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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

#361

It's surprising to me (perhaps shouldn't be) how many people here are discussing this issue in the abstract using terms like "broadly harmless." To these commenters: are you unaware of the issue of child porn, revenge porn, stolen content* and videos of actual rapes being uploaded to Pornhub, and Pornhub making money off of this content? If you are aware of this (the core issue), you should be grappling with these is…

Revenge porn, rapes and other bad stuff are being uploaded to Facebook and Google too and they make money out of it

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)

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#362

It's surprising to me (perhaps shouldn't be) how many people here are discussing this issue in the abstract using terms like "broadly harmless." To these commenters: are you unaware of the issue of child porn, revenge porn, stolen content* and videos of actual rapes being uploaded to Pornhub, and Pornhub making money off of this content? If you are aware of this (the core issue), you should be grappling with these is…

The internet hosts all of the above. Let's shut it down.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#363
Porn is harmless? To make that claim shows either bad faith or profound ignorance. Porn is incredibly harmful and degrading, both to those who perform on it as well as those who watch it. Nevermind the child porn, sex trafficking, or the blatantly non-consensual stuff, porn itself is gravely immoral and incredibly destructive. It hurts a person’s ability to have a healthy relationship. It creates obsessions and addictions that are also difficult to break. It enslaves you to your passions and blinds you. It locks you within yourself. Porn is a totalitarian regime’s dream come true. Instead of prodding people with police batons, you drown them in isolated prurient occupations, Brave New World style. You want a revolution that increases your power (until it gets out of hand, anyway)? Begin with sexual depravity. Sell it as “liberation”. Reenact the Bacchae. A man has as many masters as he has vices, so multiply those vices in others to multiply your control over them. Give them rationalizations that keep them trapped in their vices and easy to manipulate. He who controls the passions controls the masses.

Thus a man is only free when he has mastery over his passions and lives according to the truth. For a man can either conform the truth to his passions (rationalization) or he can conform his passions to the truth. The first is a slave, the latter a free man.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#364

It's surprising to me (perhaps shouldn't be) how many people here are discussing this issue in the abstract using terms like "broadly harmless." To these commenters: are you unaware of the issue of child porn, revenge porn, stolen content* and videos of actual rapes being uploaded to Pornhub, and Pornhub making money off of this content? If you are aware of this (the core issue), you should be grappling with these is…

Revenge porn, rapes and other bad stuff are being uploaded to Facebook and Google too and they make money out of it 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)

Their 'AI algos' allow videos to be repeatedly reposted after being deleted, as detailed in the NYTs article.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My understanding is that copyrighted content on Youtube is often uploaded under the guise of anonymous users, but this is illusory. Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. O…

No, dude. I remember back in college when Youtube was the source for copyrighted content. That's how they got their start.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the beginning. You could find whole seasons of various copyrighted shows no problem.

You still can, usually they take up like only 2/3 of the image though.

And they're sped up by like 50%.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From 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. So it sounds like Pornhub is taking child porn seriously, and Facebook isn't.

Two more likely possibilities: (1) Pornhub wasn't really checking, which is an easy way to get good stats.* (2) Many of Facebook's 84 million incidents took place on private groups or Messenger chats with small numbers of participants, whereas a single PornHub upload (counted as "1 incident") could easily reach hundreds of thousands of people. Fundamentally difficult to compare private communications networks with br…

> (1) Pornhub wasn't really checking, which is an easy way to get good stats.*

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.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenge porn, rapes and other bad stuff are being uploaded to Facebook and Google too and they make money out of it 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)

Their 'AI algos' allow videos to be repeatedly reposted after being deleted, as detailed in the NYTs article.

yep, the same with google and facebook.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#369

It's surprising to me (perhaps shouldn't be) how many people here are discussing this issue in the abstract using terms like "broadly harmless." To these commenters: are you unaware of the issue of child porn, revenge porn, stolen content* and videos of actual rapes being uploaded to Pornhub, and Pornhub making money off of this content? If you are aware of this (the core issue), you should be grappling with these is…

The internet hosts all of the above. Let's shut it down.

'The internet' is not a for-profit corporation.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#370
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power is important, but without economics, it's just an academic research project/network. Yeah, that made the Internet great in the beginning, and there are projects that don't depend on being "monetized", such as the OG hardcore F/OSS ones (GNU, Debian, KDE/Gnome, CCC, Wikipedia) and their ideological offspring (peertube, mastodon, matrix.org, blender). But the average user doesn't care and doesn't understand the i…

The "average user" of 20 years ago was watching TV news, TV entertainment, and choosing their goods from what their local stores decided to carry. Similar arguments were made about how they wouldn't want to do a bunch of technical stuff, yet today digital technology is just part of everyday life. If the middleman as a service industry could have held itself to ~2010 levels of intrusiveness, then I'd say perhaps there…

> ... yet today digital technology is just part of everyday life.

In the dumbed down form. TV 2.0 (Netflix), grocery 2.0 (Amazon), news 2.0 (whatever YouTube/FB/twitter recommends).

The same people who did not care about stepping outside their comfort zone to get a bit more out of those aspects of life still don't do. (And sure, on one hand it's completely understandable, many people don't have the need, ability, resources and time (the good old privilege) to even do so; and ... there's no other hand, even if we know long term being closed in a walled garden will lead to problems, it's hard to make people understand it when they are inside.)

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