I would go so far as to say that the reason Pornhub and other tube sites haven't taken problems like child porn and revenge porn seriously is because doing so would undermine the foundation of their business: stolen content.

On the other hand, this might ultimately work in their favor if it has the effect of raising the bridge they've just crossed. If it gets harder host stolen content, Pornhub has to worry less about someone else doing to them what they've done to others now that they are making a switch to paid content.

Not disagreeing with you, but, to be fair, that was exactly Youtube's recipe for success, and still is to some extent. I never understood how Youtube could get away with that.

All of which to say, I expect this to be the same case on PH. There's the usual wackamole game of unauthorized content being taken down, but much of what stays up from unauthorized sources probably does so out of permission that is not apparent on the surface.

I think streaming companies place a premium on the appearance of content coming from users, and this is the result. If I'm right, then changes may not significantly alter the level of traffic to PH, which is what everyone is soothsaying about: that users will just go elsewhere. But I'm curious what's going to happen.

Like you said, PH's model looks to ape youtube's, and the latter does not appear to be entirely reliant on "stolen" content.

This is all much less nefarious than you make it sound.

When a rights-holder finds their IP in a video, they have the option of how to proceed. They can choose to take the video down completely, run ads and receive all or a share of the revenue, etc.

If they choose to leave it up, it's almost always because they are receiving all of the revenue from the video now so they have no reason to take it down. There's no smokey back room deals going on here, this is just the rights enforcement tools provided by YouTube.

Rights-holders do not always hold global rights to content and if the video contains content from multiple rights-holders, there are several competing claims that all need to be resolved.

The reason the videos uploaded by users eventually end up resembling the videos uploaded by the rights-holder is because YouTube provides a mechanism for rights-holders to enforce the same restrictions they operate under on their content even when they weren't the ones to upload it.

Source: I work in a company that does this, though not directly on that side of the business.

It's not a huge leap when you consider it's also been revealed that a good chunk of torrents at one time had been seeded by IPs belonging to corporates.

AFAIK porn performers don't generally get paid residuals, so there probably less interest in this sort of skulduggery.

This is not universally true. For example, you can go on YouTube right now and probably find all sorts of music videos not hosted by the actual artists, so long as it’s older or more obscure music. Plus at this point it’s kind of moot; they already gained their user base from the first several years of illegal new content.

After a Lot of suffering. I believe there was an incident recently in which Pornhub refused to take down videos of a minor in what was an obvious situation of revenge porn.

I think the current model should have been the default from the start - if verified, paid content creators were the only ones allowed, they would get a much bigger share from their videos.

Thank fuck Ryan Creamer was verified.

Yeah, right. Tell that to the flood of channels which will take cut single scenes out of tv series and twitch recordings and upload them to YT monetized.

It's basically a don't ask/don't tell system.

Courts have been reluctant to require any active investigation even when faced with very large number of valid take-down requests.

Youtube is more proactive than most (CotentID) due to settlements and agreements with its major partners.

People just really like it, including lawmakers themselves.

It's probably like with Uber - its riders ended up enacting the law that made the cheap prices possible. Or Airbnb. Or a lot of other stuff. Operating in a legal gray area for years.

Or maybe its more comparable to the difference in punishment between doing cocaine and doing crack. Although that Toronto mayor did do crack, so I don't know if cocaine is strictly the drug among lawmakers. Certainly preferred rich people, including rich politicians.

The really twisted thing is, what does that say about porn? Sure, Nicholas Kristoff might be reprinting talking points by a few purity crusaders. But for some things, like the unverified content being not just pirated, but sometimes abusive, they might be right?

Lawyers, plenty of them.

After all, if there are old songs on YT then people can send them to others (see RickRoll), listen to them (playlists), keep them in the collective zeitgeist. So copyright holders have avenues to profit from these activities. If YT purges content likely those tracks would just disappear fast from the minds of folks who mostly listen music on YT.

Same dynamic with archive.org and used book sellers, although there everything is PD. Would be nice for the not-yet-PD-but impossible-to-monetize book content from, say 1930-1980, had the same scheme in place for online content. I suppose the books-to-borrow function on archive.org or the online lending platforms in local libraries provide that function.

I don't think Pornhub behaves in same way neither YT or more comparable imgur.

Large IP holders are happy to use it because it heavily favors them. Large IP holders also don't have to worry about repercussions for false or incorrect DMCA claims.

It became obvious to big copyright owners that they would get more if they played ball with Google instead of fighting them in court.

From Wikipedia[0]: § 512(c) also requires that the OSP: 1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, 2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, and 3) upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material.

This is an 'and' which I take to mean safe harbour takedown (the 3rd clause) only applies if the other two are also true. So the host must not know it exists (plausible for YouTube) and not receive a direct financial benefit (does Ad revenue count?).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...

They are by non-consensual porn.

I personally believe strongly that porn demeans, dehumanizes, and violates the people in it, even when it's consensual (and my understanding is that consensuality and non-abusive working conditions are much rarer than most porn consumers think).

I realize that opinion would be quite unpopular around here.

* ETA: Facebook is an industry leader on CSAM scanning, and has developed both its own algorithms and media databases. So your comment that "Facebook isn't taking the issue seriously" seems like exactly the wrong diagnosis. Facebook's high numbers are a consequence of putting serious effort into this area. (Whether scanning of private messages is actually effective in stopping distribution of the content, that's something I'm more skeptical of.)

Those were external checks, no self-report. So the real question is whether those checks were insufficient and just found the tip of the mountain, or whether pornhub was acutually doing serious checks for this stuff and doing quite well in that.

In later case it also opens the question on whether the reports were really childporn, or just some disputable case which be acceptable in some country or time, and problematic in other countries or times. Or whether they just missed them. Or whether there is some darker reason behind them.

I think it's very likely that pornhub really had a system to prevent the nasty stuff, after all they are were big and old and not stupid enough to ignore those easy targets that would kill them fast. Their fast reaction this time shows that they are very focused on surviving.

These were incidents counted by a third party, not self-reported

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canada-internet-chil... There's a useful little graph in the article that shows how the Canadian Centre for Child Protection ranked various sites.

The article mentions it was not Pornhub doing the checking.

Pornhub also required you to have an account to report content if I'm not mistaken.

anecdotal indeed.

I lived in South East Asia for a while and the cell phone footage of sexual interactions between middle school students is what I reported. These are girls wearing middle school uniforms embroidered with the school's name on the shirt [1] which indicates that the woman is under 18.

Nobody would bother to replicate the uniform for 2 minutes of shaky cell phone footage. It was underage material. Plain and simple.

[1] - https://favpng.com/png_view/t-shirt-t-shirt-school-uniforms-...

My own ex-girlfriend's photographs were uploaded to XHamster by her ex-boyfriend along with a copy of her passport. She's 17 in the images. Took us over a year to get them taken down.

Indeed your mention of the uniform, along with it being shaky cell phone imagery, would cause me to moderate such an upload if it was brought to my attention - I would stop it from public availability and notify the uploader that they could respond with proof of age and rights if they'd like to prove the claim wrong. (99% of the time that does not happen)

Sadly, I can't say that you are 100% right on the uniform thing - especially in certain places, copying such uniforms or acquiring exact copies and using such for videos is kind of common.

Fake-revenge porn is actually a thing, and has been for a long time. There are some slick web sites out there that try to make it look like it's 'stolen / hidden video' of girls next door - but it's actually now budget / average girls selling vids cheap and it's packaged in a way to make it seem real.

With that being said, there are also some 'parasite sites' that take imagery of people out of context and use it for sexualized viewing without the person's consent - and I abhor that.

There are also people who do revenge porn, and blackmail porn I would say it's likely even more prevalent. That kind of thing really ticks me off too.

I don't know a lot about xhams, but I'm pretty sure they play with different jurisdictions and rules that pornhub and some others - so I'm not going to comment on the way they do things.

I will mention that I do get quite a few 'takedown requests' from cam models, so many do not understand how affiliate promos work, partner promotion agreements, APIs and such.. sometimes they also push dmca complaints to google and others in an attempt to rush a pic removal... I have also seen some people working with these models who get 'creative' in their removal requests, putting in emails to me (and likely to our hosting companies, google, etc) - that "not only are these pics not authorized for use, but they we're under 17 when they were made" -

As to where I am sure this works to speed up the deletion process for some, it's a shitty thing to do for many reasons - but it is done a fair amount. With so many of these fake take down notices, it's not easy for a moderating team to sort out what is legit and what is not.

It's obvious to me that sometimes this is done by a new boyfriend / husband who is trying to remove past history of their lover's porn work.

It also clogs up our system of support emails. So there is much more to these issues than most people who would file a legit request would know.

It's not always easy to determine these things.

It wasn't the police they were reported to it was the site admins of XHamster.

>Over the last three years, Facebook self-reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material. During that same period, the independent, third-party Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub.

Organizations like the IWF rely on reports, whether self-reported or not. Most people report CSAM on the website they're visiting instead of going to a third party (at least I do unless nothing is being done about it). Therefore it's not a surprise that the IWF only reported 118 incidents on Pornhub. It would be interesting to know how many instances Pornhub self-reported during the same time period since a high number is actually a good thing. I'd imagine that a sizeable chunk of the Facebook reports were quickly taken down due to being recognized by CSAM detection algorithms.

I don’t think so.

I’m not an expert on PH, but from what I understand from other sources they have a mix of public content, open-to-all-paid-customers content, and private content that is available only to subscribers to particular channels.

I don’t know if they have any content owner (well, submitter, given the level of piracy) controls on who can see content at the specific user level (whether by restricting allowed subscriptions to channels with an owner-approval process or by having content restricted by something other than subscription status.)

That's mostly why YouTube still exists.

The case with pornhub was exactly the opposite.

On the other hand, there's naked yoga on YouTube so....

Most of the content on Crunchyroll was fansubbed by various IRC and torrent groups and used without permissions of the original copyright holders or of the fansub groups and without credit to the fansubbers. So, actually, no, they didn't need a team of translators, and there's a lot of anime fans who refuse to do business with Crunchyroll because of their betrayal of the fansub community.

I remember Dattebayo fansubs, one of those torrent fansub groups you're talking about. I remember when they shutdown and announced support for Crunchyroll, suggesting that legitimate paid streaming was the future for anyone who actually wanted to support the anime subtitle community.

Perhaps I wasn't remembering the full politics of mid 00s subtitle culture... its been a very long time since then. But for Dattebayo at least, they were quite clear on throwing their support behind Crunchyroll, to the point where it was rumored that Dattebayo was probably working with Crunchyroll. (Though I'm not sure if that was ever confirmed)

With hundreds of thousands of torrent hits per week, Dattebayo fansubs probably was one of the largest torrent fansubbers of that time. I tried to search for a history of those groups, but alas, it seems lost to time. I just got my personal memories to guide me.

---------

You're right in that those early fansubber / torrent / IRC groups were all separate groups with different politics. But from my perspective, the big groups (ie: Dattebayo) were definitely all in on supporting Crunchyroll.

Most big fansubbing groups hated CR back in the days when CR started, since CR took their fansunbs to fuel their business.

Once CR started to make/pay for their own translations (also hiring translators from some groups in the background) the situation got better, since then a clear, legal path was visible for the community.

Exactly zero of the fansubbing groups ever did it to make money. For most people, they were in it for the community, which included things like the prestige of having your name associated with a popular/successful project. The reason the fansub community was upset at CrunchyRoll was because not only did they take the content, they edited it to remove the intros and other forms of attribution to the original fansubbers.

If they had left in attribution, nobody would have cared, and CrunchyRoll would have been treated like any number of other torrent to streaming sites that existed.

I mean, Dattebayo definitely criticized CR at first. But by the time Dattebayo closed shop, they were highly supportive of CR. That's why its important to remember the names of these groups. Do you remember the large-fansub group and/or which anime you're talking about?

Its hard for me to think of a bigger group than Dattebayo back then. Dattebayo covered Naruto and Bleach subs, as well as a bunch of lesser known anime.

By making it available. This is value added too.

Thinking specifically about Napster and MegaUpload. Is it because there was no value beyond simply sharing files? If there was a presentation layer + user accounts on top, would they have been spared?

I think a music sharing site I used let you see the other music files a user was sharing, so if you thought they had good taste you could check out other things too.

Megaupload poked a bigger bear.

The more you magnify on any country's history, the more prevalent shady dealings comes up. This goes doubly so for superpowers. It seems that at some point in time, everyone has done unscrupulous things to get ahead and we often forget to be introspective.

On a personal anecdote, I dabble in fashion design and it continually baffles me as to what is considered "homage" when large, established companies blatantly rip off designs. Large companies like H&M or Zara can literally steal pieces from famous designers, make it worse and cheaper and sell it in malls worldwide. Obviously, when an Asian brand does the same thing, it's a knockoff. Peeves me to no end.

[0] - https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

Paid porn doesn't have a strong lobby, so there is no similar pressure on PornHub/MindGeek.

I would, sadly, also not be entirely surprised to find out that the courts are.

YouTube would be afraid of being sued for copyright infringement. PornHub is legitimately afraid of being indicted in a criminal conspiracy to distribute child pornography.

With respect to just the copyright claim, I don't think there would necessarily be any bias, as it would be pitting pornography producers vs. pornography distributers. Both pretty slimy if you feel that way.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

While I think there are some forms of advertisement that are acceptable or even desirable, what we see on the internet is not that, mostly due to the tracking and targeting, which almost every advertisement company is doing, but also because adverts are inherently trying to trick, pressure or encourage you to spend money on something even if you don't really want or need it.

> Maybe try some introspection.

I have. I've come to the conclusion that I judge people who work in industries I find morally questionable.

Claiming that everyone who works at Google works on Ads is like saying everyone who works at Amazon moves boxes in a warehouse.

Re: second paragraph, I didn’t claim that everyone at google works on ads, you made that up. You don’t have to work on an immoral thing just an immoral employer for me to question your morals.

Also, I’d say there’s a big difference between the homeowner choosing to list their home against a city regulation that the homeowner is choosing to violate, versus users uploading content that they don’t own in the first place.

Even a tenant who is AirBnb’ing their unit against their lease terms is at least listing their own unit / choosing to violate an agreement that they themselves have signed.

AirBnb to me is unique in that their regulations came afterward to combat the monumental rise of short term rentals, whereas Section 230 / DMCA regulations are what enabled the other sites to ultimately growth hack on the back of infringement.

The problem is that enforcement was very poor.

Sadly, it'll be impossible to stop it entirely with the unverified upload model.

So much so that all videos start to look the same.

Or so I've been told.

I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hackernews act like he has done nothing wrong and is a victim. Now the community is against a business being built on uploading stolen content by anonymous users?

Ok.

Of course he has done wrong, but the fact why people are standing up for him is he did not do it while being in the US. It is one thing if the US asks for extradition of a criminal who committed the crime in the US, but an entirely different thing if the criminal committed the crime in another country - and that doesn't even answer the question if what the criminal did is actually a crime in that country.

It's already a legal stretch to arrest and punish pedophiles who fly out to Asia to rape children (because enforcing the laws against child rape should be something for the destination countries!), but the Dotcom and Assange sagas should not result in extradition.

That being said, it seems WikiLeaks was at least complicit in Russia propaganda operations. And we have no way to tell whether that would have happened without the arrest. Complicated story. And still a trial I hate to see, if Assange gets convicted, there is no way to be sure that doesn't happen to other journalists as well.

Probably one of the only ones that actually will be positive in intent.

dang made a good post about this recently. I'm having a hard time finding it now (he posts a lot), so I'll just paraphrase. a lot of (sometimes vile) positions are strongly advocated for by a minority of users, but only weakly opposed by the majority. that vocal minority will upvote any friendly post, while the majority will just shake their heads but not necessarily downvote every single post.

so it's actually quite common for the top comment to be against the aggregate opinion of the userbase.

This is the argument about why "bicycle licenses" aren't a thing. The number of drivers who aren't cyclists dwarfs the number of cyclists by many orders of magnitude in most US states. In many municipalities, some cyclists regularly break traffic laws and cause (at best) frustration or (at worst) deadly accidents. This leads to drivers-who-aren't-cyclists making the seems-reasonable comment that you should need a license to drive a bike the same way you do for a vehicle.

So let's say a politician supports bicycle license. This isn't enough to get anyone who supports a bike license to vote for them, because it's not a Top Ten issue for anyone on that side. But not only will every cyclist in their district vote against them, they'll campaign and donate to any opponent of that bill. If they even think you support the legislation they're writing checks to your opponent.

I'm not making an argument on bike licenses in particular but I can see a similar effect where a minority percentage of HN feels strongly enough about a given topic that they upvote the articles based on title alone. When an issue is particularly divisive, the odds increase that people feel strongly on both sides so you end up with the #1 posts on two different days expressing diametrically opposed positions, but both very heavily upvoted.

Then when it becomes the modern equivalent of Usenet/IRC/Napster/PirateBay, people will just shrug and say "don't blame the protocol".

The demand exists and the technology exists, but nobody has put them together yet.

(I've never developed anything with blockchain or torrents, so my apologies if there's a technical reason why this sucks.)

If I understand Pirate Bay and other torrent sites correctly, they don't host any content. They just index what's available P2P.

I'm not sure how large that index would become, but I could imagine chunking the index itself out so that it doesn't take much room on any one user's machine.

The chunking of the index could theoretically be done in such a way that no individual chunk would have any useable information, so no individual user could be accused of linking to illegal content. (I think that's conceivable? Again, not sure.)

(Please note: This is pure hypotheticals. I have zero interest in seeing such a system come about.)

With hosting, you can either have it centralised so users are anonymised from each other (but it’s easier to take down centralised repositories) or decentralised but where users can see each other (but then it’s easier for copyright holders to go after individuals). You can’t really have it both decentralised and anonymous.

To be honest, I wonder why western governments don't ban cryptocurrencies.

They make tax collection harder and help criminals collect money. Plus that would be a blow for countries that are investing tons of money in it eg China, which is destroying the rest of the world, economy-wise.

There is the possibility that western governments are already under Chinese influence, I guess, but I wasn't definitely expecting BTC to survive so long. Especially because governments are not even benefiting from cryptos.

And then there are channels like "Netzkino" who have around a million subscribers and a few thousand full movies online. The claim is all that content is supposedly legal. Well, maybe. But it doesn't look like it...

I’m not saying there is no problem whatsoever and nothing should be done. However, Pornhub has come under increasing scrutiny despite an underwhelming amount of evidence that it has a serious endemic problem. Such illegal material could easily end up on any website if it is mistaken to be legal, which unfortunately does happen; it’s not very easy to tell if someone is biologically 18, you are likely underestimating how much the human body can vary from person to person if you think that it’s easy. But, while it’s not a good thing, the bigger picture is that Pornhub is largely not being used to intentionally distribute illegal material, whereas social media and chat programs actually are. Sometimes surprisingly close to out in the open.

Something feels disconcerting here. It’s not that I care personally about this particular action; in truth I have almost only ever seen meme videos on Pornhub. But it feels like it could be a precursor to another push to censor pornography and the internet. Somehow, when eroticism is involved, people either cheer on or simply are ambivalent about censorship. I think this is irrational. The edges of free speech are the only parts that really matter that much. This action here doesn’t really hinder anyone’s expression directly, but it certainly seems like it will have chilling effects that justify future actions that will.

Of course I hope this is mostly nothing and it ends up being purely positive. However, I at least implore some thought here as this didn’t just occur in a vacuum.

I would go even farther to worry that this might begin to push the Overton window towards demonizing any content posted online that isn't "verified" by a real identity. MindGeek (the company behind PornHub) was also backing the UK's law requiring an ID to watch porn online. If users get comfortable with the idea of having even their porn tied to a real ID, wouldn't they become comfortable with less "private" content also tied to their legal identity?

I don't want to read this headline from the future: "Pornhub requires an ID, should Reddit, Twitter, and 4chan do the same?" And I also don't want to read the future headline: "Pornhub's ID database hacked, thousands of models names and addresses exposed"

Anonymity is important (imo) and it would be a shame to see people use porn as the excuse to curtail it. Surely it's possible to remove illegal content without stripping away privacy and anonymity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point#Details

Everything on that list depends on a relatively high volume of relatively low value banking transactions.

What's your evidence for this claim? I don't know if it's true but it certainly isn't what I'd expect.

> Pornhub's announcement also cites a report by third-party Internet Watch Foundation, which found 118 instances of child sexual abuse material on Pornhub in the last three years, and notes that in the same period, Facebook's own transparency report found 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material on the social media platform.

There was also such an issue with it cropping up on Tumblr and not being removed in short enough order that Tumblr was briefly removed from the iOS app store.[1]

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46275138

A large bulk of users likely never sign up for PH, making it harder to vet individuals to make sure they wont report the content. People show up with pretty much one thing in mind when going to PH and it's not really to interact with communities. Facebook has so much reach and such a large userbase that it's harder to moderate, and it's used for exactly what these groups want to do.

If we were only talking about close to 18 yo CSAM, sure that I could believe might be something that is more common on PH. But when looking at the entirety of CSAM, I just find it hard to believe that people would risk uploading a video that clearly has a child in it to a service that actively moderates video content primarily to a community that, en masse, doesn't like the content.

There could be some tabulation issues, but I find it hard to believe it's so poorly counted that it would make up a meaningful difference between the two numbers provided.

- Most popular social media websites allow adult content in some forms.

- It is no easier to tell illicit content from legal content on one site versus another.

- There is likely not just far more content, but far more adult content on Twitter and Facebook than dedicated porn websites.

- Sites like Twitter and Facebook better facilitate private conversation (presumably.)

I don’t think you can make money on Pornhub without verification, so there’s probably not a money incentive to intentionally post illicit content. In fact I’m not entirely sure why you would at all, but my best guess is in hopes of trading with others. In that case, social media is actually perfect: draw people in with carefully constructed fronts, do dealings in private groups and try to fly as much under the radar as possible.

It’s hard to say and probably silly to speculate but I just don’t see the point of using a pornography website for this.

Still, Facebook and Twitter just have way more content and users than porn websites, and it’s going to be easier to fly under the radar. Twitter accounts with fewer than 500 followers are basically invisible.

Of course, banning pornography really does roughly solve this problem, but it’s a pretty nuclear solution... (I would prefer a world where we’re less weird about erotic content, not more. I get why it’s complicated, but I still think we can do better.)

> makes me think

> Intuitively, I'd expect

Why do you think all these things?

If you are aware of this (the core issue), you should be grappling with these issues rather than ignoring them. If you're not aware of these issues (the core issue here & the motivation for the actions of the CC companies), please read[1] & build that complicated issue into your view of the topic before commenting. These "what's the harm?" comments are really stupid, to put it bluntly.

* and I don't care about DMCA & intellectual property, I'm talking about someone having their phone stolen & private pictures taken, or sending pics to a lover in confidence and having him humiliate her by sharing it online & telling friends and she can't get the pictures taken down. This isn't about IP it's about peoples' lives.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

1) How wide do you cast the net for accountability?

Bad content is a subset of unverified content, unverified content is a subset of Pornhub, Pornhub is a subset of an ISP's traffic and a subset of CC companies' revenue. How much good do you want to ban with the bad?

2) Why not actual law & order?

I would guess a lot of fans of unverified content also dislike bad actors, and would like to see them investigated/prosecuted, rather than 'deplatformed'. 200 OKs for the good actors and gaoltime for the bad actors, rather than 401s for everyone.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/fabian-thylma...

Sure I’ll answer your questions, but you go first & answer mine :)

Agree that jail is better, if that’s an option I’ll take it. But if the options are “let a company make money off rape/cp/etc” or don’t let them do that, I’ll take the latter.

We can already generate realistic video/audio content based on a very small sample.

We're going to get custom porn in the vein of celebrity fakes, but for EVERYONE. It was limited because it used to take time/skill to make. That's changing incredibly quickly.

I'm fairly conflicted about how I feel about it, too.

I'd wager a non-trivial chunk of my income you'll be able to upload a photograph, pick a category, and have custom generated porn some time in the next 10-15 years.

People never had a right to their image, because it is neither unique, nor is really theirs with all these enhancements that we call “image”. Nobody can dictate you what to think. One little step from here and we’ll quite seriously discuss thought crimes.

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" great but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?

Upset about revenge porn? What if it's just a really close copy of your face/body generated by machine, stitched together in a very believable fashion? You could maybe claim ownership of your likeness, but I don't think it's going to be possible to really enforce - Many people look near identical already. Or they add a mole here or there and claim - look - clearly not you!

And it won't be you, but does it really matter? How do you prove it's not you to other people without stripping down?

Upset about rape videos? I am too when it's a real person. I find it much harder to argue against when it's a performance (current porn) or when it's not any person at all. Who has standing in court? No one was harmed. Are you upset that someone was raped, or are you upset that someone is making money off of rape videos? Because there will be generated videos of this content, and it will absolutely be customizable to look like people want it to. Does it matter if the video is real? And removing this content won't stop rapes at all. So is it somehow worse if a real rape victim has fake rape porn made of them? If so, why?

---

Basically - My point is that you're making an appeal based on a moral system that I don't think is going to survive the coming wave of generated imagery.

I too have serious issues with all of the real crimes you dislike, but I don't think you can genuinely equate video content with the crime itself - They happen to be tightly coupled now, but that's going to change.

This is NOT an open and shut victory here. I'm not really sure there's a victory to be had.

Maybe the best we'll get is a world where even when real revenge porn is uploaded, no one will believe it's real...

People make all kinds of claims all the time, including transparently self-serving ones like your example, but that doesn't mean anyone buys them.

I'm pretty sure what's going to happen is the law will make it clear that porn generated from your likeness and distributed without your consent is as illegal as revenge porn. Then a bunch of people who did it anyway will go to jail and that will put a strong chilling effect on the whole thing. In most cases, the people with the motive an ability to make machine-generated porn of a particular person will be relatively easy to find.

And those are folks with the actual resources to go after it in courts.

> In most cases, the people with the motive an ability to make machine-generated porn of a particular person will be relatively easy to find.

I just find this incredibly difficult to believe, unless this "ban on user content" extends to a ban on general computing. And maybe that's where we'll end up, but I think that's a much more malicious result than generated porn. Or maybe anonymity will disappear online, which I find fairly scary, but is another clear thrust we're seeing.

Also - What about the absolutely bonkers industry that will be consent based generated porn? We're already headed that route now with 3d scanning of actors/actresses, and lord knows - I think a lot of folks in the porn industry would be happy to get digitally imaged and then not have to actually engage in the physical process of making porn.

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I think this is a real and genuine ethics question that we don't have good answers to right now.

I don't really have a problem with PH pulling down anonymous user content (hell - private company, they can make their own decisions) but I also don't really think it's going to stop this kind of behavior, and it certainly doesn't untangle complex social questions around what's right and wrong in this space.

I will say - I think we're undergoing another sexual revolution right now, it's just more subtle because it's less about what folks do or wear in public, and more about what folks do in private.

I'm not entirely sure how you legislate on this topic either - What's art? What's porn? can you really "Know it when you see it"? What if you unintentionally make imagery that just resembles a real person?

Those are all questions that depend on social context at the time they're legislated on, and they set a tone going forward.

Basically - My whole point is that this is not some clear win, and again - I'm not entirely sure there's a win anywhere in this discussion. I think this is just PH skirting around the issue for monetary reasons because they happen to be big enough at this point that they can do without anonymous submissions.

I will say - I'm fairly sure any "it's simple and this will solve it!" response is utter bullshit.

> I just find this incredibly difficult to believe, unless this "ban on user content" extends to a ban on general computing. And maybe that's where we'll end up, but I think that's a much more malicious result than generated porn. Or maybe anonymity will disappear online, which I find fairly scary, but is another clear thrust we're seeing.

You're not thinking about this clearly, and are veering off into overreaction and catastrophizing.

Machine-generated porn of celebrities is far harder to police, because they're celebrities. There are thousands, maybe millions, of people who have the desire and technical means to make porn of them.

For regular people, the story is different. For the most part, no one's going to want to make porn of some random person they don't know. The only people with an interest in making or consuming machine-generated porn of a particular normal person are people who have some connection to them, which is a far smaller group. That makes enforcement possible with regular investigative tools. Enforcement doesn't even need to be 100% to be effective at creating a chilling effect, just make examples of some bitter and angry exes and creepy stalkers.

Celebrities are also a pretty rarefied group. Once this problem starts affecting everyday people, there will be more electoral pressure for dealing with it legislatively, just like with revenge porn. At least some cases of "leaked celebrity sex tapes" would probably count as illegal revenge porn today.

He focuses a lot on "things promoted towards pedophiles". But, he admits on many occasions, that the vast majority of the content (even in the problematic keywords) isn't problematic, and therefore, might just be simulated.

He hasn't said how common the child porn is. He assumes there is a lot of it, although all indicators show it is low (there may be a lot more which hasn't been detected, but he seems to have dug really deep into the site).

This isn't to excuse someone posting child porn or running a site which is likely to get such content with insufficient moderation. However, how big is the problem on there? Is there anyone who has quantified it? I am very curious to know.

* I am not familiar with PornHub or those keywords. I am just going by what other people have said about this issue.

Given PornHub's actions, it seems not even they could given an confident answer to that question. PornHub may have stepped up its efforts but it has been mostly a reactive response to media pressure (which has been mounting), not a proactive one.

Pornhub's official position, like Facebook and Google, is to have AI algos and teams of moderators to manually remove such content.

(According to the article, Pornhub only had 118 incidences of child porn over the last 3 years whereas Facebook had 84 million incidents of child porn during the same time)

But for some reason, instead of focusing on facebook, they focus on pornhub because it is an easy target and easy to say we've done something.

Facebook is getting criticized? But what about Twitter?!?

Twitter? But what about Apple?!?

Apple? But what about Google?!?

Google? But what about Amazon?!?

Amazon? But what about Facebook?!?

Just stop. This is horse shit.

> The Internet Watch Foundation couldn’t explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it’s because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it’s possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including “less than 18,” “the best collection of young boys” and “under- - age.”

Is there any information that IWF has done more sophisticated audit than relying on user reports? Have they used advanced "fuzzy" searching algorithms that Facebook uses to identify known videos that have been modified in some way to get past filters?

I was laughing at the UK when it tried to ban pornography sites on the grounds of "morality". But it was the NYT who achieved it first.

The result is the same: I don't like some of your ideas, so I will shut you completely, just in case.

For the particular case of Phub, we should fine it, if it did not comply to takedown requests. But if it did, what is the accusation exactly? That it missed 200 videos from 18M ones?

What is next? Shut down the ISPs that profit from this illegal content in their networks? Hard disk companies that store the content? Where does this end?

Kind of makes you miss the good old days when companies were just mindlessly greedy rather than pushing morality/ideologies.

I'm not saying the far left don't have it in them, because obviously they did USSR etc. But that was in that context, in which by some miracle they controlled the murderous tools of a nation-state. In USA they know very well that they're in line for censorship (or whatever, really) immediately behind the pornographers. No one who appears on cable news is part of the "far left", no matter how loudly they shriek.

I have seen seemingly infinite demands from liberal Democrats that big tech shut down covid disinformation and election disinformation. Surely you are aware of this. Is it your position that this isn’t censorship?

The people who advocate censorship vote for all the same wars and inhuman abuses that you vote for. They're closer to your position than to mine. If they have anything to their credit, it is that they are less explicitly racist.

They are requiring ID verification (i.e. that you're 18 or over) to upload content. As much as I am privacy-minded, the idea that someone could upload an explicit video to Pornhub without verifying that they were 18 is mind-boggling.

This is also a net positive for content producers on Pornhub, who often see their content pirated on the very same platform.

Which could well be a net negative (I'm assuming both the viewers and exhibitionists get something out of it) given how small the positives are.

But a lot of those "casual exhibitionists" are unverified. Many of the photos may have been taken with consent, but are distributed without. Sometimes that's revenge porn, sometimes it's hacked/jacked content, etc. Distribution of questionably sourced content can be quite damaging to the subjects.

If the "casual exhibitionist" is harmed here, it's dwarfed by the harm already being done to subjects without consent. And there are still plenty of suitable venues out there. Including verification with pornhub.

If you look at the actual mechanisms by which harm happens in a revenge porn case, I think you'll find it isn't dependant on pornhub at all.

What do you think are the mechanisms by which revenge porn harms?

If there is a legal case to be made against Pornhub, then the authorities should make it. Otherwise they would do better to go after those who made (or uploaded) the offending material in the first place.

And spinning up a new video host (that you intend to make money somehow) isn't cheap or easy.

Is it still a thing? What malware can a pornsite contain that cannot be uploaded to or linked to from a regular smaller niche or bigger broader site? Do you download and run hotgirls.exe dialers or what?

Nor is it terribly safe right now legally speaking. Considering the child porn castoffs from pornhub will be out looking for a new place to upload their trash. Eventually, not only child pornographers, but so many other undesirables are on your site, that it's just dangerous to continue running it from a liability perspective.

Of course anonymity provides an environment prone to misinformation and exploitation, at the same time, so having verification on a case by case (site by site) basis would be my vote.

After this year everyone should be worried about what the future government turns into after the talk of violent overthrow of the legitimate vote.

Plenty of misinformation posted by identified accounts on FB and Twitter.

You make it sound like the statement requires no evidence. In reality it makes no difference if the uploader is 18 or not, but that the _recording_ is made consensually by 18+.

It is not a net positive for content producers, because viewers of legal but unverified porn (ie the wast majority of the content) will go to other sites.