Free speech, separation of church and state has nothing to do with it. Not wanting to be associated with rape, child and revenge porn (variations on non-consent) is all it is.
User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about (consent in particular) and as long as the user submitted content is sexual in nature, it is legal plutonium.
A lot of the attacks against amateur porn and sex work are by religious groups masking their actual motive by focusing on consent verification. Verification raises the barrier and makes performers much more vulnerable since their legal identities are attached to their work.
I’m of the impression that consent is a legitimate problem? Lots of pornography is wrapped up in sex trafficking never mind revenge porn, or so I’ve heard.
Consent is a real issue. The problem is advocates apply pressure to eliminate sex work even under clear consent, because safety isn't their actual goal. See OnlyFans, Craigslist for example.
So what? There are legitimate arguments to having consent verification, and the things they prevent are about as far from victimless crimes as you can get- what happens on the internet, stays on the internet, leading to a lifetime of re-victimization.
Just because people you don't like are for something does not mean that you must automatically be against it.
I don't think we should expect a policy to serve the stated purpose when the people driving it have entirely different reasons for pushing it.
For example, when states strengthen regulations on abortion clinics with the stated goal of improving patient safety, but the driving forces behind the legislation are anti-abortion groups who know that rural abortion providers will have to close, creating large unserved areas... will those laws help or hurt the safety of women who want abortions?
Likewise, we should be wary of consent verification laws that are pushed by groups whose supporters are opposed to legal pornography.
In both cases the goal is not to protect women. The goal is to take something morally wrong and make it seedy, underground, and dangerous, like morally wrong things are supposed to be.
So yes - motivation is important. The identity verification requirements for performers on porn sites are at least partially driven by actual victim complaints.
"but the driving forces behind the legislation are anti-abortion groups"
This is the definition of an ad hominem, which is what the whole separation of church and state discussion is, since neither church nor state are involved here.
We arent discussing regulations, we are discussing payment processors choosing to not do business with video hosts who cannot prove legal consent was obtained from all involved.
If you ran a business, would you want to make money off of rape and child pornography? The payment processors chose "no", and that is their right.
Ad hominem is an appropriate form of reasoning in this case, although in context you might pronounce it "cui bono." It's reasonable to expect that when a group pushes a policy, the details of the policy will be engineered to serve their goals, and the policy will be tweaked over time to serve their goals better. Corporations want to make them happy so they can do business in peace. What will make them happy? Will it make them happy if most porn is created by workers who enjoy robust assurances that their autonomy, consent, and medical safety will be respected? Or would they regard that as a nightmare of legitimized industrial-scale psychological harm to women?
In porn as in abortion, prohibitionists are numerous and committed enough to be a force to reckoned with, but they strategically justify their work using reasons that the rest of society finds persuasive. Anti-abortionists believe that abortion is inherently wrong, but they talk about women's safety while they shut down clinics.
The difference is, the groups who care about the safety of women will look at the details and say, the effect of this supposed "reproductive safety" bill is that thousands of women will lose access to legal abortion. Even if it targets shortcomings at poorly staffed, decrepit facilities, they won't support it if it actually makes women less safe. Overall, will shutting down OnlyFans payments make things better or worse for the women on it? People who aren't asking that question don't actually care.
"So what?" as a response to a post explaining how a policy puts certain people at risk, regardless of what the policy is and who those certain people are, makes how you view those people quite a lot clearer than you may have intended.
The person I responded to implied that the arguments in favor of consent verification were made in bad faith because some people might also oppose porn in general.
It is a logical fallacy. The risk of de-anonymization doesn't go away because their consent wasn't verified- tattoos, birthmarks, backgrounds of images and video, etc are still there.
Not only that, but that same risk still applies to people whose videos were posted without consent. What's worse than being raped and having your video put online? Knowing that everyone you ever work with may have seen it, for the rest of your life.
Also, if you read the article the post attached, it literally opens with a woman who had to impersonate a lawyer to get porn of her taken off of pornhub.
"How I view those people" seems to be your imagination, not mine.
Context and quantification are needed, not sensationalism.
Yes there are real accounts of abuse. The problem is that the policies adopted aren't actually directed at solving those problems with minimum harm to people involved; they are directed at eliminating sex work.
How many problems occur, what kind, what protocols would address the problems without needlessly harming performers and consumers?
> What's worse than being raped and having your video put online? Knowing that everyone you ever work with may have seen it, for the rest of your life.
There's no mechanism I can imagine that would make this situation true. HOW would everyone have seen it? Are you aware of just how many porn videos/pictures there are in the world?
You'd be well served to post a stat for how many people have had their coworkers see their rape videos, I'd bet $$$ that it's a negligible number compared to the livelihood issues suffered by onlyfans removing all those creators.
> what happens on the internet, stays on the internet, leading to a lifetime of re-victimization
Nonsense. The odds of you stumbling upon a particular porn photo or video are miniscule unless you are specifically searching for it or it's very popular (which is very hard and not going to happen for unwilling pictures).
Particularly as most sites would take down images of you on request.
No, the logic is that separation of church and state is a red herring.
Payment processors are choosing to not associate with businesses that cannot demonstrate that legal consent was gained from everyone involved in the production of the videos.
This is just a variation of the ontological argument.
You say there's neither church nor state, but then you cite payment processors and legal consent, which are both constructs that are determined by the state. And the content that's in question is sexual consent. The idea that there should be an additional mind (e.g. a legal mind) regulating the behaviors of sexual participants is an old religious conservative idea.
If you still insist that the church in this sense has no meaning, and that this isn't a question of church and state, then you don't believe that there is fundamentally a problem of church and state at all, which in itself is an old religious conservative idea.
> You say there's neither church nor state, but then you cite payment processors and legal consent, which are both constructs that are determined by the state. And the content that's in question is sexual consent.
I don't think many people who believe in the separation of church and state would think that implies that the state doesn't have the ability to make and enforce laws around consent.
I am saying that state isnt involved in the sense that the state isn't compelling payment processors to make these decisions through regulation. Church isn't involved because there is no establishment of religion. I have presented, in several places, non-theological reasons why payment processors may be making the decisions they are.
If you want to count "choosing to not support a business that enables rapists and child porn" as exclusively an old conservative idea, I guess you are missing the mark by quite a lot.
You've contradicted yourself multiple times. You've used the legal categories of rape and child pornography to try to justify the motives of a legal entity. The entire basis of motivation that you yourself have presented is instantiated within the context of a state authority.
The institution of a church in the theological sense has nothing to do with a legally registered organization. The domain of the church, in the sense of "separation of church and state", is in the psychology and interal belief structures of the mass of people. The Enlightenment thinkers who asserted a separation of church and state were not making an assertion about mere legal technicality.
> The institution of a church in the theological sense has nothing to do with a legally registered organization. The domain of the church, in the sense of "separation of church and state", is in the psychology and interal belief structures of the mass of people. The Enlightenment thinkers who asserted a separation of church and state were not making an assertion about mere legal technicality.
Just pointing out that this seems to be your own interpretation and isn't held in any legal doctrine I've been able to find.
In-fact it doesn't have a lot of historical or academic backing either: Historically, the separation of church and state was about removing the special benefits of state-sanctioned religions so that other churches could exist.
That was explicitly about the legally registered organisation, and you can see this now in how legally registered churches are constantly trying to find ways to legally divorce themselves from linked entities so those entities can receive state funding. That is 100% about the legally registered organisations.
> Let us now consider what a church is. A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.
Where do you see "legally registered organization" in this defintion?
Of course, within existing legal doctrine, "separation of church and state" could only refer to legal technicalities. And that's the whole point I was making, that separation goes both ways. For you to redefine the idea behind separation of church and state in merely legal terms is itself a breach of that separation.
The idea of separation of Church and State came from the Reformation, and it was explicitly about separation of the legal entities. And they were legal entities - notably under Calvin the Genevan Consistory was the entity in charge of religious life and it was separated to the civil authorities.
You've misunderstood your own sources. The Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, according to which the church is not a legal entity but which exists in the spiritual kingdom, was a way to protect the church from the law and other secular authorities. This doctrine was then adopted by Calvinists, one way of which is the way that you're talking about.
> this has nothing to do with consent laws, which are entirely a matter for the state.
That's what I've been saying. And it has nothing to do with my point.
Verification is obviously necessary to prevent revenge porn.
If that inconveniences performers, then that’s their problem to deal with. We shouldn’t be focused on making things easy for performers if that happens at the expense of allowing revenge porn.
Revenge porn is just another form of harassment. The problem isn't it being uploaded to pornhub, the problem is a dickhead sending it to all the victims contacts. It becomes a non-issue with reactive takedowns and going after those who repeatedly upload it as you would any other form of deliberate harassment.
Going after porn sites does nothing really to stop the harassment (they can just send the pic or video directly rather than a link).
I don't see how a payment processor is "being associated" with the content. Deciding whether that sort of thing is happening really shouldn't be their purview.
This is why I love HN, you gave me a surprising, but after evaluating your links trustworthy explanation.
Thank you!
If anyone else is wondering Exodus Cry is an organization which originated out of a weekly prayer group founded 2007 [0], they apparently lobbied Mastercard to only accept providers which verify the identity of all performers & review content before any upload [1]. Which is almost impossible for the tubes / onlyfans => no more payment
> I don't see how a payment processor is "being associated" with the content
They are literally facilitating the transaction.... Handling payments which determine access to the content is very much "being associated".
> Deciding whether that sort of thing is happening really shouldn't be their purview.
That is their purview. Who they choose to process payments for, and the various rates based on content and risk, is the entire purpose of their business.
Risk I understand. But that's not really an issue here. These are relatively small payments, and it is easy to see what percentage end up causing them trouble. I doubt it is any higher than anything else.
Content, no. My email provider doesn't get involved in what I am emailing (even though they might be "facilitating" a crime or other unsavory), the car dealership doesn't get involved in what I am going to use the car for. I mean by your logic a grocery store could ask what business you are in, and not sell you food because that is facilitating what you are doing.
Sure, if law enforcement and courts get involved, then they can stop being a provider.
But to suggest that it somehow reflects badly on the credit card company that they are used on a porn site is ridiculous.
> My email provider doesn't get involved in what I am emailing (even though they might be "facilitating" a crime or other unsavory),
I guarantee you they do. This is right from SendGrid:
__Twilio SendGrid Email prohibits sending of any content that is illegal or content that is harmful, unwanted, inappropriate, objectionable, confirmed to be criminal misinformation, or otherwise poses a threat to the public, even if the content is permissible by law. This content is not allowed, regardless of user consent.__
They then have a huge list of prohibited topics. Pornography, misinformation, hate speech, etc.
I recommend you check your provider TOS.
> the car dealership doesn't get involved in what I am going to use the car for
Car dealerships are free to refuse you service for any reason, other than being a protected class. I guarantee there is a long list of activities you could tell a dealership you'd do, and they'd refuse you service.
> I mean by your logic a grocery store could ask what business you are in, and not sell you food because that is facilitating what you are doing.
Yes, this is literally the case, lol. Not just by logic, but by actual reality. A grocery store can refuse you service for any reason other than discrimination of a protected class.
You need to update yourself with the laws in this country.
> But to suggest that it somehow reflects badly on the credit card company that they are used on a porn site is ridiculous.
They are free to do business with anyone they see fit. Pornography comes with the significant risk of actual harm to people. Therefore, they don't want to be involved.
If you don't like it, maybe capitalism isn't for you.
As of this year you can no longer sell on eBay without going through full KYC, including SSN (not EIN), providing a physical bank account, etc. If you are selling as a company, including a multi-owner or multi-person company you are still required to provide full personal details for the people involved and any beneficial owners.
Stolen items are fenced on eBay. The payment processors don't have an issue with actual crimes like theft but want to impose a moral code on legal behavior.
Be realistic, if I offer stolen set of fancy hubcaps or something (ie something potentially expensive but doesn't have a serial # like a computer) there's no real way to tell if it's legit or not. If I offer porn for sale and there's an anti-porn policy, they can just say 'welp this is porn to us.'
Like how would you distinguish between a stolen item and a used item without requiring people to keep every receipt for anything they ever buy? This is not an endorsement of their anti-porn policy, just observing that that it's easy for them to implement that in contrast to your theft example.
Can you explain in more detail? I just don't see the analogy you're drawing here. People may sometimes fence stolen items on Ebay, but you're not allowed to, and payment processors would definitely cut them off if you were.
Maybe that people may sometimes post illegal porn on OnlyFans but you're not allowed to either?
User-traded goods on e-Bay are also much harder to verify facts about than goods from a brick-and-mortar shop. Doesn't seem to prevent e-Bay from operating.
User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about (consent in particular) and as long as the user submitted content is sexual in nature, it is legal plutonium.