Re:Visa and MasterCard ban Pornhub over abusive videos
by mncharity on Friday December 11, 2020 @09:21AM
(#25386063)
> goes back many years
I've sometimes wondered what might have happened if 9/11 had occurred a couple of months later. My fuzzy understanding is that through 2001, US DoJ was working up a major effort, a "War on Porn". Mid September, shortly before kicking off, that focus became an embarrassing liability, and was quietly shelved. So instead of a big explicit declared War, with associated societal reflection, we've had a long quiet shadow war, with misdirection integral. Though hoping for societal political reflection seems increasingly quaint.
Yes: Pornhub had a massive problem, not with child depictions, but with "revenge porn" and similar materials. They definitely needed a slap on the wrist for that one.
But... this is not about children, not about "revenge porn". This is part of an organized, fundamentalist-Evangelical-Christian anti-sex-work campaign that goes back many years (https://theconversation.com/evangelical-women-are-shaping-pu...), whose biggest successes to date were FOSTA/SESTA, and (in countries where prostitution is legal) who uses the current Coronavirus crisis to further calls for banning brothels and other sex work indefinitely.
Make no mistake: the ones suffering at the moment are not the people behind Pornhub/Mindgeek. The ones suffering are the countless content creators that already had their lives screwed when Coronavirus restrictions made face-to-face sex work impossible, and now the biggest platform got hit with a payment cutoff. And this is intentional.