I read most of the Nickolas Kristoff editorial in the NY Times (don't confuse editorial with actual reporting, in the NYT or anywhere - editorial has 'license' to do hit pieces). While I agree that online porn is a horror show, Kristoff oddly omits what looks like the biggest problem to me:
(This might be upsetting. Read at your own risk.)
What I've seen of online porn sites is a strong emphasis on the real physical and sexual abuse of women. It's advertised brazenly in video titles: I am confident that if you search for something as horrible as 'woman gets the crap beaten out of her', you'd find lots of videos, and I'm not using more stomach-turning and sexual examples that I'm confident would find equal success. It's shown in the videos (at least the still frames that are part of the video title): Women expressing pain and showing bruises and even bleeding.
I understand sexual fantasy, and that to widely varying degrees and frequencies people enjoy these fantasies - PornHub has many customers - and that a few people even consensually engage in them in a safe, controlled manner. That is all people's private business, not mine or the public's, and I have no objection to it. But these are not fantasies - these are real people, real human beings, getting hurt and abused, physically and emotionally, for others' entertainment. It's on an enormous scale.
We can argue to ourselves that they are actors and it's all made up, like a Hollywood movie. We can say the women choose to do these things. And I will tell you what I told myself: We are full of shit and we know it.
Almost everything we see and read tells us otherwise, and yes many of these people are assaulted on camera by any definition of the word; many are beaten and tortured. Also, if you think Amazon workers are vulnerable, imagine the situation of these women. Are they going to take the video producers to court? Call the National Labor Relations Board and file a complaint? Has it ever happened? If it has, it's a drop in the ocean of porn online. From what I understand (and see), these are among some of the most vulnerable people in communities with limited resources. The world and the system tell them (wrongly): You're work in porn, you are the lowest of the low, we don't care. Imagine Amazon treating employees this way - and then selling the videos for profit.
I don't want to speak for the people in the videos or define them; I encourage you to find online them speaking for themselves. They are all different people with different responses to different experiences, but a lot of it is much worse than this HN comment. Also, imagine seeing someone you know or love being hurt like that; imagine how you would feel if it was you, beyond the pain. These are people just like us and our loved ones; they feel the same things.
It's straightforward: It should be illegal to hurt people, and to distribute videos of it, and to do it for profit. It's not hard to understand. It is happening on a wide scale and publicly. It's a horror show, and it's real.