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.
If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad. The cumulative effect is a chilling of protected speech in a way that congress could never legally get away with.
(As an aside, one sort of neat thing about CCBill is apparently they’ll never kill your account without warning, unlike PayPal & co)
You also need to deal with various combinations of acquiring (bank the merchant account linked to the specific payment network is with) and issuing banks (bank of the individual card owners)
People think this is about morality, but it's a lot more about the cost of operating in that market. I bet that there are way more claims of fraud, money laundering investigations, subpoenas and other overhead that the banks don't want to deal with.
Like teenagers stealing credit cards to pay camgirls is probably pretty common. And there are likely a lot of prostitution investigations.
The real problem is that sex work isn't treated like normal work, which just creates freedom for criminals to take advantage of vulnerable people.
If it was licensed and regulated, then it would be easier to tell the crooks, and victims of human trafficking from the people who are legitimate, voluntary workers.
Then the economics might make sense for banks to keep serving these customers.
Anyone discussing this needs to be aware of "Operation Chokepoint".
The banks all doing the same thing is exactly what you would expect in a free market.
They are all in the same market (credit card processing) and all have the same information on the risks and costs and revenue in that market for handling various types of transactions. All of them that make rational decisions supported by the data they have should come to the same conclusions and take the same actions.
What you'd expect in a free market is for specialized banks to appear that would deal with porn and other high risk customers that the more general purpose banks all conclude that they don't want to deal with.
That's what has happened, as has been mentioned in other comments.
I think that's not quite what happened here. It's not that, literally, all the banks decided this; it's that the banks are so huge that, when one or a few of the mega-banks make the decision, it's effectively the same as if they all did. Ultra-consolidation is the real problem.
The Traci Lords case is a good illustration of this. One day everything is order, the next somebody realizes she used a fake ID and bam, everybody involved is suddenly manufacturing/profiting off/in possession of child pornography. Add in the massively lowered bar for OnlyFans/PornHub, where anybody with a phone can now DIY, and it's a legal minefield.
Just another reason to smash these banks into a million pieces.
Price increases are a great example. One company will take an increase and most follow.
And how is this chilling of protected speech? The constitution guarantees free speech, not payment for speech. There is nothing stop these workers from sharing their content/speech.
So how do you share things legally on the internet without involving a private business who can stop you?
Not necessarily. Banks have a government license to create money (ok, depends on what kind of bank, but let's put that aside), and provide services many individuals and organizations rely on. That already means that even if you're a staunch capitalist, you should still support some sort of set of constraints and norms, regulation, of their activities. So it's not clear that a bank should be able to refuse service to legally-operating organizations.
Plus, if one bank can do this, then why not any other bank?
I think it is about charge backs. Visa and mastercard hate charge backs. Porn has a very high charge back rate and these cost card companies so much they will often just cancel the merchant agreement. With a charge back there is human customer service involved, customer denials, fraud and complicated dispute resolution. This is why the processors that specialize in porn (ccbill) charge up to %15 per transaction. I don't think the processors wanted to go after onlyfans - they just would rather not deal with the drama. However, like onlyfans discovered, if you offer to pay a %15 per transaction fee - processors will work with you. Processors do not have morals - they are just trying to make money. They don't mind handling transactions for gun sales, tobacco, strip clubs or pyramid schemes.
I don't think causation runs one way. The financial industry & "Government" aren't clearly delineated. You can see this all the time in "compliance." Banks will commonly cite "compliance," essentially blaming the regulator for various policies. If you ask the regulator itself, they'll generally consider a lot of that stuff bank policy.
The way in which banking regulation works in practice creates a ton of ambiguities like this. "Compliance" is basically the area between regulation and internal policy. One firm will adopt a policy, which has all sorts of compliance implications. Another will copy them. The regulator grows to expect it, and it develops from there.
Market centralisation encourages this a lot.
If you had billions to invest and transact with, you'd have banks bending over backwards for your business too.
The banks are accountable to their boards which are accountable to their shareholders, which (the ones that matter) are increasingly .. I hate to use the word but 'woke' activists - nudging companies in the 'right' direction either from a moral standpoint or from a perceived moral standpoint of customers/public at large.
Progressively (as in a simple progression over time, not the political sense) investing in/lending to/providing the current account for, defence/tobacco/oil/sex are becoming bad looks, to the big voteholders even if not in general.
Yes, both PornHub and OnlyFans haven't been careful enough with screening their material but we normally don't hold hosts responsible for perfect policing of user content--except when sex is involved.
The whole scheme to make creators pay to run ads is a failed ideology if creator content is the very thing that platforms depend on to succeed.
This is why I always edit/record to files I can re-use/re-distribute rather than using native record options on platform-specific apps.
I make music, not adult content though just FTR.
This is exactly the case.
One is the higher incidence of chargebacks. You don't have to ask if something is naughty -- just look for the chargebacks and it'll tell you. What happens is someone charges a thing, their partner sees it on the CC statement and asks about it, the first person is ashamed to admit it so they act shocked and insist it MUST be fraud because THEY would never charge something like that, and to keep up appearances, they call the bank and have the charge reversed. And platforms have to build in large margins to cover for it, or screw creators out of their payouts, or sometimes both and keep the difference.
(Which is why something irreversible, like cryptocurrency, keeps getting talked about. It wouldn't solve the shame problem, but it would eliminate chargebacks, and creators would just get paid. It just brings a bunch of other problems.)
The second is extremely vocal pressure from some fringe religious groups, who will pump the bellows of the CSAM-PR-disaster furnace for anyone who allows a nipple on their platform. You don't know the groups' names, but you've seen the hit pieces they put in the press. Look up "Exodus Cry" for one.
Likely higher instances of "friendly fraud", and chargebacks.
Where exactly are the banks at risk or accountable?
Are we talking about fraud, or potential criminal investigation because of underaged girls forced to do onlyfans by mafia (I can imagine that) and money transfer via their bank?
One of the great usecases for crypto
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/01/germany-orders-deutsche-bank... is just the first result from a google search
It's easier to stir up outrage against porn—sexual prudishness has a long history—than against Facebook—the ability so globally to overshare, and the (inevitably delayed) realization of its consequences, is only in the very beginning of forming.
The answer to regulation gone wild is not more regulation, it is to remove regulatory power. You can’t dig your way out of a hole.
"Rules for thee, but not for me."
This speaks to the need for censor proof payments systems that can still accommodate KYC and AML requirements (so you’re not violating financial regs and end up closing up shop). Stablecoins perhaps? I leave that to the domain experts.
TLDR Disintermediate legacy payment systems without breaking the law.
I'm all for Twitter choosing what they will allow - if anything the more aggressive they are, the more space it creates for competition.
I'm on the other hand not for payment providers even being allowed to choose, because their position then makes them effective arbiter of what kinds of businesses are allowed to exist without democratic oversight.
For all the power the social networks have, it's nothing like that.
Maybe crypto will change that, but today threatening to withdraw payment processing is an existential threat for a lot of online businesses which gives payment networks undue power.
The competition is not apples to apples. Instead, you have ideological bubbles like Gab, and you have the incumbent network (Twitter) which "normies" use by default.
The problem with the default network applying ideological censorship is that it limits the average person's exposure to the marketplace of ideas. In the context of a controversial topic, this benefits the default narrative tremendously.
If we want to reduce ideological conflict, it's imperative to respect alternative viewpoints and engage them as equals. Otherwise, we risk alienating people into becoming extremists, or worse, we allow the authorities (who work closely with censors and fact checkers) to control the Overton window and propagandize us away from the truth.
Yeah, there are vastly inferior alternatives which almost nobody uses (Bitchute, Minds, cryptocurrencies), but that cuts you off from the vast audience that they've monopolized. An audience that want to read you and wants to pay you, evident by the vast number of subscribers and payments.
Network effects matter.
Twitter stats are a good example of this. Look at the stats for your individual tweets. I have an account with 45k. I can beat the organic exposure for a tweet with 1-2 USD of ads.
That's not to say the big networks have no value, and you could end up one of the lucky ones with huge exposure.
But they remain giants because people keep thinking they're much more important than they are.
They are important if you get big on them. The vast majority will never get big or even mid sized on them.
That said, the same people made the same arguments ("private businesses, no rules should apply") with payment providers boycotting Gab, but turn around now. Will they learn that political pressure via businesses is a bad idea because it might affect them next? Doubtful, they haven't learned it the first few times.
It's meaningless to suggest they had one.
And I'm a concrete example of someone who considers Gab a haven of extremism, but who still believes payment processors should not be allowed to boycott legal businesses.
There is the often repeated "imagine your worst enemy had this power" but it doesn't seem to get through to people.
The number of users is important, and they have monopolies on the user base.
Learn about network effects.
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.
> A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy
Enough with the hyperbole, the FBI has already stated they found little evidence of a grand conspiracy to overthrow the govt [1], despite the fact we know that the Oathkeepers' leader is actually an FBI operative or informant [2]
[1] https://www.salon.com/2021/08/20/fbi-finds-little-evidence-j...
[2] https://www.revolver.news/2021/06/stewart-rhodes-oath-keeper...
>The officials did note that far-right groups – like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters – may have collaborated in breaching the Capitol on the day of the riot.
These aren't scrubs either. Some of them are ex-military, armed civilians coordinating with other groups to breach the capitol and take hostages. This is not hyperbole, it's fact. Just because they didn't succeed doesn't mean it wasn't real.
That comparison doesn't work because calling to storm the Whitehouse is calling on people to perform an illegal act which is illegal by itself. I think everyone is in agreement that platforms should remove content that is illegal.
Yes. Including child pornography that Twitter seems to find it difficult to remove off of their platform. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...
There were many, many lawsuits all of which were heard in court and ruled on.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-moved...
Its also a bit of a non-sequitur to the thread’s discussion.
That’s a pretty loaded statement. It’s strange to me that someone can take a provable fact (e.g. COVID-19 is real), politicize it, and now spreading that misinformation is painted as political speech that should be protected.
Exactly the same thing how YouTube demonetises specific individuals who use the platform for a living for content that is skewed to a certain political audience.
Do they now realise that this can happen to anyone? As for payment solutions, this is the whole point of cryptocurrencies that will solve this eventually.
I hate this argument, it is so easy to say: people were against before and they are in favor now. Without proving that the people who were against are the SAME people that are in favor of it.
For example, people wanted mask at the beginning and now they don't wear them. People support Facebook censorship but are against when it is for porn. People wanted a vaccine but now they dont want to take it. People protested against motorbike sounds yesterday and they protest in favor of motorbikes today
Sorry but what tell you that they are the same people ? Without that this is just wrong
Fine.
Crypto solves this issue...
It doesn't solve trust. In fact existing solutions fall way, way, short of what consumers already have. A provider that accepts crypto is 100% unaccountable. You can't do a chargeback on Bitcoin. You get what you get once you make that payment.
Now, it's true that there is an ever growing stable of technologies trying repeatedly to solve the trust problem on top of a crypto base. And none have been remotely successful in any market. Almost all have significant drawbacks. Some have included absolute whoppers of security bugs.
You have to crack that second part before declaring that "crypto solves this". Until then, you aren't going to see any successful small payment markets on this stuff.
“Yeah I’ll throw $50 into this OnlyFans subscription, but only if I can get a chargeback if I’m not happy with the performer” said nobody ever.
And that's what you need in the crypto world. It's not enough to have anonymity. It's just not. And that's why this hasn't been solved yet. Keep at it.
[1] Actually some did, who was the starlet that produced a giant chargeback flood a while back by promising nudity she didn't deliver? I'm not the expert but I remember the story.
Depends on the cryptocurrency. If you're talking about Monero then yes.
As for the others, they are far less private than you think and the majority of cryptocurrencies out there can still be traced.
Sending cash also wouldn’t work.
MasterCard and Visa had a strong monopoly on instant transactions at a distance. They fought PayPal quite a bit in the beginning as it encroached on their monopoly.
Thankfully crypto has solved this monopoly
Crypto will have to overcome these hurdles first:
- Slower and more difficult to use (especially compared to saved CC auto-complete)
- No rebills (the biggest problem)
- No credit
- No payment protection
[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.
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.
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.
There is no way there is a moral stand here, the idea is absurd. They're locking out sex work because some regulation is making it risky for them. Or maybe the charge-back issue. But probably regulation.
I am not aware of any existing regulations that would make this particularly risky for the banks. I am aware of a very vocal minority that wants to limit sex to heterosexual and procreative (and ideally not fun at all), and then only when the man wants it.
I suspect the increased liability risk is the main cause of what we’re seeing.
Not just politics -but finances as well. The Evangelicals represent a huge amount of money -particularly when you're talking about the mega-churches.
Also, it's quite, quite possible that a large number of decision makers in the banking industry are themselves conservative hard-line Christians.
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.
Sex trafficking is the flagship target of these regulations but it's fairly obvious from their messaging that the original lobbyists are trying to shut down sex work of all kinds and using sex trafficking as an excuse.
Perhaps there is a way to shield investors from this association without cutting off adult content businesses?
If so, that alone could be a reason to stop servicing them.
Although the name fractional reserve might be correct it is highly misleading as to how modern banking actually functions. Practically speaking banks are limited by the availability of solvent debtors.
Colloquial language is describing an ancient process that is no longer in use. Debtors are people who promise to work, they sign a contract that they will pay in the future. That debt contract called a bond is an asset of the bank, it is a future income stream just like the share of a company. In exchange the debtor obtains a liquid form of his debt contract. The bank grants credit equal to the principal owed in the contract.
Essentially, bank money is just a share in the bonds that the bank owns. It's almost equivalent to buying a bond ETF whose share price is fixed to $1. The profits of the bonds are then distributed through interest rates. Now, the big question is, what happens when the bank is losing money because the bonds are worthless (think 2008)? It does not pass on the losses because of the free deposit insurance program that the government pays for. In fact, the incentive is to write as many (possibly bad) loans as the bank can get away with. Add onto the fact that US dollars are a shared currency among private banks, you get a pee in the pool scenario...
The central bank then engages in QE which is basically the act of transferring the bonds to the central bank and now private banks have a metaphorical share in the bonds the central bank owns. If there are 10 banks and 1 with 50% bad loans then after QE there are 10 banks with 5% bad loans. The central bank has the pee now and diluted it to the point the pee is no longer noticeable.
Of course, the "correct" solution is to just lower the value credit. That's usually done via inflation but the problem is that this "after the fact" inflation must be done through government spending. Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the value of credit the same just pass on losses directly? That would imply negative interest rates. In practice it doesn't work because cash gives a risk free 0% return which forces returns on every investment to be above 0% to justify the investment and that includes 0% interest rates on bank accounts. Essentially, inflation targeting only exists to allow representation of negative real interest rates on cash. It's a huge hack.
I wanted to limit it to the first paragraph but I felt it would be too difficult to understand without further explanation.
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.
The market speaks out with wallets not with hypocritical outrage nor moral high grounding nor virtue signaling and especially not straight up random censorship of legal buisnesses. And last time i checked onlyfans was wildly profitable and legal.
> Instead of asking the payment processor monopoly to censor things you don't like
There's no monopoly here. There are many payment processing options, but their differ in their level of service and transaction fees. Both of which get better with scale. So while everyone wants to use the major processors, those processors have to cater to majority use case, because that's how they maintain their position and profits.
> last time i checked onlyfans was wildly profitable and legal
And niche. The OF story is weird in many ways. At this point I half suspect it was a PR stunt. But still, it's a fast-growing company, and like all such companies, they evolve towards being appealing to the masses, because it's the only way to continue rapid growth.
At some point, the status quo was slavery, death penalty, child work, women domination and against gays.
Just because if you do nothing the current equilibrium tends in some direction doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
Anyway, my point is just that this may just be market at work, and not some conspiracy or minority exerting undue influence over society.
(And my second point is that, for the same reason, I don't buy the argument that shitty technology is good because that what sells with most people.)
The theory that payments with OF have more charge-backs and that's why they are going after them is plausible to me. From what I understand, there's a lot of blatantly false advertising/severe buyer's remorse on OF.
So... ban it for everyone else because they don't like it? Sounds fair and reasonable /s
The group I posit is the majority are the people who:
- Will want to hide their sexual services related habits from others, including their spouses (who may also do the same!). Those are the people who cause chargeback risks for sex businesses, making the latter undesirable for payment processors that are optimizing for majority use case. This is reflected in payment processing fees.
- Will dislike products and companies who use overtly sexual messaging or associate themselves with sex work, but themselves are in business other than sex works. Advertising industry is exerting pressure against sexual topics in order to not lose access to these people('s wallets). This means that any non-sex, ad-funded business faces tremendous market pressure to stay away from topics pertaining to sex.
- Will be highly responsible to messaging that porn/sex work is dangerous to people's minds/souls, or their children, or society. They may not agitate and organize against sex business, but when presented with pro- and anti- options (and enough propaganda), they'll vote against.
There's no need for any conspiracy, or any large-scale organizing here. It's just how the political and economical incentive gradient looks.
... you're forgetting the biggest economical incentive gradient - people who are actually throwing money at Only Fans, and will immediately throw their money at a competitor if one should open.
It's almost like you've forgotten that people already pay money for porn online everyday.
It's relevant here because of how obviously subjective censorship is, which is the strongest argument against it
Strangely, the same evangelicals that are being allegedly discriminated against, and de-platformed [1], and their right-wing jewish allies [2] are also the same evangelicals that are controlling the big platforms, and through NCOSE, creating a pressure campaign [3] to form porn removal? That the Right Wing is executing this, and controlling this, for anti-porn? [4]
I don't think this is particularly credible, but I did include [3] & [4] for the contrary perspective.
A more realistic answer is that Nicholas Kristof, a well-known NYTimes reporter and author, wrote an interesting piece on Pornhub that also indicting several others for rebroadcasting non-consensual sex videos [5]. This led to pressure on the market in general around payment processors handling things of less repute because of #MeToo
> 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.
Well said.
If the era of #MeToo has taught us anything, it should be that one person's sexual freedom to make a buck is another's sexual coercion and exploitation. In the grey between those two truths there will be casualties.
[1] https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/02/27/financial-blacklis...
[2] https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/visa-finally-gets...
[3] https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/08/conservative-christ...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opinion/onlyfans-porn-sex...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
Post nut clarity is apparently a financial problem.
Or a portal for prostitutes to advertise their services. I tried forever to find a way to charge CC or PayPal but it's impossible without a huge existing volume. These providers basically enforce a monopoly on this market. Even thought it is completely legal here.
For me the US is enforcing their moral believes on us. In my culture this differentiation does not make sense
I'm really happy to pay for content, but shit like that makes me nope right out of there and look for alternatives or not bother.
I’m interested in how much the morals we don’t like line up with the cold stats we would follow.
the fact that it's decentralized means you will not be told - and it's on yourself to buy in and be part of.
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.
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.
Decentralized Social Media is less promising unfortunately, it's a harder problem to scale because nobody wants to pay for it and without payment its hard to ensure it's not overrun with trolls / spam. Twitter's Bluesky project is probably the best effort to fix this atm.
I doubt it very much. To me it feels like the screws are being tightened and the oppression more blatant because they realize that for a variety of reasons (technical and legal) we're past the point where decentralization is a viable strategy.
Meaning they know we have no choice so they're dispensing with the velvet glove.
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.
Welcome to cancel culture.I can recommend some reading to get caught up.
The Guardian merely has a problem with this particular application of it.
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.
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.
Are they being forced to sell something, or a conscious choice?
I don't know i just want to see real data before condemning anyone at all.
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.
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.
If you didn't immediately ditch your iphone obviously that means Apple are beyond criticism of any kind because the market.
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?
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-ra...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
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.
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.
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.
>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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
This isn't allowed for utilities, why not the same for payment systems?
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.
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.
I understand the audience on this site. At first I thought it's just /. But it really isn't.
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.
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.
If Visa/MC wanted to fix this problem they could overnight, but they refuse to.
First they come for your enemies, then your neighbors, then your friends and family and then they come for you.
Sometimes, they only learn who really is in charge as soon as it happens to them which is always when it is too late.
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
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.
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.
So the fact that there's underage children selling porn on OnlyFans isn't a scandal? What about the bestiality on sale?
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.
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?
Funny the Guardian didn't mention this. Reading their coverage gives the impression deplatforming is limited to moralizing against sex workers.
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/re...
