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Some background regarding the recent OnlyFans changes
@Post-Culture Review:
A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong, and the reality of it is a lot more damaging and concerning to both the livelihood of sex workers and online freedom in general.
Thread reader app: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428584131835748359.html
I can't verify the statements about Exodus Cry being anti-semitic. The Wikipedia article is short, and only notes the founder's opposition to abortion and gay marriage (equating the former to the holocaust, lol).
I'd suggest also reading the linked articles in the tweets.
Something like the Thread reader should be integrated on Tildes.
Equating abortion to the holocaust is a hair's width away from holocaust denial. I dunno, people might beg to differ on that one, and I wouldn't necessarily use the term myself, but on that alone, the accusation of antisemitism isn't baseless at all.
How is it similar to holocaust denial? If anything, equating it to the holocaust uses the countless murders committed during it as an illustration to what people who are against abortion believe; that you are murdering an alive person, who is simply unborn. At least it's how I understand it. If you deny the holocaust, the argument of calling abortions a holocaust falls apart.
Well, it's not literally denying it happened. But by equating these things, you show -even if as devils advocate I take the harshest stance on abortion I can muster- you show quite the disregard for the scale, brutality and downright evilness of the holocaust. To compare these is ignorant/tone-deaf on a whole new level.
Ahh, maybe it's us Germans. Any holocaust comparison would raise eyebrows here. This one in particular stinks. To use the holocaust as a point of comparison for something like this and politicize it -to me- shows disregard for the fate and suffering of European Jews.
Even if I muster the strongest view on abortion I can imagine, I wouldn't expect anyone to make such a comparison, unless I would also expect some very creative takes on the holocaust from that person.
I'm vehemently pro-choice, but have some anti-abortion family.
I think that when you look at this through the "reasonableness" filter that you probably have, it seems like an unreasonable comparison, and it seems like it downplays the Holocaust. After a lengthy discussion with one of my crazier aunts, I have reached the following conclusion:
To her, abortion is murder, and not just a "run of the mill, normal" murder; it is a tortured, heinous act of evil baby murder. For those of us who are pro-choice, we do not have that visceral understanding. There have been 27 million abortions so far just in 2021. That eclipses the Holocaust. She cannot understand why everyone isn't abjectly horrified by this; to her mind, we are evil, because we value ourselves over the baby holocaust that she perceives.
To be clear, I don't think her position is reasonable - it's influenced by massive amounts of propaganda, and an ignorance of science - but once you understand the feeling that accompanies her thoughts, it's a lot more understandable. In my experience, when people equate abortions and the Holocaust, it's the furthest thing from Holocaust denial, and they actually mean what they say; it's like a Holocaust except it recurs every 2 months.
So you're saying I was too reasonable in my assessment? Alright, I can live with that.
Slightly more seriously though, if you apply those standards, it's a flip of the coin whether their source of propaganda denies the holocaust.
All jokes aside, yes, you were being too reasonable. The "abortion is worse than the holocaust" crowd did not reach their conclusions through application of reason. For the most part, people who think like this aren't in any kind of denial about the Holocaust; they're in denial about the thing that they are comparing to the Holocaust.
My aunt (and most of her sisters actually, but I only argued with the one) truly believes in the Holocaust and how terrible it was. Her uncle died in WW2 fighting Nazis; she believes the Holocaust was abhorrent evil, and almost as evil as humans can be. She sees abortion as worse.
I think it's hard for people who look at things through some kind of scientific / reasonable lens to actually understand that. It took me a long time to grasp that she wasn't engaging in hyperbole or trying to make a point. She was being completely literal, and it informs every single political thought and action she has ever had. To her, abortion is a constant Holocaust that for some reason stupid liberals don't care about and actively engage in. It's actually horrible to talk about, and she cries and is in actual mental pain about it. She sees people who shoot abortion doctors as the equivalent to a time traveler who could kill Hitler.
It is totally unreasonable, but I think that, at least in my experience, it's not coming from a place of Holocaust denial or anti-semitism.
Oh it definitely is an iffy comparison, because ultimately there's a stark difference between an unborn fetus and a person who is alive. An an important aspect of the Holocaust is of course that it wasn't just genocide, it was Industrial genocide. Even the Soviet gulags, which by the way killed way more people, were work camps with punishment being the primary goal, and not death, they simply had an incredible high rate of attrition for the unfortunate souls locked inside.
Even if you accept the point of view that abortion is murder, the industrial aspect isn't really given, as there is no profit incentive, no ulterior motive but to help, which is in stark contrast to the Shoah, where the goal was to eradicate everyone Hitler deemed as undesirable. But I can see why the comparison is drawn, is all. It's also a very provocative statement which means it will get eyeballs on your issue.
In general, people love to make provocative statements more than they want to think about them and any comparison to Hitler which doesn't actively involve genocide is uncalled for.
The emphasis is mine:
This article really puts the whole issue in line with the disastrous FOSTA/SESTA law.
I get what they’re point is, and I agree that we shouldn’t have to get rid of all sex work just because some of it is exploitative. But at the same time, the author doesn’t actually show any evidence of what they’re saying. They mention “trafficking scares” as if the entire thing is made up like the Satanic panic of the 80s. But I know someone who’s sister was likely taken in by a sex trafficking ring and may now be dead. It does happen. It’s not some hypothetical. Do we have any actual numbers on the relative frequency of sex trafficking as a result of Craig’s List and Backpage? Given my experiences with Craig’s List, I would absolutely not say it’s a safe way to meet clients even for simple things like selling an item. Most people I know set up exchanges from these sorts of sites in the parking lot of police stations for that reason.
I firmly believe that any legally major person is fully responsible for their voluntary actions, and take into account the possible reactions by their close relatives/friends as well as by other society groups.
Also, I disagree with specifically mentioning women as OnlyFans is not a service limited to women who want to present themselves to men.
Imagine someone has a baguette which is 30cm (1 foot) long, and notices that there is a stain of mould about 1cm (half an inch) from one of the ends.
What would one expect that person to do?
I would hardly expect that the stain is exactly carved out, but cutting some 2.5cm (1 inch) or so from the affected end and discarding that piece seems reasonable to me.
However, I would definitely not expect that 25cm (10 inches) are cut and only the remaining 5cm (2 inches) are left.
And this is what PornHub was forced to do. They removed 10M videos out of 12M due to allegedly having a few thousand problematic ones.
Pornhub had a responsibility to keep the bread from molding in the first place.
The fact that they were forced to take down all those videos shows they didn’t do the bare minimum of due diligence. They had to take the nuclear option and delete all unverified videos rather than only offending ones because they had no way of distinguishing between regular porn and content depicting rape, abuse, trafficked individuals, or underage individuals. For a porn purveyor to not have safeguards against this type of content in place is both unethical and illegal.
In terms of the metaphor, they couldn’t just cut off the mold because they had no idea how much of the bread it had infested, and that is their own fault, not the fault of people attempting to have abusive material removed.
In the first place, there is no way to keep every single loaf from moulding when you have millions of loaves.
The fact that perfect moderation at scale is economically impossible is very well established. PornHub was removing illegal/problematic videos they found, but especially such videos reported by others (the approach known as Notice and Take Down). However, there is no economically feasible way to prevent offending content from being re-uploaded, whether it is about illegal NSFW material or about copyright violations—Notice and Take Down might be imperfect but it is feasible, whereas Notice and Stay Down might be ideal but even YouTube and Facebook do not have a well-working solution.
Yeah, so you're left with a situation where enforcement was economically unfeasible, and so they didn't do it. They ran a business that couldn't make money without cutting corners, and so they cut corners. Can you see why people might have problems with that, and prefer that they get out of the business instead of cutting corners, when those cut corners hurt so many people?
They actually DID their best (in the last two years at least) to enforce standards. Out of their 12M videos, only “thousands” allegedly contained CSAM, and in that infamous article by that fundamentalist group, one of the main complaints was that though the videos had been repeatedly deleted and the infringing users banned, they were then re-uploaded by people using different accounts.
In short, they, just like YouTube or Facebook or Reddit or any other major social medium, could not check each and every submission. Unfortunately, there will always be people who violate the law (especially copyright) by stupidity or malice, and the only sustainable option is to rely on reporting from inside or outside the community. The other option is to pre-screen everything (a.k.a. Letters to the Editor), and I remember the Internet in late 1990s—or even today where there are no laws similar to CDA 230—the user-generated part of it is really boring.
I doubt the certainty of this. I don't think we have any way of knowing this, nor, more importantly, did Pornhub. If those videos really were only a small portion, I don't think they would have chosen to nuke millions of videos, because they could have worked to vet the comparatively few that were offending, or delete only those. I think this line of thinking also goes against the point that you brought up in another comment to me about moderation at scale not being possible. If the issue really was only a few thousand videos across 12 million, then that's not really a problem of scale.
I'm not trying to be combative, but I do think you are giving Pornhub way too much benefit of the doubt here. This article features a former Mindgeek executive talking about how these things were being handled internally:
The Girls Do Porn lawsuit identified that Mindgeek knowingly promoted GDP's content long after they were aware of it being coercive:
Even in cases where abusers have been convicted, Pornhub has not been held responsible for hosting and profiting off videos of the abuse, nor did they report those videos to authorities:
Even if you think the people that caused the takedown were sex-negative fundamentalists acting in bad faith, I don't think that changes the fact that Pornhub was conducting themselves in shady and unethical ways. They had no acceptable way to answer for what they were doing when people finally did come calling, and that holds even if those people came calling with ulterior motives.
It's honestly a shame that everything involving pornography falls into a prudishness vs. libertinism lens. The shame it's soaked in means other sorts of considerations, like consumer and worker protection, get ignored.
Mindgeek is functionally a monopolist for online smut-peddling. It is definitely a candidate for "big tech" in need of breakup and anti-trust action. Is there any doubt they're squeezing out profits for creators and limiting choice for consumers?
A.S. Presumption of Innocence.
Sometimes people are totally fine with that. For example, I am posting comments on Tildes without disclosing my real identity, and I totally do not mind spending my time while not receiving any money from Tildes. And something tells me that I am not the only one.
Maybe they could but the outcome was stipulated by the payment processing companies. We do not know what happened behind closed doors.
Unfortunately, there is no magic wand like that, but there are methods that allow to avoid this amount of collateral damage. Also, note that a very big part of today's social media is basically unverified content. Basically, any site that allows user-submitted material of any kind without verifying that user's identity is like that, including Reddit, Twitter, and… Tildes. Thus, by presumption of innocence, I do not want any content complying with the respective site's rules, SFW or NSFW, to be removed from anywhere in the Internet unless there is a plausible claim that the content is illegal. It is inevitable that some legal content will get a false positive, in which case the logical solution is, indeed, verification (or staying removed, when the content uploader prefers this to disclosing personal details).
PornHub WAS the biggest player, but after that Great Purge it no longer is. XVideos has nearly 10M videos (more than PornHub now), and XHamster has 1.2M, which is less than PornHub but NOW quite comparable. And believe me, those really interested know about those sites; moreover, that content can be found via e.g. Google.
Had I been asked this question 8 months ago, when that PornHub story took place, I would have said I did not know. Maybe, by Occam's razor (and/or by Hanlon's razor) I would have agreed with the former version. Now, after this OnlyFans case, I strongly lean to the latter version. It was not a “weird deal,” PornHub had a dilemma of either removing most of its content or losing most of its revenue.
As for piracy, it is true that many (up to 1% but very likely to appear on the first pages of searches) pre-purge videos on PornHub were pirated. It was typical that a video appeared, stayed for a year, and then taken down with a copyright notice.
And then, a month later, another video with the same copyright holder was taken down after staying on PornHub for a year. And again. And again. To put it simply, adult content producers tacitly tolerated some infringement, as it brought them paying consumers.
And this phenomenon of tacit copyright infringement approval is far from unknown in SFW settings.
As I wrote here,
and
Back then, in December 2020, the issue was CSAM (which was removed and reported but “not swiftly enough”) on PornHub, and PornHub was de facto neutered. This time, this is not about anything illegal—it is just about something someone with influence dislikes.
I have to reiterate my opinion that essential Internet-related service providers should be treated as any other service providers.
I don't know what the industry thinks about it, but why not have a guild with membership, then require membership numbers for everybody in the stream / image?
Unionisation is a good idea but really hard to do when the overwhelming majority of power is concentrated on in a single company, i.e. Mindgeek with the rest being so tiny they don't matter anymore or on foreign soil where they also don't matter.
Porn also has this unique aspect where fresh blood is always coming in and careers tend to last for a really short amount of time. Even the real stars of porn are only big for a 2-3 years if you get lucky. If you are replaceable, it's hard to wield your importance with any kind of power, because there absolutely is someone out there who only cares about the paycheck.
yeah, I was thinking less of a union and more of a 'license to thrill' --- purely as a way to verify active performers all across the industry.
The industry as a whole really needs to figure out a way around the verification issue or else they'll all get backed into a corner with by the payment processors.... unless they (probably Mindgeek) magically figure out a way to cover that aspect themselves
License to Thrill would be an absolutely fantastic name for it holy shit.
i just don't see how a license like that would do much more than verify age, something any other public license already does. What venues did you think should it open?
yeah, its exactly a license. Facial recognition will eventually be good enough that it'll be able to match up people, too, even if it requires a quick bumper at the end that shows who is who for the time being.
The industry needs to sort something out, though. There's probably some good startup opportunities in the identity space here.