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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

It would really be ideal if some of these sex workers could get their own platform. Pornhub seems like it was frankly unresponsive on a lot of serious concerns until they were forced to deal with them by the panic articles that went around last month

And frankly it seems to me like it's still trivial to go on there and find what seems to me to be a lot of content that has dubious consent or related issues.

These performers would be better off with a platform that was highly moderated, something Pornhub and the sites similar to it don't seem to be able to (or want to) properly do.

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The panic articles were primarily drawing on statistics provided by groups that want to eliminate sex work entirely.

Last thing I saw from sex workers rights groups was roughly "Pornhub are far from perfect, but moderation at scale is hard, and they're actually talking to us and trying to improve, which is far better than most other platforms."

So I suspect what would be ideal, honestly, would be "let the sex workers rights groups lead the way rather than panic articles placed by people who hate sex workers" - and that includes disregarding my opinion just as much as yours ;)

OnlyFans allows them to sell their content directly (not the same as it's up to them to solve the discoverability problem)

In a perfect world, you'd have something like Patreon or OnlyFans that runs like a utility out of a non profit org (such that Signal, Let's Encrypt, Wikipedia, and similar platforms operate as 501(c)(3) non profits). Removing the profit motive removes a lot of room for bad behavior on the part of the platform.

Verify the creator, provide a way to get payments to them without you acting as the intermediary, charge reasonable fees for your tech stack to organize and distribute digital content, and keep a paper trail when regulators, legislators, and law enforcement knock.

I want to really stress as a financial infra and payments system armchair enthusiast and scholar that crypto payments don't fix this. The law just comes for you if you try to subvert the law with crypto. You have to drive home the point (lobbying, marketing) that consenting adults adhering to the law should not be in fear when exchanging value in a transactional business and should not have their payments intercepted.

Even something like a public benefit corporation in a state with more strict reporting requirements could even fill the same niche, without dealing with the rigamarole of obtaining/maintaining 501(c)3 status. It'd be interesting to see how the corporate charter would be written.

It would really be ideal if some of these sex workers could get their own platform.

Then they'll go after the platform infrastructure (AWS), or any other fundamental aspect. Peer pressure.

We've been warning for ages: the Cancel Everyone game the NYT and others with very loud voices are playing is a dangerous one.

OnlyFans seems to be having no issues. I do find it funny how "this site is filled with a lot of rape and child porn" is being framed as "it's being cancelled for no reason." No, there is a reason and other sites with better policies aren't being targeted.

There was a documentary earlier this year about how many underaged people were selling on Onlyfans.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5e7dad06-c48d-4509-b3...

But there's a dark side: the documentary found evidence of the age verification process being circumvented, meaning under-18s were able to illegally sell explicit content of themselves on the site.

16 year olds circumventing age verification to sell explicit content of themselves is a problem, but at least they are doing it voluntarily.

Surely if a 16 year old can circumvent age verification then any criminal can. I understand nothing is perfect, my point was to show that any user generated platform faces the potential of illegal content being hosted.

Pornhub was targeted not because of the content, but because it was by far the 800-lb gorilla in the room. Facebook has far more numerous instances of cheese pizza being thrown around but Facebook is a far more sympathetic entity than something with the name "Pornhub". The people who went after Pornhub were looking for any angle that would be palatable to the Left in a bid to remove adult material from the US landscape. There is a reason that they changed their name from Morality In Media to something else.

> I do find it funny how "this site is filled with a lot of rape and child porn" is being framed as "it's being cancelled for no reason."

It's because this is the wrong way to deal with that issue.

The fairly obviously correct way to do it is that you have law enforcement investigate instances of child pornography, arrest the creators for it, and then issue a court order to the hosting sites to remove the specific instances that they've found.

The content gets removed. The correct people to go jail. If there was a mistake, the site and the uploader have standing to challenge the order.

Who ever thought it was a good idea to turn websites into the police? It's not their job, they're bad at it, don't do that.

According to the NY Times article, what you suggest is exactly what people have tried to do.

However, according to the article, it was really hard to get Pornhub to remove illegal videos. And since videos could be downloaded and uploaded by anyone, removed videos quickly showed up on the website again and again.

Sex abuse victims have been fighting for years to keep their videos off Pornhub, yet they show up again and again.

Pornhub is the only one making money from the videos, so I do think it's their job to keep rape videos off the site. The police can't spend all their time making sure no anonymous users reupload illegal videos again and again.

> However, according to the article, it was really hard to get Pornhub to remove illegal videos.

You're saying that if you go to them with a court order, they don't comply with it? So then have the court find them in contempt. This requires no involvement from Visa or Mastercard.

> And since videos could be downloaded and uploaded by anyone, removed videos quickly showed up on the website again and again.

How are they supposed to know it's the same video? Compare every video to every other one? The uploader would presumably just reencode the video or make whatever other changes to evade an automated system, and a manual system is infeasible. And no matter what Pornhub does, there are six quintillion porn hosting sites on the internet and it would just end up on a different one.

The correct answer is for the police to investigate who is continuing to upload them and impose penalties. Then no more uploads, no more video.

> You're saying that if you go to them with a court order, they don't comply with it?

No, I'm saying it's hard for sex abuse victims to get their videos off Pornhub.

> How are they supposed to know it's the same video?

If they can't even prevent re-uploads of known illegal videos, maybe they should never have allowed user uploads at all.

> No, I'm saying it's hard for sex abuse victims to get their videos off Pornhub.

If they go to the police, who have the ability to get a court order, and they don't, isn't your issue with the police?

> If they can't even prevent re-uploads of known illegal videos

How do you propose that they know that it's the same video? Trivial checks like whether it's byte for byte identical are just as trivially bypassed by the uploader, e.g. by reencoding. Anything more complicated than that will fail to match with 100% accuracy, especially when the uploader is trying to cause that to happen. And then you would still have people complaining that the videos are there again.

This isn't a job for the platform. It's a job for the police.

> How do you propose that they know that it's the same video?

I'm not making money from user uploaded videos of young girls, so I don't need to have an answer to that question.

> This isn't a job for the platform. It's a job for the police.

No, it's not. It's the platforms job to ensure they don't distribute unlawful content. You don't want the police involved, since all they can really do is seize the domain and block the website altogether. (And that's exactly what they do for file sharing websites)

If it takes a court order to get pornhub to remove content they have failed.

Most legal systems have concepts of being an accomplice, criminal negligence, constructive possession and so on. So it seems reasonable that a website which help crimes be committed or hosts illegal content on its servers should have some liability or requirements on taking reasonable preventive measures. Especially if the website is made aware that such crimes are being committed.

> Most legal systems have concepts of being an accomplice, criminal negligence, constructive possession and so on. So it seems reasonable that a website which help crimes be committed or hosts illegal content on its servers should have some liability or requirements on taking reasonable preventive measures.

That doesn't follow at all. If you get on a Greyhound bus with the intent to get to a place to commit a sex crime, Greyhound would "help crimes be committed" by carrying you to your destination, but they're not the police and it's not their job to investigate you before allowing you to travel.

> Especially if the website is made aware that such crimes are being committed.

There are two different versions of "made aware" here.

One is that a court has decided that something is illegal and ordered them to take it down. I have a hard time believing that they don't comply with that.

Two is that somebody claims that something is illegal, but the website is neither judge nor jury and has no competence to adjudicate the claim. In this case it's not at all unreasonable to refer you to the actual court system, which will bring you back to number one.

The fact is that all of these alternatives are designed to be an end run around the constitutional protection of speech, by foisting the messy process of determining what's illegal onto a platform that can claim it isn't subject to the First Amendment, instead of a government body that is. Even though it's a government penalty being imposed for not removing what is, in practice, a body of works some of which are lawful speech.

Not only "It's filled with rape and child porn" but "It's filled with rape and child porn and revenge porn that pornhub tacitly tolerates by ignoring removal requests"

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