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Re:A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong by acdha on Friday August 20, 2021 @11:24AM (#28247108)
The other question to ask is whether that piece came out of the blue or because someone was talking it up with Kristof. The author of that twitter thread thinks it’s inspired by an evangelical group (Exodus Cry) and it seems highly unlikely that they’d only be talking with him. It seems more likely that companies like MasterCard are hearing from them, politicians who are getting lobbied by their supporters, etc. and the NYT editorial was more like the final straw than the trigger.

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.

Re:A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong by xg15 on Friday August 20, 2021 @11:33AM (#28247202)
But the thread wasn't defending trafficking. It's claiming that the forces that push the anti-trafficking rules have a hidden agenda, which is not about trafficking at all: They want to get rid of the whole sex industry for religious reasons, specifically including the legal and consensual part. That's a different goal altogether.
Re:A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong by zozbot234 on Friday August 20, 2021 @12:05PM (#28247604)
The problem with that kind of argument is that these rules are what everyone pushes to deter traffickers. No one has seriously managed to come up with a viable alternate policy that averts this kind of collateral damage on bona-fide sex work. 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.
Re:A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong by johnnyanmac on Saturday August 21, 2021 @03:30AM (#28255005)
>The problem with that kind of argument is that these rules are what everyone pushes to deter traffickers.

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.

Re:A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong by acdha on Friday August 20, 2021 @12:04PM (#28247586)
I’m aware: that’s the reason why I mentioned that topic - transparency is what helps the reader know why a topic is getting a spike in coverage and let’s them decide whether they share all of the goals of the groups pushing it.