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Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

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21–30 of 175 posts

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's better, more ubiquitous, or has higher quality content, all while still having largely ad-driven revenue and not being pure cancer?

reddit ticks 4 out of those 5 boxes

The quality is very poor and I don’t think they verify age.

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#23

How do you ensure that the person performing sex work is being compensated for sex work, versus some form of exploitation (whether that's the platform or an individual exploiting)? A sex worker union [1] who can negotiate with distribution companies and platforms, lobby legislators and payment facilitators (who should not be prohibiting payments for legal business transactions), and ensure quality working conditions…

Same way you ensure any other person isn’t being exploited. Society provides resources allowing the person to have the opportunity to not be leveraged into exploitation as their only option.

How does this work on the internet where there are a 100+ separate countries involved?

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#24
post #6

Can't they somehow verify themselves and then be allowed to upload anything they want[1]? I thought the problem was that anyone could make an account and upload whatever they wished like child pornography, hidden cams, etc. [1] As long as it is legal and it's their own stuff.

That's not the problem, as stated in the article. It's payments being cut off by card networks.

Isn't that because PornHub didn't verify anything and was filled with content that exploited people? In the end, the issue seems to be PornHub rather than the card networks.

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#25
post #6

Can't they somehow verify themselves and then be allowed to upload anything they want[1]? I thought the problem was that anyone could make an account and upload whatever they wished like child pornography, hidden cams, etc. [1] As long as it is legal and it's their own stuff.

That's not the problem, as stated in the article. It's payments being cut off by card networks.

The article also says the following.

  Credit card giants Visa, Mastercard and Discover have blocked all payments to Pornhub, after the adult site was accused of being "infested" with child abuse and rape-related videos. 
So if PH solves that problem I don't see why they couldn't be back in business.

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#26

It would really be ideal if some of these sex workers could get their own platform. Pornhub seems like it was frankly unresponsive on a lot of serious concerns until they were forced to deal with them by the panic articles that went around last month And frankly it seems to me like it's still trivial to go on there and find what seems to me to be a lot of content that has dubious consent or related issues. These perf…

OnlyFans allows them to sell their content directly (not the same as it's up to them to solve the discoverability problem)

In a perfect world, you'd have something like Patreon or OnlyFans that runs like a utility out of a non profit org (such that Signal, Let's Encrypt, Wikipedia, and similar platforms operate as 501(c)(3) non profits). Removing the profit motive removes a lot of room for bad behavior on the part of the platform.

Verify the creator, provide a way to get payments to them without you acting as the intermediary, charge reasonable fees for your tech stack to organize and distribute digital content, and keep a paper trail when regulators, legislators, and law enforcement knock.

I want to really stress as a financial infra and payments system armchair enthusiast and scholar that crypto payments don't fix this. The law just comes for you if you try to subvert the law with crypto. You have to drive home the point (lobbying, marketing) that consenting adults adhering to the law should not be in fear when exchanging value in a transactional business and should not have their payments intercepted.

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's better, more ubiquitous, or has higher quality content, all while still having largely ad-driven revenue and not being pure cancer?

reddit ticks 4 out of those 5 boxes

Most of reddit adult content is links to pornhub and other adult sites.

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#28

> "There's not a lot you can do about it, which makes you feel really helpless. I have friends who are considering leaving the business as a whole, just because Pornhub was such a big source of income." I would guess for at least some of the public, sex workers leaving the business would be seen as a feature rather than a bug.

One of the performers quoted summed it up well in the article:

> "The real target of these groups is not to help victims or fight illegal content on the internet, but to ban all forms of adult material."

A few years ago I was doing some research to figure out how I felt about SESTA/FOSTA, and one of the things I quickly came to realize is that a lot of groups and politicians who are ostensibly anti-trafficking are actually anti-porn, and use the boogieman of trafficking to build a broader coalition than they could on a purely anti-porn agenda.

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem, as stated in the article. It's payments being cut off by card networks.

The article also says the following. Credit card giants Visa, Mastercard and Discover have blocked all payments to Pornhub, after the adult site was accused of being "infested" with child abuse and rape-related videos. So if PH solves that problem I don't see why they couldn't be back in business.

Didn't they solve it? I heard they deleted something like 80% of their videos last month.

Re: Sex workers say 'defunding Pornhub' puts their livelihoods at risk

#30

Moody doesn’t seem to care about the abuse or victims that is rampant in the industry, she just wants to get paid.

If you can get paid reliably then abusers have less leverage in the first place. I've been friends with a lot of sex workers and their #1 gripe is that prohibitionist types create the conditions for abuse.
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