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.
> 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
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.