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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.