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Comment by yarcob | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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