The winner here might actually be the majority of NSFW content makers on OF who are mortgaging their future reputations for very small payouts.
(not a judgment on what they do but the reality of the situation
A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
121–130 of 457 posts
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#122I've never heard a good argument against prostitution. The arguments that I hear are against trafficking, rape, child molestation; which are all non-sequiturs: true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself. Can anyone here argue against prostitution per se? I'll listen.
I don’t mean to be rude but this is hopelessly naive. This isn’t MasterCard engaging in a marketplace-of-ideas good faith debate. This is using whichever tactics work to score points against whatever you’re trying to defeat. Thus the junk about CP, trafficking etc.
I would hesitate to even describe this as politics 101, it’s more like what students understand before they walk in the door of politics 101.
If someone says “your mom is so fat she sits around the house”, you don’t retort with an accurate measure of your mother’s BMI paired with a series of astute points about how it’s impossible to compare an adipose human body with the size of a dwelling. Like... seriously
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#123MasterCard doesn’t want to process payments for child pornography which only fans hosts. The argument for payment processors having too much power was had over a decade ago when they everybody stopped allowing donations to Wikileaks. No, they shouldn’t have that power, it should be the courts who shut down only fans by jailing the people who work there. But I’m also not going to shed any tears over some people who wi…
wikileaks the terrorists who hate me and their entire contribution to journalism is "did you know people die in wars??? or did i blow your mind please give me more money" give me a break.
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#124I've never heard a good argument against prostitution. The arguments that I hear are against trafficking, rape, child molestation; which are all non-sequiturs: true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself. Can anyone here argue against prostitution per se? I'll listen.
how is onlyfans prostitution?
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it worth continuing to push sex workers into illegality If that's the price to pay in order to rescue vulnerable people who are being exploited and trafficked, very much so. Sex work is a decadent luxury at best; human freedom and agency are worth so much more. > thereby putting them in danger? There's no proof that legitimate sex workers are being "put in danger". They might be de-facto forbidden from engaging…
The question is, is criminal regulation better than legal regulation? Are sexually trafficked victims truly helped when this work is criminalized rather than heavily regulated ? To me it’s like how some states try to combat Teen pregnancy and abortion by teaching abstinence instead of proper health education and provide accessible resources.
There's no known way at present to regulate sex work in a way that keeps traffickers from coercing their victims to work for their benefit. Many countries outside the U.S. have tried and failed to do this. Maybe you can make the case for a teeny tiny niche of specialty services, too specialized to ever appeal to the traffickers; but even if that was in fact viable it's extremely hard politically to argue for such a thing.
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, in this particular case huge companies did make changes on the basis of this newspaper column. It's not common, but it's what happened here. It was an incredibly visible and influential accusation that seemingly came out of nowhere from arguably the most prestigious newspaper in the country, and legitimate businesses like PornHub and MasterCard are terrified of brand association with child porn and sex traf…
You say "it's what happened here" and "But this particular one, because of the seriousness of the allegation combined with its plausibility, did in a big way" - but you haven't actually provided any evidence for it, just repeated assertions that it's true. Can you show anything aside from just speculation?
It's literally been all over the news, with journalists and analysts directly linking the column with the changes at both PornHub in December and at MasterCard in April -- and these are the people who follow this professionally. You can Google it yourself trivially, you don't need to ask someone on HN to get it.
But if you somehow don't trust that and you're asking for someone to report on the confidential goings-on of internal meetings at MasterCard and nothing else will satisfy you, you're not going to get that here on HN.
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#127Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking. How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financia…
That's the first leap in logic, the second is this:
> The new MasterCard rules are a direct result of this, which basically means an overwrought Christian anti-sex fever dream is now dictating sexual content online.
That's right, the state of everything was "dictated" by a guy writing an article.
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#128Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking. How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financia…
All it took was one useful billionaire... https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr...
> Mickelwait, however, says there was a “fatal flaw in that they put a download button on every video.” Under current law, any site that transfers pornographic content is responsible for verifying the age of the people in it.
> “Because they had a download button that actually transfers from their servers onto the devices of millions — I think it was up to 130 million a day in 2020 — of visitors to the site, they have been responsible this whole time for record keeping. So what that means is they violated the criminal code of the United States millions of times, tens of millions of times,” she says.
Is this actually true? How is streaming not transferring under the law?
Edit: This article is also interesting in that it characterizes Mickelwait as a "human rights activist" without mentioning Mickelwait basically being the COO of Exodus Cry, which is an anti-gay/abortion/LGBTQ group among other things.
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#129> These rules will basically require that OnlyFans (and every other site that accepts MasterCard payments) not only fully verify every user and every person who appears in every adult video, but review all posted content before publication, including real-time review of livestreams
It became extremely difficult to prove that there are not naked children on our platform. So we've decided to take our money and run.
Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
#130Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking. How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financia…
I understand the thread, but if Kristof's reporting is accurate, then you can hardly blame him. He's not responsible if payment providers decide to freak out over potential liability. Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators.