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The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

675 points by shivbhatt 5y ago

Causality1 5y ago
It's incredible to me that a private business can discriminate so wantonly while also being fully supported by the FDIC.
- tobylane 5y ago
  Is it either a form of discrimination that doesn’t line up with any protected class, or a bona fide discrimination against areas that have a high chargeback rate? I’m interested in how much the morals we don’t like line up with the cold stats we would follow.
  - willis936 5y ago
    Sex workers are effectively a subset of women. I'm not sure if this qualifies as a protected class. My personal sense of justice leads me to think that there should be some amount of protection for any worker, even if the powers that be disagree.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Not sure why you're downvoted. I've never heard any definition of 'class' that would make sex workers one. It's a profession, not a class.
    - tobylane 5y ago
      Yes, though sex workers aren't workers of an employer, who give worker's rights. I'd like greater amounts of protection, but is requiring Visa and Mastercard to do business the right move?
      - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
        Yes, they should be common carriers.
- leeroyjenkins11 5y ago
  They've been doing it with firearms manufacturers and retailers for a while.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It wasn’t that long ago that discrimination on the part of banks was required by the government.
- mc32 5y ago
  Right? It’s the old, they’re a private enterprise, they can kick you off their platform if they want to (AWS, GoDaddy, for example, or even YouTube).
draw_down 5y ago
Of course people skipped right over this to make their tired political points about Republicans hating women
bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
The centralized financial system is a weak point, and those in power are more than happy to utilize it ala Operation Choke Point.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
- ehinson 5y ago
  It's odd to me that people, such as the author of the Guardian article, so casually find the origin of the censorship in 'surveillance capitalism' or corporations, even as they also hold that corporations are singularly motivated by money. The existence of Operation Choke Point makes pretty clear that in fact a self-appointed group of questing govt officials are the ones motivated to impose censorship. The existence of monopoly financial platforms give them the means.
float4 5y ago
> for these corporations this is not a matter of free expression, as it ought to be, but one of morality Is it really true that banks block transactions related to sex work because they are morally against it? Last time I checked banks just want to make money. This is a genuine question by the way. > But just a few weeks in, Twitch shut it down after a change of policy that included, among other things, a ban on visible nipples for those who “present as women”. At a time when societal views around gender and sexuality are in many ways opening up, restrictions on sexual expression [...] feel positively archaic and seem to demonstrate that [...] there remain highly unaccountable powers making decisions about how we express something so utterly natural and human. Although I fully support the free the nipple movement, I can absolutely understand that a streaming platform wants to ban nudity / sexual content. Sure, sex is natural and normal, but compared to other human behaviour it is still in a league of its own.
- pydry 5y ago
  They're reacting to regulations designed specifically to make it too much of a headache for them to service these customers.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    This is also my understanding - though I think it’s mostly a side effect of the regulation (which is intended to increase the liability around enabling sex trafficking). The article mentions this, but I agree with pessimizer that the article seems to get the causality backwards. I also agree with float4 re: why platforms may not want sexual content. I’m sensing some agenda driven motivated reasoning behind this article that’s being used to shoehorn the events into its frame. There is something to centralized software companies and payment processors being in a position to do this at all though (whether required by regulation or not). Both blockchain based protocols that create decentralized incentive structures like Audius, and (non-blockchain) approaches like Urbit (along with just regular crypto) help to solve this problem. I’d bet this is what will enable them to be more resilient in the long run. https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit
gregd 5y ago
So do I have to be THAT guy? Fine. Crypto solves this issue...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- shadilay 5y ago
  Crypto moves the problem to the exchanges. It doesn't solve it.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  These people, especially in porn, live by impulsive spending (buying the subscription, sending tips). The high delay and extremely large sign-up burden [0], combined with the fees, would probably ruin a lot of their income. Remember, they compete with a free offering. [0] Most people don't own crypto yet, so they'd need to learn about it, create an exchange account, verify it, fill it up and then they can pay. Compare that to two minutes of entering cc information.
  - chii 5y ago
    CC also went through a similar transformation that crypto would have to. The problem is that noone wants to take the risk to transform crypto into as convenient a service as credit cards, when credit cards have such a first-mover advantage.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      Many companies do want to solve that problem, but they’re hampered by the conventional financial system which really doesn’t like interfacing with anything crypto related.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      A key reason for the cost of the CC payment infrastructure is that these costs were instrumental in solving the chicken/egg problem of adoption by ensuring that there's enough money/kickback/etc for all the infrastructure partners to market cards and offer various benefits to get both the cards in the consumers pockets and also terminals rolled out at merchants. Noone wants to take the risk to transform crypto into as convenient a service as credit cards because crypto is decentralized enough so that no organization can feel sure that they (as opposed to everyone else) will see enough payout (e.g. lucrative lock-in, skimming part of every transaction) to justify the quite immense and risky long-term investment required to push consumer adoption.
IAmEveryone 5y ago
The decision was reversed due to public pressure, so how unaccountable are they, really? And even before that, the decision was made because they were afraid of public opinion. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to refuse to do business that generates revenue. The credit card companies’ puritanical values are a reflection of what they think public opinion, among the public that matters to them, is. They were wrong, or at least outdated, or maybe online sex workers just somehow happen to be better at PR than evangelical christians. But (trying to) follow public opinion isn’t unaccountability, it’s the opposite.
- chii 5y ago
  The fact that they have the option to make this decision is the problem - a payment system _should not_ have the option to cut someone off, without a warrant from a court. This isn't allowed for utilities, why not the same for payment systems?
  - gruez 5y ago
    >a payment system _should not_ have the option to cut someone off, without a warrant from a court. That seems like a high standard considering that AML laws require them to proactively block transactions. >This isn't allowed for utilities, why not the same for payment systems? because utilities usually have some sort of monopoly granted/enforced by the state.
monsecchris 5y ago
It's tremendously easy to be concerned about unaccountable power opposing your own narrative.
- imtringued 5y ago
  It's just the usual progression of authoritarianism. First they come for your enemies, then your neighbors, then your friends and family and then they come for you.
ryeguy_24 5y ago
I was thinking of this just the other day. Just the past few weeks, Apple with CSAM, OnlyFans getting between people and their fans/clients. All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming?
- chii 5y ago
  > Is that coming? the fact that it's decentralized means you will not be told - and it's on yourself to buy in and be part of.
  - HKH2 5y ago
    The revolution will not be televised?
  - version_five 5y ago
    This is an important observation. People (myself included) are tired of the power exerted by large corporations with centralized platforms, while at the same time, we're just waiting around for another large centralized platform to come and save us. I have no idea how to get started, but I agree with you, the onus is on people to do something different, not just to complain about it.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  > All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming? Absolutely not. Decentralized and self-hosted alternatives to doing anything on the internet have been available since the beginning, but 1) people choose convenience, every single time 2) popular things get popular 3) corpos have what it takes to make a thing popular 4) popular things get popular among the audience because all the content is there 5) popular things get popular among the "content creators" because all the audience is there 6) it's hard to make an artificially popular decentralized service without centralized investment into it; platforms that rely on individual users meshing their internet connections and $5 VPSes start small and stay niche 7) central investing into a platform without moderation and censorship is very risky, so it's unlikely to happen and if it does happen, it's likely to draw the same fire from banks, hosting providers, regulators, etc. 8) any platform that offers moderation and censorship and gets big enough will eventually get between what people want and those who provide that 9) lots of people actually want moderation and censorship, not freedom 10) the "scene" behind decentralized stuff is also divided on the issue of moderation 11) if a decentralized platform with no moderation were indeed to get big, it would again draw fire from various parties (see how various file sharing protocols and sites died) There's more to it but point is, a "big" decentralized platform cannot happen (or at least cannot last) unless it also has a central entity that wields the power to do the same things that happen on centralized platforms. And people really just want to use one big platform. And it's not a technical issue, it's a social & political issue. To make a system that won't bend under the powers that be, people would also have to accept that they're hosting child porn, terrorist materials, drug trafficking, and other fun stuff. That's never going to happen. The alternative is decentralized platforms that are and stay niche. They exist already, they've existed since the beginning. Are you using them, or are you just using the big few popular centralized platforms? I'm guessing you're not using them because "Is that coming?" kind of implies you think it's something that doesn't exist yet.
rob_c 5y ago
Looks like the same thing as wikileaks to me. A combination of bad optics and lawyers getting involved causing a monopolistic supplier to pull their services. Doubt this has much to do with MasterCard attacking the adult industry, it looks more like they want to strongly protect their existing stranglehold on the payment systems. Anything which impacts the way they're seen costs them real actually money I'd bet at their scale.
- colordrops 5y ago
  This is still attacking the adult industry. You are just suggesting alternative motivations.
  - rob_c 5y ago
    Yes. Welcome to cancel culture.I can recommend some reading to get caught up.
- Guthur 5y ago
  Oh please come on, stop with the monopoly rhetoric Only Fans is no where near a monopoly. It just comes across as truly naive to throw that term around in every conversation.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure they mean the payment provider are the monopolistic service.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I read monopoly above as credit card processing, not OnlyFans.
  - rob_c 5y ago
    AFAIK only fans doesn't provide services to MasterCard as an entity... I think that would be a scandal I'd enjoy reading if that's the case.
dalbasal 5y ago
I suspect that "accountability" is a problematic frame. Platforms are the accountability mechanism, increasingly so. As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.
- laurent92 5y ago
  But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? of all the possible battles to lead, children and the sanity of adults would be their battlehorse? If so, I admire it.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    >> But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? I think a secret meeting to form a secret cabal is unlikely. More like an approximate consensus, that has always existed in an industry that has always been highly centralized, in a world where sex work has always been marginalised. My point was that there's nothing new about relatively arbitrary power at banks to decide who can do business. It's pretty uncontroversial, if you think about past decades. Was there no profit to be made providing financial services to women, before it became normative in the 50s-70s? Theoretically, there probably was. In practice, banking norms were not to.
pessimizer 5y ago
The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks. The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups. > The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities. This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Exactly. Banks have no morals, as long as the price is right
  - ByteWelder 5y ago
    You're describing the average business. Businesses are primarily there to make money.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      It's amazing how pwople dont see the fundamental tension between "western values" like individual freedoms and unbridled capitalism "values" (i.e. profit). Those motivations are sometimes pulling in opposite directions. Which will win? Which should win?
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  I have to ask. Who is going to hold banks responsible for their role as just a payment gateway and not the actual people involved or the service? This is like saying banks are responsible for a drug mafia using a laundromat for "money washing" by using sales proceeds of a laundromat depositing into the said bank and sending it away.
throwjd764glug 5y ago
It affects more than just sex workers. Amren cannot accept Paypal or credit cards due to deplatforming (or even draw attention to this through Youtube or Facebook, as those also banned them), Wikileaks was also financially isolated, and donation websites and payment providers deplatformed Rittenhouse's legal defense fundraising. Funny the Guardian didn't mention this. Reading their coverage gives the impression deplatforming is limited to moralizing against sex workers.
perryizgr8 5y ago
Meh. Everybody was like "private companies can do whatever they like" when parler was censored off the internet. Now why is it a big deal when the same happens to a porn site? Only fans can create their own Visa and Mastercard if they want.
- _flagged_ 5y ago
  Underrated.
- rvz 5y ago
  Exactly. There you go and that's the idea. This can happen to anyone. I don't understand why they cheer on with the same "X is a private company and can ban, censor or remove whatever they like" argument when it happens to someone they don't like with but only care when it happens to them or to someone they agree with. Just look at how Google Play removed other apps on the Play Store after Parler was banned [0]. This can happen to anyone. These companies that hold this power are not anyone's friends and once again are on the side of profit. When will supporters of such acts learn that it can soon happen to them and realise that these large companies are the problem? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173060
- harry8 5y ago
  And Parler can obviously make their own mobile phones with comparable market access to Apple and Android combined with most apple and Android users more than happy to abandon their investment in their asset on principle. If you didn't immediately ditch your iphone obviously that means Apple are beyond criticism of any kind because the market.
shadilay 5y ago
The platform and banks also do not allow the following list items which are varying degrees of legal. There are categories that they crack down upon which are entirely legal and that doesn't sit well with me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point ammunition sales cable box de-scramblers coin dealers credit card schemes credit repair services dating services debt consolidation scams drug paraphernalia escort services firearms sales fireworks sales get rich products government grants home-based charities lifetime guarantees lifetime memberships lottery sales mailing lists/personal info money transfer networks online gambling pawn shops payday loans pharmaceutical sales Ponzi schemes Pornography[5] pyramid-type sales racist materials surveillance equipment telemarketing tobacco sales travel clubs
temp8964 5y ago
The author has a book "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism" Copy a comment here: 1.0 out of 5 stars Another pompous elitist advocating free speech for those they agree with Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2021 Looking for yet another elitist advocating for freedoms, but only those they agree with, then this is the book for you. The author complains vociferously about silicon valley enterprises restricting the speech of people and groups she politically agrees with while at the exact same time advocating for the removal of content she finds "offensive". The author also makes great noise (rightfully) attacking racial and religious bigotry while simultaneously coming across as extremely bigoted towards Jews and anyone with low melanin counts and politically right of Mao. If the author is the voice of freedom of expression and speech in the modern age then we are all doomed. see: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MXNOSHCZ1CW1/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MXNOSHCZ1CW1/re...
cenkozan 5y ago
Why is still the real narrative for this ban is still not around the children on that platform. I can't for the life of mine understand why everybody is pulling their own agenda while the real reason for that ban is dragged under the rag. Crazy...
controlweather 5y ago
Invest in Nafty coin, it’s the only fans of crypto
_flagged_ 5y ago
The posting of this article on HN is well timed to start a nice comfy little flamewar on a Saturday morning. Have fun frens.
the-dude 5y ago
My comment from another thread : Dutch banks terminated accounts of Corona-critics / anti-vax'ers / conspiracy nuts ( you choose how to call them ). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301199
- Guillaume86 5y ago
  Seems like you conveniently forgot the word "organisations".
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Why does that matter?
    - Guillaume86 5y ago
      Why did you remove it if it doesn't matter?
      - the-dude 5y ago
        I didn't remove anything. What I wrote is just my attempt at translation, while I am not fixated at orgs like you seem to be. Why don't you answer the question instead of insinuating I have ulterior motives?
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      There is a big difference between cutting off financial services for organizations and people; in general, in business-to-business relations organizations are free to serve only whom they wish, but individuals (unlike organizations) deserve protection from discrimination, and having access to core banking services is considered an important right for individuals in EU. Dutch banks denying accounts to someone because they are a conspiracy nut would be big news; even someone who's declared bankruptcy and is currently sitting in jail after being convicted for fraud would have the right to a basic bank account.
quotemstr 5y ago
This is rich coming from The Guardian, which for years has been in favor of private actors censoring their ideological opponents. Today, when their face is getting eaten by leopards, they're worried about "unaccountable power", but tomorrow, they'll be demanding others be kicked off the internet.
- rvz 5y ago
  Exactly. They now start crying when it happens to others that they support, when the whole entire point is that this can happen to anyone; as these private companies are on the side of profit. Sometimes, they only learn who really is in charge as soon as it happens to them which is always when it is too late.
recursivedoubts 5y ago
The Guardian has no problem with the unaccountable power of platforms and banks. The Guardian merely has a problem with this particular application of it.
- ghomrassen 5y ago
  Bingo.
- sarabad2021 5y ago
  Absolutely true. Whoever is downvoting leave a comment to explain. Are we okay with banks discriminating against free speech but not against porn?
  - freddie_mercury 5y ago
    What is to explain? The article is an Opinion and not representative of The Guardian. It is written by Jillian C York, the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism. Trying to conflate this opinion piece with The Guardian itself is dumb and shows a failure to understand what an Opinion is.
    - throwjd764glug 5y ago
      So the Guardian also has a comparable number of Opinion pieces decrying the financial censorship of sites like amren.com? Since, as you claim, what they choose to publish under Opinion is completely unrelated to their ideals.
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    What's your point? That someone at the Guardian does not share your personal opinion? As for me, I'm not okay with either banks discriminating against free speech and banks discriminating against porn. For example, I was vigorously against banks blocking Wikileaks payments. Therefore, I'm fine with the Guardian article.
    - 5y ago
theelous3 5y ago
As far as I was aware, the main reason banks don't want to deal with porn is the huge rate of chargebacks that occur. Post nut clarity is apparently a financial problem.
- da_chicken 5y ago
  I thought it was a side effect of "know your customer". Sex work is high risk because it's adjacent to trafficking (organized crime) and underage workers result in CP. It's very difficult to determine if every amateur sex worker is a consenting adult.
- draw_down 5y ago
  Post nut clarity will not suddenly come into effect beginning October 1 2021.
- _trampeltier 5y ago
  They could make the credit card more save, so it wouldn't be so much a problem.
- caseysoftware 5y ago
  I suspect post wife-noticed-the-charge clarity is a bigger issue.
- odiroot 5y ago
  It's not only chargebacks, it's also stolen credit cards being used on porn sites to "launder" the money.
  - theelous3 5y ago
    Sure - I guess I should have said disputes.
- pavedwalden 5y ago
  Businesses with high chargeback rates might get rejected by some payment processors, but there's usually another one willing to take them on in exchange for higher fees.
bufferoverflow 5y ago
It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported Youtube/Twitter/FB/Patreon/Visa political censorship, but are suddenly against the porn censorship by the payment same systems. "Rules for thee, but not for me."
- archildress 5y ago
  There are compelling alternatives for many of the platforms you mention; what was happening to OF amounted to a complete disqualification from infrastructure.
  - prestigious 5y ago
    Insanely wrong, the opposite in fact. Hard to be this wrong on the internet tbh
  - bufferoverflow 5y ago
    There are no popular alternatives to Youtube and Twitter. The number of users is important, and they have monopolies on the user base. Learn about network effects.
    - archildress 5y ago
      I'm sorry but your analogy just doesn't work. If you're de-platformed from YouTube, Facebook, etc, you can still publish your content and share it. You have a distribution issue, you don't have an "ability to perform" issue. If you're locked out of the banking system, your business is done. You lack transactional alternatives.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy, I’m confused why you would interpolate the two. It is just more fuel for the argument that America has always been so uncomfortable and Puritan with sex and way too comfortable with violence.
beebeepka 5y ago
What a thread. Right now literally half the posts are greyed out for saying things I don't understand in the slightest. Feels like some kind of cultural war is spilling into the site but due to nature of HN, no one is really sharing their actual thoughts on the matter so there's a lot of voting based on subtleties.
- caseysoftware 5y ago
  That's because what you type can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    What about up/down votes? Are people liable for those? I understand the audience on this site. At first I thought it's just /. But it really isn't.
cblconfederate 5y ago
I believe central-bank digital currencies will solve this problem if they offer transactions that are guaranteed anonymous, unless there is some kind of law enforcement warrant to inspect them. This will be a much more sane and accountable system than the robber baron system of unaccountable gatekeepers.
- xtat 5y ago
  Hard no on CBDCs- they're subject to the same fiat abuses we already have
swiley 5y ago
Don’t like crypto currency? Stop making it necessary.
m0llusk 5y ago
but this happened because payment processors feared being held to account
TeMPOraL 5y ago
There's this common meme of blaming anti-sex-work sentiment on some bloc of US Evangelicals who secretly rule the Western economy and politics. Because surely, it couldn't be the market speaking out against adult material? Here's an alternative hypothesis: between those anti-sex fundamentalist religious groups (Christian or otherwise) and people who absolutely love everything sex-related, there's the vast majority of people who find the whole topic uncomfortable to a large degree. Whether they themselves like porn or not (or like, but feel guilty about it[0]), whether they make use of various meatspace sex services or not, they don't like being reminded of it. They don't like sex being mixed with other areas of life. They might especially not want their kids to be exposed to porn, or to become sex workers. The market caters to majority case. Advertisers, especially, cater to majority. In such hypothetical world (which I posit might just be the real one), the market itself will exert pressure against overt pornography and sex work, and anything that associates itself with it. So, perhaps, there's no conspiracy in play - maybe it's just the majority getting the things to how they want them to be. (It's supposed to be good, right? When some people here complain that technology is increasingly user-hostile and exploitative, there's no shortage of arguments saying it's not conspiracy, it's just the market catering for majority use case. So which way is it?) -- EDIT: Three more thoughts. 1) Of course, the degree of discomfort with sex topics is a spectrum. But on this spectrum, sex work and hardcore pornography are one of the extremes, not the middle point. Thus, the majority being uncomfortable shouldn't be a surprising concept. 2) I suspect the same thing happens with drugs. There's people who are strongly anti-drug, often on religious basis. Then there's people who are for everyone (responsibly) ingesting whatever they want. But in between, there is - in my experience - the majority who's afraid. Afraid of health effects, afraid of associations with organized crime, afraid of being shunned by others. And so, even legally selling mind-altering substances (other than alcohol and cigarettes, which have been normalized over centuries) faces the same challenges as sex businesses. 3) One can say it's religion all way down. Perhaps. Atheism as a cultural phenomenon is a very new thing in the history of humanity. The way people think about sexuality carries thousands of years of baggage. It's not going to change overnight, or over investment round, or over election cycle. So I don't think you can fix the problems faced by sex workers by telling Visa or Mastercard to chill out. -- [0] - There's no shortage of pundits - secular, religious, and religious pretending to be scientific - that make careers out of convincing people that porn is bad for you.
sandworm101 5y ago
This issue happens evey decade or so. Last time it was wikileaks and VPNs being delisted by american credit card companies. That popularized cryptocurency and saw bitcoin rise as a censorship-beating payment system. And last week i signed up for a VPNs using my visa without issue. After that they went after filesharing platforms like rapidshare. Now "file lockers" are called "cloud storage" and are a normal online service. This time they are going after porn, an old favorite for US companies to hate. It will again come to nothing.
saddlerustle 5y ago
This article completely misses the causes of the rule changes. Banks and payment processes pushed new rules because they were being held accountable. The changes were all implemented in response to hugely influential NYT opinion piece on PornHub in December [1] that specifically called out payment processors, and preempted a BBC investigation into OnlyFans that was hinted to do the same [2]. The conversation here should about how rulemaking via media outrage is a problem given the public has conflicting morals. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865
- tqi 5y ago
  Yeah this piece seems to forget that the Guardian[1] was also very critical of Pornhub when the NYT story came out. It seems like their position is that neither a completely hands off approach or a complete ban is acceptable, and that the only moral path is to allow the good and police the bad with perfect precision and recall. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhub-untold-damage-pain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
- hamstergene 5y ago
  Accountability by definition requires proper accounting practices. There should be level-headed discussions, legal actions, and punishment proportional to the wrongdoing. Taking damage from public outrage is being lynched, coerced, blackmailed, retaliated, scapegoated, it is being anything but held accountable. The author is talking about having power to discriminate anyone's business via private corporate decision. It seems OK in the context of sex trafficking/CP because we know those are bad things, but the power is not limited to any of that, and that is unaccountability.
treebot 5y ago
The strange thing is these problems are already solved through cryptocurrency and decentralized social media. We just need more adoption of decentralized platforms. To me, as I hear about these centralization problems more and more, it seems like decentralized platforms are the future.
buf 5y ago
The problem OnlyFans had was they tried to be a legitimately low risk business, but they turned into porn If they started now knowing what they know, how would they get passed the banks and payment processors? How does pornhub or others do it?
MattGaiser 5y ago
On the contrary, they are doing it as society will blame them if they do not and they will suffer if it turns out they were involved in child pornography. Banks are not moralists on a crusade. They love making money, but they fear risk. Dealing in the adult industry is a huge public relations and legal risk.
ofthrowof 5y ago
To all the people here bringing evangelical christians and other nonsense into this: Both OF and the CC merchants are owned by Jews. If they’re any bit intelligent about this they’ll try to push for a legal change/protection by pretending to fight each other.
- throwjd764glug 5y ago
  Do you have a source for this claim? It seems you're right about OnlyFans, majority-owned by Radvinsky [1], but I don't know about the payment processors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Radvinsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Radvinsky
coding123 5y ago
Isn't this what we made btc for
- Kiro 5y ago
  It is but people on Hacker News refuse to acknowledge this because they are angry that they missed out. Techies "who should have known" are embarrassed and jealous so they do everything in their power to dismiss BTC.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    >It is but people on Hacker News refuse to acknowledge this because they are angry that they missed out. Maybe you shouldn't create a money system where it is possible to miss out? The fact that regular working people do not want to subsidize "investors" is a pretty strong incentive to avoid Bitcoin altogether.
    - ephbit 5y ago
      Isn't it a mostly unavoidable characteristic of p2p distributed systems (when they're not introduced top down by governments) that they grow from "practically zero users" to (maybe) mass adoption? I'd think that it's almost inherent for any currency like technology that - over the course of its adoption process - the value goes through various phases of increase. At least for currencies with deflationary supply. There might be blockchain based cryptocurrencies out there that try to prevent early adopters from becoming excessively rich mostly out of luck, but apparently these alternatives lack the incentive to even get to wide adoption. Yes, early adopters would become unfairly rich, were bitcoin to make it to wide adoption ... but something makes me hope that a btc wealth distribution with Gini coefficient close to 1 would be a temporary thing. A phase that the whole thing would pass through towards a less unequal distribution, where the increase in value and thus the aspect of speculation would become less relevant and the aspect of btc as a payment system or value store would become more relevant.
peterparkour 5y ago
Silly me, thinking the real scandal is that our daughters are forced to sell nudes to survive.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Many businesses cannot hire enough employees. Everywhere I walk I see help wanted signs. Hourly rates are going up. Are they being forced to sell something, or a conscious choice?
  - harry8 5y ago
    How does the wages increase with help wanted signs compare to the rent increase in the last decade or two in your annecdotes? Food? Health insurance? Student debt repayments? I don't know i just want to see real data before condemning anyone at all.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Here is some real data. Right now, the inflation adjusted median weekly earnings for people 16+ is essentially at it's highest point ever. Much higher than it was 30 or 40 years ago. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
      - harry8 5y ago
        So that excludes student debt levels (ie the inflation of the price of entry into the workforce) over that period. It includes people aged 40-100 who probably also outnumber and out earn the 16-40 demographic - who I assume dominate the only fans vendors being discussed. The median as a measure will basically exclude the entire demographic. Eg Say for argument everyone in the workforce for 10 years or less had a 50% pay cut it won't show up in the median. Real data is hard!
  - imtringued 5y ago
    That's a new problem. The problem he is talking about existed for thousands of years.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
The banks do this as counter measure to human behavior, eg. Spouse , wife, family finds out about porn payment and then the people deny they have made the payment. Or sometimes an unauthorized family member or friend uses it to pay porn. Another scenario is porn pages doing dodgy monthly subscription charges. All these lead to chargebacks. It's simply not worth it for the banks, it's bad for everyone involved. It happens more frequently in porn, it has its own risk category, so to say. And most bank regulations are globally similar, so no surprises there. Most transactions have a trajectory between many correspondence banks and none of them wants to deal with chargebacks. Source, worked in chb department.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pentae 5y ago
  'Friendly' fraud is a problem that was supposed to be solved with 3D Secure (Verified by Visa etc) but it still doesn't protect merchants for billing code 5967 which is what anything involving adult sites is typically billed on. If Visa/MC wanted to fix this problem they could overnight, but they refuse to.
harry8 5y ago
This story cannot be discussed in any meaningful way without reference to Wikileaks being fully denied access to payment tech while having been charged with no crime.
- superkuh 5y ago
  The article did explicitly reference Wikileaks being blockaded by financial services. >One salient example occurred in 2014 when WePay – a payment service provider that had gained traction with sex workers and activists after its CEO described the company as the “anti-PayPal” after the latter’s denial of service to WikiLeaks...
  - harry8 5y ago
    And visa and all others without any due process at all because a politician requested it be done to their political enemy(!) I'm not seeing that being meaningfully discussed nor am I seeing how WePay stepped in and solved that problem for Wikileaks because, iirc, they did no such thing. Why do you think they left a proper discussion of that out given it's clearly the most relevant example of what they're claiming to discuss?
morpheos137 5y ago
I am going to give a contrarian take on it. Banks are doing the right thing if they do not want to provide financial services to facilitate amateur pornographic actors. Camwhoring is degrading for the both the patron and the provider. Fundamentally sex is about person to person contact for the purpose of procreation and raising children and no I am not approaching this from a religious angle but an evolutionary biological angle. Rather than masturbating to camwhores lonely men should be directing their energies toward finding a mate or at least doing something to useful for society. Rather than sitting at home doing the the same for the benefit of anonymous strangers over the internet poor women should be doing something socially useful with themselves. It seems to me that regulated in person sex work is better for society than pornography. At least it involves real people rather than frustrating desires through a digital bait and switch. Interestingly and historically, South Korea has broadly tolerated prostitution while banning pornography.
instagraham 5y ago
The real OnlyFans scandal is the friends we made along the way
bdcravens 5y ago
Haven't we been seeing this same scandal over the past couple of years? Personally I hate some of the political content that has been deplatformed, but every time one gets shut down, something about that process just doesn't sit right with me.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
unity1001 5y ago
Indeed - Payment companies like Visa and Mastercard enforcing American cultural and religious conservatism on other countries and nations is an illegal situation - per other countries' laws. These are effectively monopolies. It doesnt matter whether there's two of them. If they collectively enforce something onto the people of other countries - like Europe - then they are violating those countries' laws They must be investigated and regulated accordingly in Europe. American culture and American laws do not apply to Europe.
- ckdarby 5y ago
  One of the reasons why this happens is money and specifically money from pension funds. The largest pension funds nearly all have "morality clauses" with them and won't invest with an entity that goes against that. The other portion of this is the hassle of dealing with the adult industry in terms of politics. You can Google to see how the news articles came out claiming PornHub was being used for pornographic material related to children. Visa & Mastercard from public pressure revoked their ability to process any payments on that site. Canadian House of Commons Ethics Committee did hearings against the company. Nobody wants that kind of attention.
  - unity1001 5y ago
    Still doesnt change the fact that these corporations force American norms on European consumers. They have no right to do so.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Every business that includes network effects must be regulated as if it is a public agency or utility once it is above a certain size. I don’t think it is useful to debate the threshold to try and find some kind of optimum. Let’s just pick a number, like number of users exceeding 25% of national population, and start there.
elif 5y ago
"but there are no practical applications of cryptocurrency"
uda 5y ago
I actually agree with the term "Unaccountable". Sure, the banks have their boards and share holders, so do the tech companies. The question is not whether they have internal accountability, but rather if they have public accountability to their declared statements, their stated mission and non-written guarantees given by officials to the public. Many companies like these paint themselves as for-public, while I know and so do you, that is not true, but companies should be held accountable for the image they try to portray, they should be held accountable for public announcements no matter the personnel change. So yes, the platforms and banks have unaccountable power, given by us the public, based on false promises and sales pitches. And we the public have the power to stops that, by making them accountable, but we are the ones who have to do that, by pointing the finger at the root decision makers in those monstrous structures of organizations.
ckdarby 5y ago
I've got numerous years of software development working in the high risk space (adult & gambling). With a lot of experience specifically around payment processing for high risk merchants. If anyone has questions feel free to ask and I'll answer within reason/if I have the answer. Disclaimer: Just solely my own opinions being expressed.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
When this happened to Gab somehow no one cared.
bob229 5y ago
The guardian is absolute trash. No serious person ever reads it
stubish 5y ago
It isn't just payment processing. Recently looking at various ethical ETFs, I'm finding that they all filter out companies for social harm. Which includes porn. Even the green ETFs. So on the first few paragraphs of the disclosure doc you are investing in companies with carbon targets meeting whatever criteria, no fossil fuels, etc. And next find out they are also skipping gambling, guns, tobacco and adult entertainment.
stacker8888 5y ago
'The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks' So the fact that there's underage children selling porn on OnlyFans isn't a scandal? What about the bestiality on sale?
amai 5y ago
There are so many companies out there profiting from selling weapons, destroying the environment and misusing cheap labour in awful dictatorships. But these are issues the banks and payment platforms don‘t seem to care about at all. Where is the NYT article pointing out these issues?

675 points by shivbhatt 5y ago

It's incredible to me that a private business can discriminate so wantonly while also being fully supported by the FDIC.

tobylane 5y ago
Is it either a form of discrimination that doesn’t line up with any protected class, or a bona fide discrimination against areas that have a high chargeback rate? I’m interested in how much the morals we don’t like line up with the cold stats we would follow.
- willis936 5y ago
  Sex workers are effectively a subset of women. I'm not sure if this qualifies as a protected class. My personal sense of justice leads me to think that there should be some amount of protection for any worker, even if the powers that be disagree.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Not sure why you're downvoted. I've never heard any definition of 'class' that would make sex workers one. It's a profession, not a class.
  - tobylane 5y ago
    Yes, though sex workers aren't workers of an employer, who give worker's rights. I'd like greater amounts of protection, but is requiring Visa and Mastercard to do business the right move?
    - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
      Yes, they should be common carriers.
leeroyjenkins11 5y ago
They've been doing it with firearms manufacturers and retailers for a while.
sokoloff 5y ago
It wasn’t that long ago that discrimination on the part of banks was required by the government.
mc32 5y ago
Right? It’s the old, they’re a private enterprise, they can kick you off their platform if they want to (AWS, GoDaddy, for example, or even YouTube).

draw_down 5y ago

Of course people skipped right over this to make their tired political points about Republicans hating women

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago

The centralized financial system is a weak point, and those in power are more than happy to utilize it ala Operation Choke Point.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

ehinson 5y ago
It's odd to me that people, such as the author of the Guardian article, so casually find the origin of the censorship in 'surveillance capitalism' or corporations, even as they also hold that corporations are singularly motivated by money. The existence of Operation Choke Point makes pretty clear that in fact a self-appointed group of questing govt officials are the ones motivated to impose censorship. The existence of monopoly financial platforms give them the means.

float4 5y ago

> for these corporations this is not a matter of free expression, as it ought to be, but one of morality Is it really true that banks block transactions related to sex work because they are morally against it? Last time I checked banks just want to make money. This is a genuine question by the way. > But just a few weeks in, Twitch shut it down after a change of policy that included, among other things, a ban on visible nipples for those who “present as women”. At a time when societal views around gender and sexuality are in many ways opening up, restrictions on sexual expression [...] feel positively archaic and seem to demonstrate that [...] there remain highly unaccountable powers making decisions about how we express something so utterly natural and human. Although I fully support the free the nipple movement, I can absolutely understand that a streaming platform wants to ban nudity / sexual content. Sure, sex is natural and normal, but compared to other human behaviour it is still in a league of its own.

pydry 5y ago
They're reacting to regulations designed specifically to make it too much of a headache for them to service these customers.
- fossuser 5y ago
  This is also my understanding - though I think it’s mostly a side effect of the regulation (which is intended to increase the liability around enabling sex trafficking). The article mentions this, but I agree with pessimizer that the article seems to get the causality backwards. I also agree with float4 re: why platforms may not want sexual content. I’m sensing some agenda driven motivated reasoning behind this article that’s being used to shoehorn the events into its frame. There is something to centralized software companies and payment processors being in a position to do this at all though (whether required by regulation or not). Both blockchain based protocols that create decentralized incentive structures like Audius, and (non-blockchain) approaches like Urbit (along with just regular crypto) help to solve this problem. I’d bet this is what will enable them to be more resilient in the long run. https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit

gregd 5y ago

So do I have to be THAT guy? Fine. Crypto solves this issue...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shadilay 5y ago
Crypto moves the problem to the exchanges. It doesn't solve it.
Sebb767 5y ago
These people, especially in porn, live by impulsive spending (buying the subscription, sending tips). The high delay and extremely large sign-up burden [0], combined with the fees, would probably ruin a lot of their income. Remember, they compete with a free offering. [0] Most people don't own crypto yet, so they'd need to learn about it, create an exchange account, verify it, fill it up and then they can pay. Compare that to two minutes of entering cc information.
- chii 5y ago
  CC also went through a similar transformation that crypto would have to. The problem is that noone wants to take the risk to transform crypto into as convenient a service as credit cards, when credit cards have such a first-mover advantage.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Many companies do want to solve that problem, but they’re hampered by the conventional financial system which really doesn’t like interfacing with anything crypto related.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    A key reason for the cost of the CC payment infrastructure is that these costs were instrumental in solving the chicken/egg problem of adoption by ensuring that there's enough money/kickback/etc for all the infrastructure partners to market cards and offer various benefits to get both the cards in the consumers pockets and also terminals rolled out at merchants. Noone wants to take the risk to transform crypto into as convenient a service as credit cards because crypto is decentralized enough so that no organization can feel sure that they (as opposed to everyone else) will see enough payout (e.g. lucrative lock-in, skimming part of every transaction) to justify the quite immense and risky long-term investment required to push consumer adoption.

IAmEveryone 5y ago

The decision was reversed due to public pressure, so how unaccountable are they, really? And even before that, the decision was made because they were afraid of public opinion. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to refuse to do business that generates revenue. The credit card companies’ puritanical values are a reflection of what they think public opinion, among the public that matters to them, is. They were wrong, or at least outdated, or maybe online sex workers just somehow happen to be better at PR than evangelical christians. But (trying to) follow public opinion isn’t unaccountability, it’s the opposite.

chii 5y ago
The fact that they have the option to make this decision is the problem - a payment system _should not_ have the option to cut someone off, without a warrant from a court. This isn't allowed for utilities, why not the same for payment systems?
- gruez 5y ago
  >a payment system _should not_ have the option to cut someone off, without a warrant from a court. That seems like a high standard considering that AML laws require them to proactively block transactions. >This isn't allowed for utilities, why not the same for payment systems? because utilities usually have some sort of monopoly granted/enforced by the state.

monsecchris 5y ago

It's tremendously easy to be concerned about unaccountable power opposing your own narrative.

imtringued 5y ago
It's just the usual progression of authoritarianism. First they come for your enemies, then your neighbors, then your friends and family and then they come for you.

ryeguy_24 5y ago

I was thinking of this just the other day. Just the past few weeks, Apple with CSAM, OnlyFans getting between people and their fans/clients. All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming?

chii 5y ago
> Is that coming? the fact that it's decentralized means you will not be told - and it's on yourself to buy in and be part of.
- HKH2 5y ago
  The revolution will not be televised?
- version_five 5y ago
  This is an important observation. People (myself included) are tired of the power exerted by large corporations with centralized platforms, while at the same time, we're just waiting around for another large centralized platform to come and save us. I have no idea how to get started, but I agree with you, the onus is on people to do something different, not just to complain about it.
foxfluff 5y ago
> All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming? Absolutely not. Decentralized and self-hosted alternatives to doing anything on the internet have been available since the beginning, but 1) people choose convenience, every single time 2) popular things get popular 3) corpos have what it takes to make a thing popular 4) popular things get popular among the audience because all the content is there 5) popular things get popular among the "content creators" because all the audience is there 6) it's hard to make an artificially popular decentralized service without centralized investment into it; platforms that rely on individual users meshing their internet connections and $5 VPSes start small and stay niche 7) central investing into a platform without moderation and censorship is very risky, so it's unlikely to happen and if it does happen, it's likely to draw the same fire from banks, hosting providers, regulators, etc. 8) any platform that offers moderation and censorship and gets big enough will eventually get between what people want and those who provide that 9) lots of people actually want moderation and censorship, not freedom 10) the "scene" behind decentralized stuff is also divided on the issue of moderation 11) if a decentralized platform with no moderation were indeed to get big, it would again draw fire from various parties (see how various file sharing protocols and sites died) There's more to it but point is, a "big" decentralized platform cannot happen (or at least cannot last) unless it also has a central entity that wields the power to do the same things that happen on centralized platforms. And people really just want to use one big platform. And it's not a technical issue, it's a social & political issue. To make a system that won't bend under the powers that be, people would also have to accept that they're hosting child porn, terrorist materials, drug trafficking, and other fun stuff. That's never going to happen. The alternative is decentralized platforms that are and stay niche. They exist already, they've existed since the beginning. Are you using them, or are you just using the big few popular centralized platforms? I'm guessing you're not using them because "Is that coming?" kind of implies you think it's something that doesn't exist yet.

rob_c 5y ago

Looks like the same thing as wikileaks to me. A combination of bad optics and lawyers getting involved causing a monopolistic supplier to pull their services. Doubt this has much to do with MasterCard attacking the adult industry, it looks more like they want to strongly protect their existing stranglehold on the payment systems. Anything which impacts the way they're seen costs them real actually money I'd bet at their scale.

colordrops 5y ago
This is still attacking the adult industry. You are just suggesting alternative motivations.
- rob_c 5y ago
  Yes. Welcome to cancel culture.I can recommend some reading to get caught up.
Guthur 5y ago
Oh please come on, stop with the monopoly rhetoric Only Fans is no where near a monopoly. It just comes across as truly naive to throw that term around in every conversation.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure they mean the payment provider are the monopolistic service.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I read monopoly above as credit card processing, not OnlyFans.
- rob_c 5y ago
  AFAIK only fans doesn't provide services to MasterCard as an entity... I think that would be a scandal I'd enjoy reading if that's the case.

dalbasal 5y ago

I suspect that "accountability" is a problematic frame. Platforms are the accountability mechanism, increasingly so. As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.

laurent92 5y ago
But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? of all the possible battles to lead, children and the sanity of adults would be their battlehorse? If so, I admire it.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  >> But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? I think a secret meeting to form a secret cabal is unlikely. More like an approximate consensus, that has always existed in an industry that has always been highly centralized, in a world where sex work has always been marginalised. My point was that there's nothing new about relatively arbitrary power at banks to decide who can do business. It's pretty uncontroversial, if you think about past decades. Was there no profit to be made providing financial services to women, before it became normative in the 50s-70s? Theoretically, there probably was. In practice, banking norms were not to.

pessimizer 5y ago

The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks. The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups. > The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities. This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.

jbverschoor 5y ago
Exactly. Banks have no morals, as long as the price is right
- ByteWelder 5y ago
  You're describing the average business. Businesses are primarily there to make money.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    It's amazing how pwople dont see the fundamental tension between "western values" like individual freedoms and unbridled capitalism "values" (i.e. profit). Those motivations are sometimes pulling in opposite directions. Which will win? Which should win?
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
I have to ask. Who is going to hold banks responsible for their role as just a payment gateway and not the actual people involved or the service? This is like saying banks are responsible for a drug mafia using a laundromat for "money washing" by using sales proceeds of a laundromat depositing into the said bank and sending it away.

throwjd764glug 5y ago

It affects more than just sex workers. Amren cannot accept Paypal or credit cards due to deplatforming (or even draw attention to this through Youtube or Facebook, as those also banned them), Wikileaks was also financially isolated, and donation websites and payment providers deplatformed Rittenhouse's legal defense fundraising. Funny the Guardian didn't mention this. Reading their coverage gives the impression deplatforming is limited to moralizing against sex workers.

perryizgr8 5y ago

Meh. Everybody was like "private companies can do whatever they like" when parler was censored off the internet. Now why is it a big deal when the same happens to a porn site? Only fans can create their own Visa and Mastercard if they want.

_flagged_ 5y ago
Underrated.
rvz 5y ago
Exactly. There you go and that's the idea. This can happen to anyone. I don't understand why they cheer on with the same "X is a private company and can ban, censor or remove whatever they like" argument when it happens to someone they don't like with but only care when it happens to them or to someone they agree with. Just look at how Google Play removed other apps on the Play Store after Parler was banned [0]. This can happen to anyone. These companies that hold this power are not anyone's friends and once again are on the side of profit. When will supporters of such acts learn that it can soon happen to them and realise that these large companies are the problem? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173060
harry8 5y ago
And Parler can obviously make their own mobile phones with comparable market access to Apple and Android combined with most apple and Android users more than happy to abandon their investment in their asset on principle. If you didn't immediately ditch your iphone obviously that means Apple are beyond criticism of any kind because the market.

shadilay 5y ago

The platform and banks also do not allow the following list items which are varying degrees of legal. There are categories that they crack down upon which are entirely legal and that doesn't sit well with me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point ammunition sales cable box de-scramblers coin dealers credit card schemes credit repair services dating services debt consolidation scams drug paraphernalia escort services firearms sales fireworks sales get rich products government grants home-based charities lifetime guarantees lifetime memberships lottery sales mailing lists/personal info money transfer networks online gambling pawn shops payday loans pharmaceutical sales Ponzi schemes Pornography[5] pyramid-type sales racist materials surveillance equipment telemarketing tobacco sales travel clubs

temp8964 5y ago

The author has a book "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism" Copy a comment here: 1.0 out of 5 stars Another pompous elitist advocating free speech for those they agree with Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2021 Looking for yet another elitist advocating for freedoms, but only those they agree with, then this is the book for you. The author complains vociferously about silicon valley enterprises restricting the speech of people and groups she politically agrees with while at the exact same time advocating for the removal of content she finds "offensive". The author also makes great noise (rightfully) attacking racial and religious bigotry while simultaneously coming across as extremely bigoted towards Jews and anyone with low melanin counts and politically right of Mao. If the author is the voice of freedom of expression and speech in the modern age then we are all doomed. see: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MXNOSHCZ1CW1/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MXNOSHCZ1CW1/re...

cenkozan 5y ago

Why is still the real narrative for this ban is still not around the children on that platform. I can't for the life of mine understand why everybody is pulling their own agenda while the real reason for that ban is dragged under the rag. Crazy...

controlweather 5y ago

Invest in Nafty coin, it’s the only fans of crypto

_flagged_ 5y ago

The posting of this article on HN is well timed to start a nice comfy little flamewar on a Saturday morning. Have fun frens.

the-dude 5y ago

My comment from another thread : Dutch banks terminated accounts of Corona-critics / anti-vax'ers / conspiracy nuts ( you choose how to call them ). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301199

Guillaume86 5y ago
Seems like you conveniently forgot the word "organisations".
- the-dude 5y ago
  Why does that matter?
  - Guillaume86 5y ago
    Why did you remove it if it doesn't matter?
    - the-dude 5y ago
      I didn't remove anything. What I wrote is just my attempt at translation, while I am not fixated at orgs like you seem to be. Why don't you answer the question instead of insinuating I have ulterior motives?
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    There is a big difference between cutting off financial services for organizations and people; in general, in business-to-business relations organizations are free to serve only whom they wish, but individuals (unlike organizations) deserve protection from discrimination, and having access to core banking services is considered an important right for individuals in EU. Dutch banks denying accounts to someone because they are a conspiracy nut would be big news; even someone who's declared bankruptcy and is currently sitting in jail after being convicted for fraud would have the right to a basic bank account.

quotemstr 5y ago

This is rich coming from The Guardian, which for years has been in favor of private actors censoring their ideological opponents. Today, when their face is getting eaten by leopards, they're worried about "unaccountable power", but tomorrow, they'll be demanding others be kicked off the internet.

rvz 5y ago
Exactly. They now start crying when it happens to others that they support, when the whole entire point is that this can happen to anyone; as these private companies are on the side of profit. Sometimes, they only learn who really is in charge as soon as it happens to them which is always when it is too late.

recursivedoubts 5y ago

The Guardian has no problem with the unaccountable power of platforms and banks. The Guardian merely has a problem with this particular application of it.

ghomrassen 5y ago
Bingo.
sarabad2021 5y ago
Absolutely true. Whoever is downvoting leave a comment to explain. Are we okay with banks discriminating against free speech but not against porn?
- freddie_mercury 5y ago
  What is to explain? The article is an Opinion and not representative of The Guardian. It is written by Jillian C York, the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism. Trying to conflate this opinion piece with The Guardian itself is dumb and shows a failure to understand what an Opinion is.
  - throwjd764glug 5y ago
    So the Guardian also has a comparable number of Opinion pieces decrying the financial censorship of sites like amren.com? Since, as you claim, what they choose to publish under Opinion is completely unrelated to their ideals.
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  What's your point? That someone at the Guardian does not share your personal opinion? As for me, I'm not okay with either banks discriminating against free speech and banks discriminating against porn. For example, I was vigorously against banks blocking Wikileaks payments. Therefore, I'm fine with the Guardian article.
  - 5y ago

theelous3 5y ago

As far as I was aware, the main reason banks don't want to deal with porn is the huge rate of chargebacks that occur. Post nut clarity is apparently a financial problem.

da_chicken 5y ago
I thought it was a side effect of "know your customer". Sex work is high risk because it's adjacent to trafficking (organized crime) and underage workers result in CP. It's very difficult to determine if every amateur sex worker is a consenting adult.
draw_down 5y ago
Post nut clarity will not suddenly come into effect beginning October 1 2021.
_trampeltier 5y ago
They could make the credit card more save, so it wouldn't be so much a problem.
caseysoftware 5y ago
I suspect post wife-noticed-the-charge clarity is a bigger issue.
odiroot 5y ago
It's not only chargebacks, it's also stolen credit cards being used on porn sites to "launder" the money.
- theelous3 5y ago
  Sure - I guess I should have said disputes.
pavedwalden 5y ago
Businesses with high chargeback rates might get rejected by some payment processors, but there's usually another one willing to take them on in exchange for higher fees.

bufferoverflow 5y ago

It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported Youtube/Twitter/FB/Patreon/Visa political censorship, but are suddenly against the porn censorship by the payment same systems. "Rules for thee, but not for me."

archildress 5y ago
There are compelling alternatives for many of the platforms you mention; what was happening to OF amounted to a complete disqualification from infrastructure.
- prestigious 5y ago
  Insanely wrong, the opposite in fact. Hard to be this wrong on the internet tbh
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  There are no popular alternatives to Youtube and Twitter. The number of users is important, and they have monopolies on the user base. Learn about network effects.
  - archildress 5y ago
    I'm sorry but your analogy just doesn't work. If you're de-platformed from YouTube, Facebook, etc, you can still publish your content and share it. You have a distribution issue, you don't have an "ability to perform" issue. If you're locked out of the banking system, your business is done. You lack transactional alternatives.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy, I’m confused why you would interpolate the two. It is just more fuel for the argument that America has always been so uncomfortable and Puritan with sex and way too comfortable with violence.

beebeepka 5y ago

What a thread. Right now literally half the posts are greyed out for saying things I don't understand in the slightest. Feels like some kind of cultural war is spilling into the site but due to nature of HN, no one is really sharing their actual thoughts on the matter so there's a lot of voting based on subtleties.

caseysoftware 5y ago
That's because what you type can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  What about up/down votes? Are people liable for those? I understand the audience on this site. At first I thought it's just /. But it really isn't.

cblconfederate 5y ago

I believe central-bank digital currencies will solve this problem if they offer transactions that are guaranteed anonymous, unless there is some kind of law enforcement warrant to inspect them. This will be a much more sane and accountable system than the robber baron system of unaccountable gatekeepers.

xtat 5y ago
Hard no on CBDCs- they're subject to the same fiat abuses we already have

swiley 5y ago

Don’t like crypto currency? Stop making it necessary.

m0llusk 5y ago

but this happened because payment processors feared being held to account

TeMPOraL 5y ago

There's this common meme of blaming anti-sex-work sentiment on some bloc of US Evangelicals who secretly rule the Western economy and politics. Because surely, it couldn't be the market speaking out against adult material? Here's an alternative hypothesis: between those anti-sex fundamentalist religious groups (Christian or otherwise) and people who absolutely love everything sex-related, there's the vast majority of people who find the whole topic uncomfortable to a large degree. Whether they themselves like porn or not (or like, but feel guilty about it[0]), whether they make use of various meatspace sex services or not, they don't like being reminded of it. They don't like sex being mixed with other areas of life. They might especially not want their kids to be exposed to porn, or to become sex workers. The market caters to majority case. Advertisers, especially, cater to majority. In such hypothetical world (which I posit might just be the real one), the market itself will exert pressure against overt pornography and sex work, and anything that associates itself with it. So, perhaps, there's no conspiracy in play - maybe it's just the majority getting the things to how they want them to be. (It's supposed to be good, right? When some people here complain that technology is increasingly user-hostile and exploitative, there's no shortage of arguments saying it's not conspiracy, it's just the market catering for majority use case. So which way is it?) -- EDIT: Three more thoughts. 1) Of course, the degree of discomfort with sex topics is a spectrum. But on this spectrum, sex work and hardcore pornography are one of the extremes, not the middle point. Thus, the majority being uncomfortable shouldn't be a surprising concept. 2) I suspect the same thing happens with drugs. There's people who are strongly anti-drug, often on religious basis. Then there's people who are for everyone (responsibly) ingesting whatever they want. But in between, there is - in my experience - the majority who's afraid. Afraid of health effects, afraid of associations with organized crime, afraid of being shunned by others. And so, even legally selling mind-altering substances (other than alcohol and cigarettes, which have been normalized over centuries) faces the same challenges as sex businesses. 3) One can say it's religion all way down. Perhaps. Atheism as a cultural phenomenon is a very new thing in the history of humanity. The way people think about sexuality carries thousands of years of baggage. It's not going to change overnight, or over investment round, or over election cycle. So I don't think you can fix the problems faced by sex workers by telling Visa or Mastercard to chill out. -- [0] - There's no shortage of pundits - secular, religious, and religious pretending to be scientific - that make careers out of convincing people that porn is bad for you.

sandworm101 5y ago

This issue happens evey decade or so. Last time it was wikileaks and VPNs being delisted by american credit card companies. That popularized cryptocurency and saw bitcoin rise as a censorship-beating payment system. And last week i signed up for a VPNs using my visa without issue. After that they went after filesharing platforms like rapidshare. Now "file lockers" are called "cloud storage" and are a normal online service. This time they are going after porn, an old favorite for US companies to hate. It will again come to nothing.

saddlerustle 5y ago

This article completely misses the causes of the rule changes. Banks and payment processes pushed new rules because they were being held accountable. The changes were all implemented in response to hugely influential NYT opinion piece on PornHub in December [1] that specifically called out payment processors, and preempted a BBC investigation into OnlyFans that was hinted to do the same [2]. The conversation here should about how rulemaking via media outrage is a problem given the public has conflicting morals. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865

tqi 5y ago
Yeah this piece seems to forget that the Guardian[1] was also very critical of Pornhub when the NYT story came out. It seems like their position is that neither a completely hands off approach or a complete ban is acceptable, and that the only moral path is to allow the good and police the bad with perfect precision and recall. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhub-untold-damage-pain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
hamstergene 5y ago
Accountability by definition requires proper accounting practices. There should be level-headed discussions, legal actions, and punishment proportional to the wrongdoing. Taking damage from public outrage is being lynched, coerced, blackmailed, retaliated, scapegoated, it is being anything but held accountable. The author is talking about having power to discriminate anyone's business via private corporate decision. It seems OK in the context of sex trafficking/CP because we know those are bad things, but the power is not limited to any of that, and that is unaccountability.

treebot 5y ago

The strange thing is these problems are already solved through cryptocurrency and decentralized social media. We just need more adoption of decentralized platforms. To me, as I hear about these centralization problems more and more, it seems like decentralized platforms are the future.

buf 5y ago

The problem OnlyFans had was they tried to be a legitimately low risk business, but they turned into porn If they started now knowing what they know, how would they get passed the banks and payment processors? How does pornhub or others do it?

MattGaiser 5y ago

On the contrary, they are doing it as society will blame them if they do not and they will suffer if it turns out they were involved in child pornography. Banks are not moralists on a crusade. They love making money, but they fear risk. Dealing in the adult industry is a huge public relations and legal risk.

ofthrowof 5y ago

To all the people here bringing evangelical christians and other nonsense into this: Both OF and the CC merchants are owned by Jews. If they’re any bit intelligent about this they’ll try to push for a legal change/protection by pretending to fight each other.

throwjd764glug 5y ago
Do you have a source for this claim? It seems you're right about OnlyFans, majority-owned by Radvinsky [1], but I don't know about the payment processors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Radvinsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Radvinsky

coding123 5y ago

Isn't this what we made btc for

Kiro 5y ago
It is but people on Hacker News refuse to acknowledge this because they are angry that they missed out. Techies "who should have known" are embarrassed and jealous so they do everything in their power to dismiss BTC.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >It is but people on Hacker News refuse to acknowledge this because they are angry that they missed out. Maybe you shouldn't create a money system where it is possible to miss out? The fact that regular working people do not want to subsidize "investors" is a pretty strong incentive to avoid Bitcoin altogether.
  - ephbit 5y ago
    Isn't it a mostly unavoidable characteristic of p2p distributed systems (when they're not introduced top down by governments) that they grow from "practically zero users" to (maybe) mass adoption? I'd think that it's almost inherent for any currency like technology that - over the course of its adoption process - the value goes through various phases of increase. At least for currencies with deflationary supply. There might be blockchain based cryptocurrencies out there that try to prevent early adopters from becoming excessively rich mostly out of luck, but apparently these alternatives lack the incentive to even get to wide adoption. Yes, early adopters would become unfairly rich, were bitcoin to make it to wide adoption ... but something makes me hope that a btc wealth distribution with Gini coefficient close to 1 would be a temporary thing. A phase that the whole thing would pass through towards a less unequal distribution, where the increase in value and thus the aspect of speculation would become less relevant and the aspect of btc as a payment system or value store would become more relevant.

peterparkour 5y ago

Silly me, thinking the real scandal is that our daughters are forced to sell nudes to survive.

OrvalWintermute 5y ago
Many businesses cannot hire enough employees. Everywhere I walk I see help wanted signs. Hourly rates are going up. Are they being forced to sell something, or a conscious choice?
- harry8 5y ago
  How does the wages increase with help wanted signs compare to the rent increase in the last decade or two in your annecdotes? Food? Health insurance? Student debt repayments? I don't know i just want to see real data before condemning anyone at all.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Here is some real data. Right now, the inflation adjusted median weekly earnings for people 16+ is essentially at it's highest point ever. Much higher than it was 30 or 40 years ago. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
    - harry8 5y ago
      So that excludes student debt levels (ie the inflation of the price of entry into the workforce) over that period. It includes people aged 40-100 who probably also outnumber and out earn the 16-40 demographic - who I assume dominate the only fans vendors being discussed. The median as a measure will basically exclude the entire demographic. Eg Say for argument everyone in the workforce for 10 years or less had a 50% pay cut it won't show up in the median. Real data is hard!
- imtringued 5y ago
  That's a new problem. The problem he is talking about existed for thousands of years.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

The banks do this as counter measure to human behavior, eg. Spouse , wife, family finds out about porn payment and then the people deny they have made the payment. Or sometimes an unauthorized family member or friend uses it to pay porn. Another scenario is porn pages doing dodgy monthly subscription charges. All these lead to chargebacks. It's simply not worth it for the banks, it's bad for everyone involved. It happens more frequently in porn, it has its own risk category, so to say. And most bank regulations are globally similar, so no surprises there. Most transactions have a trajectory between many correspondence banks and none of them wants to deal with chargebacks. Source, worked in chb department.

deleted 5y ago
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pentae 5y ago
'Friendly' fraud is a problem that was supposed to be solved with 3D Secure (Verified by Visa etc) but it still doesn't protect merchants for billing code 5967 which is what anything involving adult sites is typically billed on. If Visa/MC wanted to fix this problem they could overnight, but they refuse to.

harry8 5y ago

This story cannot be discussed in any meaningful way without reference to Wikileaks being fully denied access to payment tech while having been charged with no crime.

superkuh 5y ago
The article did explicitly reference Wikileaks being blockaded by financial services. >One salient example occurred in 2014 when WePay – a payment service provider that had gained traction with sex workers and activists after its CEO described the company as the “anti-PayPal” after the latter’s denial of service to WikiLeaks...
- harry8 5y ago
  And visa and all others without any due process at all because a politician requested it be done to their political enemy(!) I'm not seeing that being meaningfully discussed nor am I seeing how WePay stepped in and solved that problem for Wikileaks because, iirc, they did no such thing. Why do you think they left a proper discussion of that out given it's clearly the most relevant example of what they're claiming to discuss?

morpheos137 5y ago

I am going to give a contrarian take on it. Banks are doing the right thing if they do not want to provide financial services to facilitate amateur pornographic actors. Camwhoring is degrading for the both the patron and the provider. Fundamentally sex is about person to person contact for the purpose of procreation and raising children and no I am not approaching this from a religious angle but an evolutionary biological angle. Rather than masturbating to camwhores lonely men should be directing their energies toward finding a mate or at least doing something to useful for society. Rather than sitting at home doing the the same for the benefit of anonymous strangers over the internet poor women should be doing something socially useful with themselves. It seems to me that regulated in person sex work is better for society than pornography. At least it involves real people rather than frustrating desires through a digital bait and switch. Interestingly and historically, South Korea has broadly tolerated prostitution while banning pornography.

instagraham 5y ago

The real OnlyFans scandal is the friends we made along the way

bdcravens 5y ago

Haven't we been seeing this same scandal over the past couple of years? Personally I hate some of the political content that has been deplatformed, but every time one gets shut down, something about that process just doesn't sit right with me.

deleted 5y ago

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unity1001 5y ago

Indeed - Payment companies like Visa and Mastercard enforcing American cultural and religious conservatism on other countries and nations is an illegal situation - per other countries' laws. These are effectively monopolies. It doesnt matter whether there's two of them. If they collectively enforce something onto the people of other countries - like Europe - then they are violating those countries' laws They must be investigated and regulated accordingly in Europe. American culture and American laws do not apply to Europe.

ckdarby 5y ago
One of the reasons why this happens is money and specifically money from pension funds. The largest pension funds nearly all have "morality clauses" with them and won't invest with an entity that goes against that. The other portion of this is the hassle of dealing with the adult industry in terms of politics. You can Google to see how the news articles came out claiming PornHub was being used for pornographic material related to children. Visa & Mastercard from public pressure revoked their ability to process any payments on that site. Canadian House of Commons Ethics Committee did hearings against the company. Nobody wants that kind of attention.
- unity1001 5y ago
  Still doesnt change the fact that these corporations force American norms on European consumers. They have no right to do so.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Every business that includes network effects must be regulated as if it is a public agency or utility once it is above a certain size. I don’t think it is useful to debate the threshold to try and find some kind of optimum. Let’s just pick a number, like number of users exceeding 25% of national population, and start there.

elif 5y ago

"but there are no practical applications of cryptocurrency"

uda 5y ago

I actually agree with the term "Unaccountable". Sure, the banks have their boards and share holders, so do the tech companies. The question is not whether they have internal accountability, but rather if they have public accountability to their declared statements, their stated mission and non-written guarantees given by officials to the public. Many companies like these paint themselves as for-public, while I know and so do you, that is not true, but companies should be held accountable for the image they try to portray, they should be held accountable for public announcements no matter the personnel change. So yes, the platforms and banks have unaccountable power, given by us the public, based on false promises and sales pitches. And we the public have the power to stops that, by making them accountable, but we are the ones who have to do that, by pointing the finger at the root decision makers in those monstrous structures of organizations.

ckdarby 5y ago

I've got numerous years of software development working in the high risk space (adult & gambling). With a lot of experience specifically around payment processing for high risk merchants. If anyone has questions feel free to ask and I'll answer within reason/if I have the answer. Disclaimer: Just solely my own opinions being expressed.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

When this happened to Gab somehow no one cared.

bob229 5y ago

The guardian is absolute trash. No serious person ever reads it

stubish 5y ago

It isn't just payment processing. Recently looking at various ethical ETFs, I'm finding that they all filter out companies for social harm. Which includes porn. Even the green ETFs. So on the first few paragraphs of the disclosure doc you are investing in companies with carbon targets meeting whatever criteria, no fossil fuels, etc. And next find out they are also skipping gambling, guns, tobacco and adult entertainment.

stacker8888 5y ago

'The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks' So the fact that there's underage children selling porn on OnlyFans isn't a scandal? What about the bestiality on sale?

amai 5y ago

There are so many companies out there profiting from selling weapons, destroying the environment and misusing cheap labour in awful dictatorships. But these are issues the banks and payment platforms don‘t seem to care about at all. Where is the NYT article pointing out these issues?