme or fringe porn to get the same satisfaction which I think is new. To clarify, kinks aren’t new, but just like political extremism, the internet is much better at radicalizing people into them.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, and I’m somewhat libertarian on the issue if only out of resignation, but I think that online pornography is extremely new and unprecedented and may indeed be very detrimental to society.
Anecdote of one, but I use it not infrequently and still have a healthy and fun sexual relationship with my spouse. Managed to produce two children and participate positively in society too. I may be baised, but I think I'm at most 25% degenerate. That being said, maybe I'll try going without for a while and see whether it has any effect.
Sources?
Also you seem to let's assume unintentionally mixing porn with its production modes, its ecosystem, all of its problems, plus the mental health problems of rich men, and so on.
It boils down to the fact that you're wanting to let opinions on "how things should be" steer availability of core economic infrastructure, rather than relying on the legal system which is more properly setup to come to these conclusions.
EDIT Oh PornHub is now implementing the following measures:
a.) allow uploads only from verified users;
b.) no downloads;
c.) improvements in moderation
Maybe I'm actually for this then. Apparently this is what it takes.
https://fightthenewdrug.org has the data. I'd be curious to understand data or reasoning that makes a compelling argument for the contrary ("porn is great or neutral for society").
Your actions on the ledger are mostly permanent, and one opsec mistake and you're screwed.
This simply means that the government will double down on making life for crypto holders more and more difficult, like KYC on non-hosted wallets
Which is precisely what's motivating the ongoing rapid development of various privacy preservation strategies (Monero, Zcash, Wasabi Wallet, ...).
Pornography is hard, it's on the interface of liberty where if you want to maximize freedom, it isn't just a simple action. You need to be careful to protect people in their freedom to express themselves, and you need to protect people from being abused.
>these seemingly arbitrary decisions can be extremely impactful
One would hope that they are impactful. An enormously profitable industry has not been doing enough to protect people from the abuses the business encourages and is thus threatened with losing the ability to sell its product. I really don't see a problem with that.
But when it comes to porn...oh NO! NOT MY PORN!
They are certainly free to do business with whomever they please, but with MC/Visa being a more-or-less global duopoly, these seemingly arbitrary decisions can be extremely impactful.