Journalists with an agenda use a disingenuous tactic, if they have a problem with a person or entity, they'll call up their sponsors, business partners, vendors, etc, and say "we're writing an article on X's platform which has been found to have (controversial material framed in a negative context), are we to believe that you're supportive and would your company care to comment." This leads to the company panicking, going completely defensive, and killing all contracts, services, and pulling sponsors or place of employment from the person whose being targeted in what is often just a hit piece with unverified out of context accusations. So yes, journalists, especially those that work for outlets like the NYT's can have someone's sponsors, money streams, etc pulled out from them by asking so called "innocent" questions in a passive aggressive way. They've done this numerous times not even giving those accused to respond, sometimes the article never even comes out. It's one of the abuses of power you can see in journalism today, where agenda driven journalism is used as a weapon to get someone removed from society, bank accounts closed, etc. Some targets are too big for it to work, or can lose a few sponsors, but they do it all the time.

If a journalist blows a story out of proportion, then usually nothing happens and the story is forgotten after a few months.

But in the porn hub story, the uncomfortable truth is that there was a lot of involuntary porn on the platform. The NYT story just made it a bit harder to ignore that uncomfortable fact.

And it's not like mastercard just changed their policy on a whim based on a single NYT story; credit card networks have always been known to kick all kinds of sex related services off the platform. Sex related businesses have been complaining about that for ever.

1. https://www.pcmag.com/news/pornhub-reveals-explicit-traffic-...

That's demonstrably not true, since PornHub did do more in response to the mainstream media coverage (e.g. finally require some kind of age verification for uploaders and purge unverified content).

The only way they could be contextualized to have done "everything feasible" is within a fundamentally flawed model that they created, but it's precisely that model that needed to be reformed.

To be even more pedantic, they still haven't done everything they can do: they could shut down their whole site and eliminate 100% of illegal material with 100% confidence. Which, I suspect, is the goal of those propping up the narrative that PornHub was some sort of wild west where child pornography was welcome.

I mean they didn't even do that. Wasn't their enforcement team pretty small? The original op-ed said it was ~80 people. In any case it was inadequate.

> but rather an effort to prevent said content from being uploaded in the first place.

PornHub chose a model that made it impossible for them to deal with their illegal content problem. The distinction between legal an illegal porn is often too subtle for any solution that just looks at the content or relies on "someone else" to do the work for them. That's the core issue. It's like a factory that dumps toxic waste into a river, and then "solves" that problem by building a little filtration plant far downstream of the factory that only filters a fraction of the river water, just upstream of some city. Their solution can't work, for reasons that should be obvious. The only solution that has any chance of working is filtering the waste before it goes into the river at all, and that's essentially what PornHub has started to do with their more-thorough vetting process.

Businesses don't have the right to make compliance optional or inadequate if it doesn't work for their business model. They have to pick a business model that can be compliant.

By comparison, critics described pornhub as:

> Human beings of all ages, races, genders, and sexualities are being abused while Pornhub pockets profits from selling said abuse and exploitation online. It's nearly impossible to stress strongly enough the fact that these cases are far from anomalies.

https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf

This is utterly disingenuous. If dozens of instances out of tens of millions isn't an anomaly, what is?

Can you say that was all of it? Frankly, I don't see how anyone can have any confidence that PornHub's previous moderation practices were effective. Some of the stuff they have to remove is too hard to detect without context which is not present in the content itself. Also, those practices put the onus on the wrong party (e.g. forcing someone who had illegal or otherwise improper videos of themselves uploaded to find them and play whack-a-mole as they got reuploaded).

> The filter was sufficient to make illegal content something that the overwhelming majority of people - almost everyone - will never see when using their platform.

And now they have an even more effective filter.

And you're twisting the goalposts: "the overwhelming majority of people" aren't going to seek out illegal content, so talking about what the "majority sees" is actually ignoring the problem.

Not to be snarky, but isn't the the SV business model. Facebook 'are not a publisher', because editors cost too much. Uber are 'not an employer', because proper benefits cost too much..etc ad infinitum

I totally agree with you, it is. Responsibility is a barrier to scaling and other selfish goals, so their "clever hack" is to try to be as irresponsible as they can get away with.

“Of course the New York Times article came out, so even if the information was sensationalized or whatever, MasterCard had to cut them off... It was out of MasterCard’s hands...” No, they made a political-humanitarian choice to use their gatekeeping to influence the world. Same with Apple choosing to go to war with CSAM, we can talk about worries about their methods or whatever but these big companies are making their own choices and they could choose to just ignore the problems with marketing spend, do like Amazon does and purchase ads about how green they are and how they improve local communities and whatever. They chose to instead take their own moral stances and act accordingly, they weren't forced to by some article. And as far as I can tell it's not a purely calculated profit move either.

For that better OnlyFans and PornHub also have agency. So yes MasterCard is making a decision to put financial pressure on a sleazy industry overall, but then PornHub is making their own choices to screw over indie creators and bank on their bigger porn producers. They could instead say, “hey, the indie porn market is about to face this stressor, we could lean into it and become their main ally and then we will basically corner the market on the indie/amateur stuff as others flee.” The business case is not at all open-and-shut you-must-screw-over-the-indie-producers. The story link above acts like this decision was forced; that decision is not forced upon them either. OnlyFans doesn't have to stop doing adult content. They are choosing to pivot away, we'll see if their choice is successful.

I think it's easy to point to "religious groups" and op-eds and not to the overall regulatory push into more aspects of the economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

> On August 17, 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice, under the Trump Administration, announced that the Obama Administration's Operation Choke Point would officially end, stating that it was hurting legitimate businesses instead of preventing fraud as intended.

maybe Biden has done something?

> Banks Tried to Curb Gun Sales. Now Republicans Are Trying to Stop Them. [0]

Corporations like predictability. When you see regulations going back and forth with administration to administration, companies just pick the worst case scenario and go by that. That's why you didn't see any cars lower fuel mileage just because limitations were lifted during the last administration. I imagine MC and Visa are definitely anticipating more restrictions and don't want to be caught flat footed.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/us/politics/banks-gun-sal...

It absolutely makes sense when you are manufacturing a physical good. No point in designing a thing that you might not be able to sell for very long, particularly when you're dealing with something like automobiles. Plus honestly, which car buyer wants less miles per gallon?

Payment processing though is rather different. You can do it today and make some money, and tomorrow you can stop. It's obviously not quite so agile, but the point roughly holds. Unless Visa and Mastercard require years of payments from OF to pay for their costs of starting to do business with OF... there's no real point to not doing this now. They can stop later if needed without a real problem.

And there isn't a button that says "exclude all payments in category [X]" that they can click and the next day they're cut off. It takes time, especially in a giant organization where there might be different regulations based on the content, jurisdiction, etc.

So it absolutely makes for them to cut it off preemptively.

Again it's not something that has much upfront cost nor do later products depend on the current decision.

OF was pulling in about $400M/year. If law changes were a serious risk here, how are they making any money at all? At least two years are probably dependable here. If the payment processor can't be profitable processing $800M over two years for a single account, I don't see how that business would work at all.

In a real world, where people are prone to moral panics, the press is driven by clicks and agendas, politicians are corrupt and routinely abuse power, and businesses love to cover their asses - a single accusation in anything sex-related could cause a lot of damage to any business, whether truthful or not.

Definintely disagree. Stories can be published that are sided, contain bad facts, are missing highly relevant facts, and the narrative can be set in the public consciousness as a matter of record forever.

It’s always a risk-reward issue. Banks are more than happy to work, as long as they can profit enough

My partner, a journalist, has gotten death threats just by being at peaceful protests against certain groups that have wealth and pull in the community - just because members of that org were certain the journalist was the main provocateur. It’s just absolute paranoia. But it is a tell isn’t it? Maybe the rich and powerful should be worried about the common people learning about some truth that they invest a lot of resources to keep secret?

Also I think you may have to look and see how much journalists make. To be so entrenched in a mass conspiracy that takes down whole networks of industry, I’d negotiate a better salary then the equivalent of $20/hour.

This is like arguing that hooligans engaged in vandalism are virtuous because they're not millionaires.

You're failing to distinguish between journalists publishing a balanced truthful article in which the truth makes someone look bad, vs. "nice business you've got there, shame if someone were to publish a hit piece in a major media outlet."

I might be misreading this, but are you implying that a subset of journalists perform investigative journalism to engage in blackmail rather than to follow-up on a lead or hunch?

I think it's interesting that people believe that this is the ambit of journalists rather than short selling investor relations groups where it is literally their job to publish hit pieces about companies that are hopefully flawed, while taking a short position on their equity.

It's not blackmail for money, it's blackmail for capitulation.

Suppose you have a dishonest journalist who thinks car companies should submit the location history of all their customers' vehicles to the FBI without a warrant.

You can't successfully advocate for that as government policy because it would violate the Fourth Amendment and anyway the public isn't likely to want that.

You can't use honest reporting to convince customers in the market to not buy a Ford just because Ford isn't doing that, because customers don't want to buy a car that constantly reports their location to the authorities without their consent.

But if you call up Ford and ask them some leading questions implying that you're going to publish a hit piece on them if they don't change their policy, now you're blackmailing them to change their policy. The point of the story isn't to inform the public of the company doing something bad, it's to coerce the company to change their policy under threat of slanted negative media coverage.

There are some people that enjoy the power trip of forcing the hand of large companies, and there are others that will get behind a cause dogmatically and are capable of inflicting extreme damage -- no conspiracy required.

That is what I suspect happened with that NYT piece, because its depictions of PornHub were distorted and off-base. And the damage stretches far and wide.

And judging by the Twitter thread this seems to be the case.

Sorry that happened to your partner.

I am surprised that death threats are still around. Is it not actually a crime or is anonymity so good that law enforcement can't trace them or do the recipients or police just not bother following up?

Personally, I'd really like to see them put at least a little effort into it, to send the message that it is in fact illegal and you take at least some risk. As it is, people often make no real effort to disguise themselves, but get away with it because no authority cares enough as long as they don't commit actual violence. So they can shut down speech with impunity.

I agree with your overall sentiment, but the fact that a journalist may make $20/hr is all the more reason for motivating them, individually, towards uncovering mass conspiracies. In other words, a large scandal no matter how true or not that garners a lot of attention is sure to lead to potential writing prizes, more compensation, bonuses, etc. So while I don't think every media company has some grand Murdoch-like figure that can play individual journalists like puppets, I do think there is a lot to be gained by an individual journalist leaning towards being overly harsh.

It's the publisher and owners who make that choice. In fact on occasion some publishers acquire exclusive rights to a story just to bury it: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/national-enqui...

That's a stretch. What else will you have us believe? That the New York Times intends to be a politically neutral voice of reason? No, sir. Maybe in the 1950s, maybe before the Internet, in those halcyon days when newspapers had a good slice of the nation's ad money and lots of competitors and earned money by attracting from a broad swath of readers to earn money from ads — instead of reliably enticing specific kinds of readers to pay for their content. [2]

The job description of contemporary journalists, and especially journalists at the New York Times, is to build narratives™ and use them to influence the world. That's what you'll learn about pursuing a modern journalism degree, and that's what will get you career success at the Grey Lady — doubly so since the Trump election. This is not a conspiracy theory against "the media" or even a secret; the Times has overtly published opinion articles to this effect [1], declaring this approach to journalism righteous and good, the appropriate approach for our times.

Maybe they're even right, and even if they're not, at least they're not Fox! But we're a long way from just "ask[ing] questions."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-fairness... to start with; one can find others, see also general coverage of the trends in pieces like https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...

[2] From the City Journal piece above: "The intent of post-journalism was never to represent reality or inform the public but to arouse enough political fervor in readers that they wished to enter the paywall in support of the cause. This was ideology by the numbers—and the numbers were striking. Digital subscriptions to the New York Times, which had been stagnant, nearly doubled in the first year of Trump’s presidency."

The NYTimes fired an editor for publishing an opinion piece by a sitting US Congress person because that opinion upset people. And this is supposed to be the crown jewel of journalism and has turned into Huffington Post. Your downvotes and others defending modern “journalists” are delusional.

No, you're conflating different things. That's the job of an op-ed columnist, which is what Nicholas Kristof is. And frankly, that isn't new. It's been true since the invention of newspapers. An op-ed columnist the equivalent of a modern-day pamphleteer.

The news section is different, and it's job is to report facts. The news and opinion sections are run as totally different organizations in well-run newspapers, because their objectives are so different.

Also, City Journal is even more ideological and biased than the New York Times.

You have definitely described an ideal. It's a reasonable ideal, even when those who follow it fall short. But do you actually contend that this ideal is shared by those at the New York Times and do you feel your words describe their newsroom accurately? That is the specific paper before us, after all.

> Also, City Journal is even more ideological and biased than the New York Times.

Perhaps so! Sometimes this is a positive feature; those who are biased do have an incentive to investigate facts, and uncover the truths their enemies would prefer to remain hidden. No doubt that this has been a major reason for the New York Times' success with their coverage on Trump, which contains many damning facts.

Is this a positive feature insofar as this article on OnlyFans is concerned?

It's an interesting observation that the people who have an axe to grind about, say, the New York Times being "biased" very frequently do not live up to their own purported ideals of neutrality nearly as well as the NYT does (i.e. the critics are hypocrites who are salty that someone dares to speak a different opinion than them).

Did PornHub have revenge porn, child trafficking, etc. on the site? Yes. The twitter thread concedes this point. So this isn't "just a hit piece with unverified out of context accusations". Is that fair game to report on? I'd certainly say it is.

If you're going to publish a potentially explosive article about something, is it better or worse to reach out to sponsors, partners etc proactively to get their reaction in the published piece, or should you surprise them with it? IMO the former makes sense. To suggest that these sponsors would somehow not be at all affected if a reporter didn't call them up doesn't match with reality at all. We've seen too many viral boycotts to count at this point.

> They've done this numerous times not even giving those accused to respond

Well, how long is long enough? If you were required to wait for someone to respond before publishing it would be a fantastic stalling tactic, wouldn't it? You could just keep putting it off and off.

The problem here, IMO, is twofold: there is a payment processing duopoly, and societal mores are still very puritanical. These are the cause of the problem, not the article. Yes, Kristof wrote an article that resonated with those two factors but what's the alternative, not publish controversial stories that might have a negative effect?

Does Facebook have revenge porn, child trafficking, etc. on the site? Yes.

Go ahead and have a read, I'll wait.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

The same problem exists on YouTube, Twitter, reddit, and even Hacker News to some degree. Of course, being a text-only platform makes the scope a lot less dramatic, but I've seen some people advocate for violence against certain groups and the like. I'm sure dang can tell you about some of the horrible things he's had to ban people for.

This is a difficult problem to solve, I don't really have a good solution for this, I'm not sure if anyone does. I do know that private companies acting solely in their own interest acting as custodians of what is and isn't allowed based on what does and doesn't generate "negative publicity" is most definitely not a good solution.

How often do we see "{YouTube,Apple,Google,...} blocked my account and is threatening by business and I don't have a good recourse"-stories on HN? Too often, and those are just the ones that manage to get publicity. There is often no good recourse to address mistakes or really get a good impartial judgement on things that might be on the border.

You might say "these are private companies and can reject the customers they want, you don't have a right to do business with them", well, fundamentally I don't really disagree with that, but a lot of these companies are monopolies or duopolies they can really have a big impact and even make basic participation incredibly hard or even impossible. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, but again, it doesn't seem to me that we really want to leave it up to private companies acting in their own interest to make these kind of decisions.

> It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.” Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”

imply Pornhub is going out of it's way to specifically monetize rape or child videos, when the truth is they monetize every single video on their platform. If it was as easy as creating some sort of child or rape filter and de-monetizing those videos as the sentence seems to imply they should be doing, they would just remove the videos entirely, not de-monetize them.

And the bit about related suggestions sort of implies to a non-techie that Pornhub employees are generating these suggestions, and it's not the only place in the article they make this point.

The reality isn't an evil mustache-twirling Pornhub employee sitting at a desk and brainstorming "Ah yes, if they searched for ‘Young Asian’ they probably want to search for 'young tiny teen. The reality is an algorithm detecting patterns in user searches, and some of those users are sick people, and there's basically no level of human moderation of videos or search terms happening at the scale of usage Pornhub gets.

Sentences like

> Mindgeek’s moderators are charged with filtering out videos of children, but its business model profits from sex videos starring young people.

Implies that Pornhub is getting a substantial amount of it's profit from illegal porn, which I highly doubt is the case and the article provides no evidence of.

Again, I agree overall with the content of the article, and approve of Pornhub's reaction to only allow verified videos (which was suggested by the article). I'm not angry at Nicholas Kristof for sensationalizing some things, as it appears that is what it took to actually make something happen. But the article is definitely skewing towards misleading in some sections to get more reach.

> the bit about related suggestions sort of implies to a non-techie that Pornhub employees are generating these suggestions

They are, in a sense. They're not actively doing it in person but the code they wrote is generating those suggestions. Changing the code is within their power, yet they don't. If the code processing payments accidentally started charging everyone $0 you can bet it would get fixed pretty quickly. Why not fix the code that suggests rape videos?

> The reality isn't an evil mustache-twirling Pornhub employee sitting at a desk and brainstorming "Ah yes, if they searched for ‘Young Asian’ they probably want to search for 'young tiny teen. The reality is an algorithm detecting patterns in user searches, and some of those users are sick people, and there's basically no level of human moderation of videos or search terms happening at the scale of usage Pornhub gets.

"We created a feature that can be actively harmful, but there's no way for us to moderate it. Oh well!". Wouldn't it be better to just... not have that feature? Why isn't it an option to just turn it off?

None of those titles say rape or child in them, and the article already covered that they have a blacklist of search terms. Ever played a videogame with a censored wordlist for profanity? People will still find a way to call you a racial slur, even if it involves some really creative uses of text to get around the filter.

> Wouldn't it be better to just... not have that feature? Why isn't it an option to just turn it off?

Related searches in a search engine is a pretty core feature, and it's not like it prevents people from just coming up with related searches with their own mind and typing them in manually. And your statement sort of applies to every facet of Pornhub. Uploading user submitted videos can be actively harmful. Comments can be actively harmful.

Edit to respond to this bit:

> Changing the code is within their power, yet they don't.

I'm pretty certain it's not just taking search term and running it through a thesaurus or something like that. It likely correlates searches from users that make similar search terms. The code isn't really generating any suggestions, just aggregating correlated search terms. I don't have hard proof of this of course, but it's a very common implementation for related searches.

Deciding what is and isn't rape is an AI-hard problem.

This is a bit akin to saying that a film like reservoir dogs encourages theft, torture, and murder.

You may not like it personally, and that's perfectly reasonable, but a lot of people – men and women alike – do.

https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war...

What does it even mean to be "okay with that" in this context? I certainly think it should be legal for newspapers to publish opeds arguing for harsher sentencing, just as it should be legal for newspapers to publish opeds calling for more lenient sentencing. I am okay with both. If I said it was only okay when I happened to agree with it, that would make me an authoritarian.

All the people hand-wringing about newspapers advocating against causes they believe in should spend less time wishing their opponents didn't exist, or weren't permitted to speak, and spend more time writing advocacy articles of their own. If you think anecdotes are more effective than statistics, then go dig up some anecdotes of your own. You're never going to stop your opponents from using anecdotes.

Right now we have a moral panic, fuelled by a microscopic proportion of content on a site, being used to fuel laws and economic exclusion to remove freedom of action from an entire industry. The consequences are, if not obvious, entirely predictable. Porn will balkanise, and what regulation exists (very strict in its production, relatively strict in its dissemination) will disappear. Sites like only fans being shut down - as with backpage, will force sex worker into enormously more dangerous street work, and ultimately lead to a vast amount of exploitation. And all this will happen, in practice not to protect the vanishingly smaller numbers of trafficked women, or children who appear on these platforms. But because an ungodly coalition of rabbidly anti-porn, anti-sexwork Christian fundamentalists, and anti-porn, anti-sexwork radical feminists have undue political influence.

So, this article alleges that MindGeek only hires 80 moderators to monitor million of videos being uploaded each year despite taking in 460 million dollars in revenue? That's pretty damning, if true. It's little wonder so much is getting through.

You refer to the amount of problematic content as "microscopic" and "vanishingly small", but on what basis do you believe that? On one hand we have an article filled with some pretty horrific examples of abuse being broadcast on PornHub, on the other I guess we have your gut feeling about this whole thing?

> Thought experiment, what happened to piracy when Napster shut down? What would adding subscription options and regulating Napster have done. Would it have created spotify a decade earlier and disincenvtised the development of Gnutella, bitorrent etc?

I don't even know what you're trying to say here. Sites like PornHub already adopt a model that fairly closely resembles Spotify when you think about it. In any event, it sounds almost like you're making the argument that a little child abuse is just the price we need to pay for innovation. No thanks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

>there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators).

'In the last three years, Facebook self-reported 84m instances of child sexual abuse material. During that same period, the independent, third-party Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub.'[0]

Facebook's revenue is about 94 billion.

It makes me feel like Facebook should have around 200x the number of mods that pornohub do based on revenue (pretty close, well done ph), or 700k more based on reported instances of CSAM (nowhere near)

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/14/pornhub-p...

Point here being, anyone doing this is not a journalist; the scenerio described is not journalism. In using the word it belittles and compromises the trust in legit journalism. And it gives the violators the privilege of the label without actually doing anything to live up to the definition of the word.

If your pet barks, do you call it a cat? It's not fair nor honest to call this type of schlock journalism.

While not bulletproof, this filter is handy.

https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1

Yes. It does matter. Words matter. We can't giving a free pass to deceptive language and then expect change.

I think that the MC and Visa duopoly that effectively governs what kinds of goods and services are permitted in society is immoral and concerning. I think the Kristof article and the Visa/MC issues need to be talked about separately.

It was an incredibly visible and influential accusation that seemingly came out of nowhere from arguably the most prestigious newspaper in the country, and legitimate businesses like PornHub and MasterCard are terrified of brand association with child porn and sex trafficking -- if those stuck, it's corporate suicide.

You're right that most opinion pieces don't make a shred of difference. But this particular one, because of the seriousness of the allegation combined with its plausibility, did in a big way.

With PornHub that makes sense because the type of content they provide is the crux of their businesss.

But does anyone care or know what MasterCard is associated with? I would not even think to blame PG&E for providing electricity, even if the recipient turned out to be doing some super illegal things with that electricity.

So I am not convinced by reputation damage to payment processors. I am more convinced by unacceptably high chargebacks and fraud, but even there it is hard to explain the about face that payment processors have made here. Curious!

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

"Your company provided the electricity to take these pictures. Now that you know are you going to continue to facilitate known predators?"

The average layperson would care if MasterCard got hit with a headline like:

"MasterCard processed payments for Very Bad People for months/years!".

Layperson: Guess I'm calling my congressman and switching to Visa!

I assume MasterCard would (a) retain some very good PR firms to assist with keeping their image clean and (b) distance themselves from anything that might tarnish their image, like, well, regular porn websites.

...and doesn't have a reputation in the toilet.

Would you get a SatanCard(tm)? Generous 10% cash back rewards but we make our money by extorting the elderly, killing kids, addicting adolescents to hard drugs, profiteering on pollution in your hometown, kicking puppies on video, and if you die we come after your family for the money, regardless of local laws.

Can you show anything aside from just speculation?

> Ackman, who has four daughters, was outraged when he read how one teenager ended up a Pornhub victim... An influential shareholder activist, Ackman immediately thought about the growing interest in ethical, or ESG, investing... He was friendly with Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Ackman texted Banga, providing a link to Kristof’s story with his tweet: “Amex, VISA and MasterCard should immediately withhold payments or withdraw until this is fixed. PayPal has already done so.” ... Banga quickly wrote back: “We’re on it.”

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ackman

But if you somehow don't trust that and you're asking for someone to report on the confidential goings-on of internal meetings at MasterCard and nothing else will satisfy you, you're not going to get that here on HN.

This is not evidence of a link. What they have said might contain evidence of a link, in which case i'd be interested to hear it. But the job of talking heads on the news is to construct compelling narratives from facts they have to hand, regardless of whether those narratives are true, so the fact that they were talking about this is just noise.

Just like you, I hadn't read the exact same articles as GP. But I was able to find this article in seconds on google as GP suggested.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornhub

> In December 2020, following a New York Times article on such content, payment processors Mastercard and Visa cut their services to Pornhub. On 14 December 2020, Pornhub removed all videos by unverified users.[15] This reduced the content from 13 million to 4 million videos.[16]

Well, they made changes based on the popular reaction to a newspaper column. I’m not sure why you’d point fingers at the column when the obvious reality is that it simply reflects societal norms.

The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill.

By acting "proactively" on anything which smells of controversial or bad PR (and nothing does that more than accusations of child trafficking, not even actual child trafficking), regulators see "self regulation" and go look at something else.

Indeed, staying on the down low and out of regulator minds (and crosshairs) is one of those "cost of doing business" things older companies do.

The actual profit in this specific case might be small but there are lot of money in things related to adult content. They are all now looking for a trustworthy processor. Also even for non adult content lot of people will prefer having payment processing partner who will not kick you out based on some newspaper image. There are lot of grey area in most of the business, specially the biggest ones.

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr...

> “Because they had a download button that actually transfers from their servers onto the devices of millions — I think it was up to 130 million a day in 2020 — of visitors to the site, they have been responsible this whole time for record keeping. So what that means is they violated the criminal code of the United States millions of times, tens of millions of times,” she says.

Is this actually true? How is streaming not transferring under the law?

Edit: This article is also interesting in that it characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things.

I'm not sure if this has been tested in courts, but there seems to be a legal theory that a streaming function corresponds to broadcasting (only creating transient copies, if any, by default) while a download function corresponds to publication (creating a permanent copy by default). I'm not sure which definitions apply to 2257, but US copyright law says that copies are "material objects [...] in which a work is fixed". So if your system is only designed to transfer into volatile/transient storage, you can apparently argue that you're not responsible for creating copies. I suspect a similar distinction is being made here.

> Edit: This article is also interesting in that it characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things.

This kind of laundering is common in opinionated outlets, and ostensibly neutral ones aren't immune either. Keep an eye out for sources being described with phrases like "concerned parent" or "concerned resident", for example.

> One of the primary sources in Kristof’s article is Traffickinghub founder Laila Mickelwait. She also works for the group Exodus Cry, a Christian group that is among other things anti-sex, anti-homosexuality and, naturally, anti-semitic.

While the article itself was a spark, this group has been lobbying for years and pushing from every imaginable direction, including lobbying payment processors and suing companies left and right. So yes, the article was just one tiny piece of the puzzle, but Exodus Cry is the real puppet master.

I suspect the "anti-Semitic" bit comes from the founder comparing abortion to the Holocaust [0], which is... a deeply stretched interpretation.

As far as anti-LGBT goes... yeah, they're a conservative Christian organization, they're not likely to have a Pride float. But it's not a common "anti-" group that goes out of their way to have a Statement of Inclusion [1] included in their FAQs, in my opinion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry

[1]: https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf

> Which, to be clear, they kinda were. PornHub was notoriously bad among the tube sites for its reckless lack of content moderation and exploitation of the people whose videos ended up there. Because of the story, Visa and MasterCard both cut PornHub off.

This should be fairly easy to verify and would corroborate the thread

By Thursday of the next week, December 10th, Visa and MC had cut them off. Discover had followed the next day, the 11th. The Washington Post article linked below includes a statement from MC which reads:

"Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site. As a result, and in accordance with our policies, we instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance."

See: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/pornhub-crack... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/10/pornhub-m...

Any and all websites that allow user published content runs into this issue. It's just a matter of how fine a comb the investigations want to put on it.

So I think the possible brand damage alone could have caused a panic, simply because this particular type of damage could be absolutely horrendous.

It’s important to note that this isn’t wrong or malicious: many things most of us approve of (e.g. ending child labor, environmental reforms, banning dogfights, etc.) followed the same process. The concern is transparency and whether it’s effective at the stated goals: for example, I think trafficking is evil but I also think that the best way to support it is by ensuring fewer people are financially desperate rather than driving them underground where abuse is more likely and harder to prevent.

yes,and I argue there is a severe amount of false negatives caught up in the crossfire because legal entities don't understand the scale of digital platforms. So these rules are made with no regards to how feasible they are and how big a problem this actually is.

Let's be honest here, the real silk road/black market aren't browsing Pornhub/OnlyFans to get their fix. This would be like money laundering on eBay. being on a big platform ruins the point.

>It's much like saying that all the efforts that are now saving elephants from being poached to extinction are just some shadowy "anti-ivory agenda" rather than being undertaken for the sake of the elephants. Terribly bad faith argument.

I don't really care about the intent to be honest. I just hate the loopholes over things that every digital platform needs to perform being taken advantadge of to cause these asinine decisions.

It's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to kill a cockroach. The baby is hurt, the water is wasted, and the roach is probably still alive. I don't think it was a deliberate attempt to support baby murder, but the entire thought process was stupid and will spread to everything else in the house. While failing to kill any bugs.

You'd think, but no. In my experience working at a large tech company, executives cared a lot about what the New York Times in particular thought. A piece published by them would have immediate attention from those executives, and it'd be our problem to respond, even if the original article wasn't well founded. Once I figured out how much leadership cared about NYT, I even justified one engineering decision based on "what would NYT say". And it worked.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that MasterCard cares so much about what the NYT prints.

> Political pressure? Regulatory pressure?

You're on the right track. If you think (correctly IMO) that politicians and regulators read NYT, then pressure from these groups is going to come soon after the NYT piece is published. Best take action before that happens.

Such an article is forwarded to “leadership” and “the board”. Boards in particular, who hire and fire the leadership, prefer collecting advisory cheques without getting any side looks at the country club.

> The new MasterCard rules are a direct result of this, which basically means an overwrought Christian anti-sex fever dream is now dictating sexual content online.

That's right, the state of everything was "dictated" by a guy writing an article.

So article wasn't the source, it was just another piece in the path of Exodus Cry's rampage. They have a huge legal team and they've been attacking this from every imaginable angle.

Someone peed in the ocean and they are draining the entire sea to "fix it". That's not the fault of the pee-er nor even the person who yelled "someone peed". It's the fault of people who didn't understand what that meant before draining some 20% of the matter on earth.

Until that happens, pretty much every single website with user generated content is at risk in some degree.

>Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators.

OG does in fact verify every creator. The problem is no company at that scale is going to site down and review every single piece of content they post after that verification which may or may not include other participants that they could not verify. That's what this policy change wants to enforce (which any webmaster would know is prohibitively expensive to do without being Google).

“ Exodus Cry is a non-profit advocacy organization seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. The organization originally developed out of a weekly prayer group founded in 2007 by Benjamin Nolot, a filmmaker and member of the charismatic Christian International House of Prayer.”

In fact, MasterCard might lose enough business that they might reconsider. So this can’t be the full story.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-...

Kristof's piece wasn't the first I'd heard of the "Traffickinghub" campaign but it seemed to be the first time a lot of people around me did.

What wasn't widely known at the time was that basically all their "data" was either exaggerated or outright fabrication, with near-zero sources, and backed by religious fundamentalists. That didn't start coming out until the damage had already been done.

"Won't somebody think of the children?!" works every fucking time though.

https://exoduscry.com/downloads/Statement-of-Inclusion.pdf

I'm sure there's much more to the story, but thought it worth at least looking at the vision, etc. from this company given the accusations made against them.

Easy. the reporter isnt just launching the page and waiting for a reaction. They probably used those accounts to report to authorities and timed their story with an expected result from the investigation.

There's no magic to it except for the ability to post the news piece and have the public think "they are just reporting on it"

It’s just a bigger market when people can feel like they aren’t a complete sex worker, and can actually share that they are on OnlyFans, same way they can share their Twitch.

The US doesn’t need to fine or litigate them if they want to penalize them heavily, they can just pass a “consumer protection bill” (so Walmart and others can pay <1% instead of ~2% on all credit card payments).

The incentive to issue cards evaporates when there’s less fee to collect.

Both would be bad upstream for visa/Mc/Amex.

The same newspaper ran similar tactics against YouTube which resulted in colossal changes. These kinds of stories have an enormous impact, magnified I think by company's (in the case of YouTube, advertisers, in the case of OF, payment providers and investors) being terrified of snowballing bad PR in social media.

It's strange but in the modern world yes, 'old media' can have transformative impact on corporations.