certain sexually oriented materials or services
November 16, 2019 10:24 AM   Subscribe

Pornhub joins Dreamwidth in the category of "your content is too extreme for PayPal." The money processor will no longer support payments to Pornhub. Performers will have to find a different payment service (sfw text-only link), potentially including cryptocurrency. They use Verge; some are suggesting bitcoin. Pornhub's blog post about the change (also sfw, text only) is simple and informational - "here's how to change your payment info."
posted by ErisLordFreedom (22 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite


 
Where does PayPal stand on processing white supremacist payments?
posted by kokaku at 10:39 AM on November 16, 2019 [39 favorites]


Where does PayPal stand on processing white supremacist payments?

Ku Klux Klan donation account suspended by PayPal (BBC, Sept. 2, 2019)

More genteel forms of white supremacism are presumably still welcome, though.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:47 AM on November 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


I'm surprised and impressed that a porn site pays through cheque, and I would encourage performers to accept that instead of internet money. It might be a bit slower, but a payee has weaker recourse through other systems if something gets spannered up along the way. Not a fan of banks, but yes a fan of their regulation, which generally does a pretty good job, and internet money transfer systems are a fuck.
posted by Sterros at 11:02 AM on November 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


Where does PayPal stand on processing white supremacist payments?

On it's neck?

Crap, wait, this is PayPal my optimism ran away from me again.
posted by loquacious at 11:02 AM on November 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Pornhub is white supremacist

Wait; What?
posted by Mitheral at 11:44 AM on November 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


I know Pornhub has a whole lot of racist content; I'm not sure it's overtly white supremacist. Links or arguments please?

They are indeed misogynistic and exploitative, including (legally) doxxing people who file DMCA takedown requests. Mindgeek, Pornhub's parent company, has an industry-wide reputation for supporting piracy and scams, but a quick look doesn't find anything that says they directly support white supremacy, as opposed to being willing to profit off anything that involves naked people.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:15 PM on November 16, 2019 [9 favorites]


I know Pornhub has a whole lot of racist content; I'm not sure it's overtly white supremacist. Links or arguments please?

If you don't believe that allowing the former is essentially the latter, I don't know what links or arguments might convince you.
posted by Etrigan at 12:30 PM on November 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


If you don't believe that allowing the former is essentially the latter, I don't know what links or arguments might convince you.

That's reasonable. It feels like there's a difference between "actively supports X ideology" and "is willing to promote and profit from content related to X ideology," but I'm not sure I can describe the difference. I certainly can't identify which a company is from the outside.

I can certainly accept, "Pornhub supports and promotes white supremacist content creators, and will protect them from backlash."
Looking at their content requirements: Users may not "Post any Content depicting child pornography, rape, snuff, torture, death, violence, or incest, racial slurs or hate speech, (either aurally or via the written word)" nor "Post any Content that is obscene, illegal, unlawful, defamatory, libelous, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive..."

Um. Since "white supremacist" works as a search term to turn up a lot of horrible racist videos, and they allow racial slurs in video titles... yeah, they're at least as supportive of outright white supremacy as Youtube.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:50 PM on November 16, 2019 [11 favorites]


The cycle repeats itself:
1) Mainstream payment processors deplatform anything tangentially sex related
2) Those services are driven to work with shady umbrella companies and alternative payment methods
3) Mainstream payment processors use (2) to justify (1)
posted by Pyry at 1:20 PM on November 16, 2019 [5 favorites]


It doesn’t really compute that PayPal would do this out of some kind of puritanical concern. I bet it was just a shakedown: PayPal wanted a bigger cut, and PornHub wouldn’t play ball.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 2:29 PM on November 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


It's likely neither (directly) ideological nor greedy; it's about SESTA and the fear that any connection whatsoever with a site that allows sex work can make them liable.

Of course, this is incredibly unlikely. Which is probably why they didn't cut out Pornhub payments the instant SESTA/FOSTA went into action--Pornhub has a lot of activity and that was a lot of money. But now they've run the numbers, and decided they don't need the money coming from Pornhub, so they can kick it out and (1) not worry about liability and (2) not try to figure out where their edge cases are for erotic content.

They kicked out Dreamwidth years ago, because DW's founders refused to remove erotic fanfic. And several ebook sites got warnings around the same time, telling them they couldn't allow publication of various kinds of fiction and use PayPal.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:19 PM on November 16, 2019 [11 favorites]


Chaturbate uses Epoch, but they take a massive cut and the conversion of tokens to dollars is like 5%. I guess it's just Amazon Gift Cards all the way down.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 6:11 PM on November 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Isn't there pretty good evidence that a good number of performers who appear on Pornhub and other porn sites are victims of sex trafficking or coerced into performing? Even hugely popular performers like Mia khalifa who managed to get out report having received peanuts (seriously, like $10,000 career total across all of her videos) and enduring abuse and poor working conditions. Is there a reason the working assumption here is that most performers were the ones actually receiving the payments in the first place?
posted by shaademaan at 6:55 PM on November 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


Where did you hear about that evidence, shaademaan?
posted by Selena777 at 8:30 PM on November 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


I'm reminded of this metafilter post a N+ 1 article by Lorelei Lee. Particularly on how she writes of how both pro and anti sex worker advocates sometimes deny the complexity of situations for adult performers and rob them of their voices.

I just hope performers get their money so they can pay rent.
posted by gryftir at 11:27 PM on November 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


" Mindgeek, Pornhub's parent company, has an industry-wide reputation for supporting piracy and scams"

TIL that ThinkGeek and MindGeek are different
posted by klangklangston at 11:28 PM on November 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


My favourite part of this is the "joins Dreamwidth". Because, well. Dreamwidth, obviously a hotbed of misogyny, white supremacy and general all-round evil-doing.
posted by Pentickle at 2:15 AM on November 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Interesting to see which of the two extant cryptocurrency systems that don't burn electricity at country scale and actually settle transactions at reasonable speeds and low cost (Ripple and Stellar) will be the first to understand that given porn's major role in the development of the high-bandwidth Internet it could potentially become responsible for widescale adoption of cryptocurrency as well.
posted by flabdablet at 10:20 AM on November 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


This bullshit encroachment of a Puritanical religious morality onto increasingly more of the public sphere is alarming.
posted by odinsdream at 1:30 PM on November 16 [28 favorites +] [!]


There are plenty of valid reasons to hate Pornhub that don't have to do with religion. They were litterally just under scrutiny for selling material that is of a child being repeatedly raped. Their response? To leave the content up. I say this in every thread regarding porn and I will keep saying it. Porn is not okay, not normal, and not healthy, and it has nothing to do with morals.
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:53 AM on November 18, 2019


This will harm real lives of sex workers.
posted by odinsdream at 3:33 PM on November 16 [17 favorites +] [!]


And the reaction should be to set up protections for the sex workers, up to and including helping them get out of sex work without being harassed as "prude-ish" or "morally protestant". Not just letting male-led multi-billion dollar companies reign un-hindered
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:59 AM on November 18, 2019


How are you defining “normal,” FirstMateKate?
posted by Selena777 at 7:45 PM on November 18, 2019


You're right, normal is a loaded word. I'm trying to basically find a word that sums up several different things, mostly unhealthy, exploitative, counter-productive, meaningless, unfounded, etc.

Porn as we know it, porn in capitalism, porn in mass media, porn in the world of the internet, porn as in porn hub, does more harm than good. And, specifically, the kind of harm it does is such that any amount of harm outweighs any amount of good. Is porn's value or contribution to society really so high, so important, so priceless that its worth forced prostitution? Child rape? Trafficking? This isn't a hypothetical, supporting the porn industry means these things happen in the dozens of thousands every single day.
posted by FirstMateKate at 4:30 PM on November 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


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