LOL, I remember when folks were saying that pornhub is just about amateurs having fun. Yeah.
There are so many advocates for “pr0n is free speech” and “do you want for us to be just like Saudi Arabia? Huh? Huh?!!” out there that one has to think for a moment before making even such a prosaic, axiomatic statement as:
Pornography always ends up being about the increasingly violent and brutal exploitation and abuse of minors and disabled people, and animals. It never goes anywhere else! Therefore it is at best only about free speech in the most marginal, abstract sense of the word.
But that’s the benefit of one’s name being mud. One gets to make these outrageous statements that will upset absolutely everyone (except those who are being abused).
The fans of pr0n will use the same sorts of examples as fans of abortion do to make their case, that is, the most outrageously rare of examples:
A fun-loving young couple make a sex vid and share it with a few of their friends. All in the spirit of fun and partying. Some hung-up magistrate finds out and goes after them and they are put in prison. Their lives are ruined. Just because they are not prudes, y’all! Is this not the most unfair of unfairnesses?
This is the same excuse, pretty much, as: A rape victim goes to the county hospital, where doctors and nurses hear her saying she doesn’t want to bear her rapist’s child. They immediately inform law enforcement, who all team up with the hospital medical staff to force her, 40 weeks later, to give birth. (Like that’s all they’re there for, right?)
I don’t think pr0n should be outlawed unless it’s patently illegal - but a typical pr0n vid often shows people doing things that will get you busted out in the real world. The excuse that it keeps rapists from raping is like saying that normalizing homosexuality will keep homos from going after kids. Hm. Yeah. Right.
“Free speech” is not a “get out of jail free” card.
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from the article:
The decision was made in connection with a suit filed by a woman who claims Pornhub dragged its heels after she warned it was hosting an explicit video taken of her when she was 13 — at one point requiring photographic evidence that she was the same child in the video.
After several weeks, the clip, entitled “13-Year Old Brunette Shows Off For the Camera,” was taken down but reuploaded on other MindGeek sites in 2014, garnering millions of views and earning the company advertising money facilitated by Visa, the victim alleged. The illicit clip was still on the company’s sites as recently as 2020, according to the suit.
The plaintiff fell into a deep depression, tried to kill herself and became a heroin user after her unwanted infamy, she claimed. Still underage, she began acting in other porn videos produced by an older man to support her habit, the lawsuit said.
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Haha, how popular are 13-year-old brunettes out there compared to 35-year-old waitresses who had a bad tip week? I would guess that the woman trying to have the video removed from the internet probably let to a lot of the subsequent interest, too: Oh, look! She’s trying to get away!
How very fascist of you to judge free expression on the most fringe elements. Let’s apply your standard to firearms or religions. Where people are involved there will always be some exploitation and abuse. Hopefully it stays on the margins.
Pornography has definitely become democratized through the rise of technology. I’m not sure how much of that site’s content you think is represented by fetish or illegal material but it hasn’t been shut down and is apparently popular.
From other coverage this seems like a case involving a California law and trying to say Visa as payment processor profits from underage content. The ramifications move beyond banks protecting organized crime to potentially making guns impossible to obtain because a manufacturer is held liable for misuse of its products. Unless they can show Visa failed to act, failed to report illegal underage activity this case makes little sense. On the other hand Visa has made payment processing choices based on politics so they opened themselves up to this.