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Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

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Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how do you scale content moderation to millions of posts without hiring millions of workers at astronomical cost (who can make mistakes, like we’ve seen with DMCA take down notices, YouTube censorship when not justified, AppStore censorship,even GitHub made these mistakes, etc... some of these mistakes ruin peoples’ livelihoods). Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone?

If a business can't run profitably and legally at scale, then that business model is a bad fit for that scale and shouldn't exist at that scale (presuming the laws in question are reasonable, which I think 'banning child porn' qualifies as.) It's super weird that people seem to constantly start from the premise of, "But their business couldn't possibly [comply with law] profitably at scale! Oh well. I guess until som…

Terrible example. What if that was true? You think that we would just shut down the companies that make essential drugs rather than change the regulation?

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#233
post #11

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What’s worse, Reddit disables NSFW/porn content in Incognito on iOS Safari and prompts you to install the app. How that got past Apple is beyond me.

More evidence that Reddit hate their users. Make something people don't want and force them to use it by building an evil moat?

Every platform that grows large/ is successful will eventually "hate it's users" as it needs to be profitable. Currently that means, at least for the solved version, invading privacy/showing ads/selling user information.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as 'impossible to censor'. It may eb 'hard to censor', perhaps even 'impractical to censor', but a powerful enough government will be able to censor anything it wants. Do your think that, if people started somehow publishing 'bad' stories about the CCP in the bit coin block chain, the CCP wouldn't act to remove that content or censor any acces to the block chain itself?

CPP might be able to ban access to the block chain, or some part of it, but they wouldn't be able to replace it with their own version that was accepted outside China.

Would they need to? If they're controlling what their populace can and cannot see that's at least 51% of their goal, isn't it?

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#235
post #129

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> This is interesting considering issues with CSEM far and away plague social media websites significantly worse than porn websites What's your evidence for this claim? I don't know if it's true but it certainly isn't what I'd expect.

The article actually covers it: > 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 o…

Yeah I read that, but I don't think that single statistic necessarily tells us a whole lot, the extreme disparity also makes me think there might be something unexpected going on underneath the tabulation of those numbers. Intuitively, I'd expect user upload porn sites to have a lot more illegal content since its much easier for it to blend in there compared to most other places on the internet, the problem is greatly magnified at scale since distinguishing between legal pornographic imagery and illegal pornographic imagery is not trivial problem.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#236
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Google and YouTube contain stolen and illegal content. There are lots of full length pirate movies on YT for instance. It doesn’t make it right but I just mean all companies should be equally judged by rules and regulations

What you may not realize is that if that "stolen" media is logged in ContentID, both Google and the proper rightsholders are making money by running ads off every view (if they decide not to block it outright.) That's mostly why YouTube still exists.

I believe many folks don't understand this and therefore wonder why random YT accounts can post clearly copyrighted material. Content owners can fairly easily capture the monetization of these videos even if its not under their account. Oftentimes it's best to just leave a video up especially if it has many views (and strong search visibility) and collect the $$ from the ads on it.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#237

When you talk to Americans about guns or fast food or healthcare or 101 other issues, Freedom is a word you hear a lot. But for porn and alcohol, despite broadly harmless, Americans are all about bans and prohibitions...

I drink alcohol, and I am all for that freedom, but it's not "broadly harmless."

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say this is a hit piece against PornHub is to oversimplify the issue. The parent company MindGeek (Revenue: 460 million USD) formerly known as ManWin has been receiving such criticisms for years now. This is not a hit-piece against a small streaming start-up. It's a wake-up call to monitor a tech giant. https://nymag.com/news/features/70985/ 2011 https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/porn-corporations-sto... 2012…

These seem all very different critiques. The Nick Kristof article is based on the work of Laila Mickelwait, who has for the last couple of years worked tirelessly on her campaign to shutdown Pornhub. I twas her who has surfaced all the victims in the article. Though I doubt she will succeed now, she is very clear that the end-goal is not to monitor Pornhub, but to criminally charge it's owners. This is because a crim…

Kristof's end goal (at least as he states, and based on the reporting) is not to shut down Pornhub, and he tried to balance it with talking to Pornstars to make sure there would be a balance.

I think you are attacking the person instead of the issue. It doesn't matter what her background is as long as there are legitimate issues. And that was certainly the case with backpage, and seems like it was true for Pornhub as well.

I would say Pornhub either is more serious or learned the lesson from backpage, and is moving very fast in shutting illegal things down. I don't think it currently looks like the outcome right now looks like they will be declared illegal.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#239

I don't have any sympathy for Pornhub here. Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users, and it wasn't until they hollowed out the rest of the industry through theft that they started looking beyond it. 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 found…

> Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users, 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.

Despite people complaining about how draconian DMCA take down notices are, the DMCA safe harbor is incredibly generous. Service providers have no affirmative duty to police user uploaded content unless they have actual knowledge of infringing materials or "facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent."

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.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These seem all very different critiques. The Nick Kristof article is based on the work of Laila Mickelwait, who has for the last couple of years worked tirelessly on her campaign to shutdown Pornhub. I twas her who has surfaced all the victims in the article. Though I doubt she will succeed now, she is very clear that the end-goal is not to monitor Pornhub, but to criminally charge it's owners. This is because a crim…

And a very quick google search confirmed what I suspected: she works for a christian organization. I thought that we had effectively neutered the religious right.

And? How is that relevant?

I really quite loathe this line of argument that the source or even the intentions behind a probably factual statement should be taken into account when evaluating the truthfulness of the statement. It's textbook ad hominem, literally argument to the person.

PH has a demonstrable problem with child porn on its service. I don't care if it's the US government, a different government, a religious fundamentalist, a competitor, a lobbying group, or some random anonymous internet user surfacing that problem so long as it's verifiably true.

Intention factors into evaluation of the speaker, not the content. To do otherwise is to discard important, actionable facts because you dislike the speaker. In other words, it discards logic.

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