From Josh Hawley’s Twitter:
.@Mastercard has just informed me that they are terminating the use of their cards on Pornhub
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 10, 2020
Additionally:
And now @visa https://t.co/3ha6hkfll7
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 10, 2020
(Featured image is “Packaged Bitcoin Keychains” by btckeychain and is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
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Just dropping in to annotate for the record that Hawley is a menaceReport
Does Hawley really think that porn is unpopular with his constituents?Report
Depends on the genre, I suppose.
Here’s the NYT column that knocked over the dominoes in question:
Report
Quite an assertion. I’d trust there was some evidence to support it but it’s the times editorial page so, you know, coin flip at best.Report
Reason is, of course, against this.
Report
Why? This kind of thing helps popularize bitcoin.Report
You’d think that Libertarians would welcome corporations and government teaming up to deal with moral panics!Report
This is an outrage. Clearly the election results must be overturned despite the vote totals so a True Freedom Lover stay prez. Hawley is really fighting for freedom here.Report
This is something that Mastercard and Visa, corporations, chose to do.Report
Senator Hawley is out there protecting our freedom. It was his tweets in the post. His eye is on the ball.
PH’s corporate owner could and likely will make a big effort to try to clean up the most egregious and possibly illegal stuff to get back in the graces of MC. It’s not like uploading porn is hard. Do they require proof of age ( through a credit card) to upload? Do they ask for consent forms for all the people in the vids or at least the really far out stuff?Report
I think you misunderstood the tweets — Hawley is happy about this.Report
My snark is all purpose. Hawley is trash in general. I’m still a bit touchy about this whole Repub FU to election thing that is going on.Report
Greg, I am pleased to say that I have no idea what the answers to your questions are.
I see Mastercard saying “we don’t want to be used for purchasing certain products” as an obvious outcome of expecting corporations to police how their products get used in practice.
This is a nice slope we’ve got here.
Sure would be a tragedy if someone
started
slippingReport
Well my questions are +3 Questions of Doom, so i got that going for me. Logical fallacies are still craptastic arguments so nothing new there.
Corps have had some legal liability, depending on the product, for how their products are used for a while. It’s not exactly new.
PH can, should and likely will take action to correct this.Report
We haven’t hammered out whether the slippery slope actually *IS* a fallacy.
Even after PH can, should, and likely will take action to correct this, there is no obligation for Mastercard to allow itself to be used to purchase its wares.Report
The New Republic on the dominionists playing the Times: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war-pornhubReport
There have been liberal and further left people that have been at least queasy about porn and other forms of commercial sex for a very long time. The main reason is that they see commercial sex has inherently exploitative and porn as degrading towards women. There are some elements of truth in their assertions but trying to get rid of porn and commercial sex entirely isn’t going to work as a solution, especially with distribution being easier than ever. Comstockery worked because the post offices were the only way to distribute porn in the past. These days not so much. So trying to totally eliminate commercial sex that much.Report
And, let’s face it, editorials like the one in the NYT make pr0n exceptionally unsympathetic and Visa/Mastercard can look like Decent Upstanding Corporations (rather than Usurers abusing the poor or what have you) by just saying “nah, you can’t use our lucre as middleman to buy that filth.”Report
Americans have a cultural tendency to turn these issues into bizarre gothic fairy tales. The author of the New Republic piece Saul linked to makes a good point about the incentives in the gig economy combined with social media’s monetization strategy. Buried somewhere in all this is probably a good case for harm reduction rules that keep it all safe and ensure the participants are paid. But why do that when you can find the most lurid examples of corporate tech sliminess to get both the Christianists and carceral feminists all hot and bothered about their long term crusades?Report
carceral feminists
Of or pertaining to imprisonment or a prison?Report
Seek and Wikipedia shall find:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceral_feminismReport
Americans might have this tendency worse than other developed nations but I don’t think these tensions are unique to the United States. A lot of it comes from the tension that second wave feminism was rebelling against both the traditional controls that society placed on female sexuality and that it wanted women to be pretty sexy help and bedmates for men. There is a certain tension in combatting both these things because women expressing their sexuality are going to naturally attract a lot of heterosexual male attention.
I also feel that a lot of people really can’t understand why somebody would go into commercial sex work for a living. Not everybody does it out of desperation, although many do or through coercion, but at least in the porn industry there seems to be many people who do it voluntarily. So naturally there is an inability to understand happening here.Report
oh, so this is yet another one of those things where the people running the website could’ve made good-faith efforts to deal with the problem, but decided to just…not do that, because it was hard, and now We Can’t Have Nice Things.Report
This is one of those stories that has been bubbling up every four months or so. Here’s something from April (and I’m pretty sure that effort would result in stuff from 2019 and 2018):
Report
This person is mentioned in the article Saul linked to. Her title is ‘Director of Abolition’ at Exodus Cry a ‘faith-based organization… that fights sexual exploitation and the sex industry.’
You don’t have to be in love with PornHub (or have some body part that is) to wonder about her credibility, or whether what she’s reporting is accurate or misleading. This is getting into the 700 Club reporting on heavy metal music territory.Report
I’m more than willing to say that Lalia is a horrible person.
That said, I used her tweet not because I thought that she was a good person but because I wanted people to look at the thing that she was pointing at.Report
Fair enough. And to be clear I don’t know that she’s a horrible person. Hell I don’t know that I think the 700 club or the Christian conservatives who bought into the Satanic abuse panics back in the day were horrible people. I do question their ability to paint a reliable picture of reality, particularly when it comes to the issues in question.Report
Misthreaded comment.Report
This will do nothing to help exploited kids. It will do everything to screw over sex workers and consenting adults. One thinks this is the point.Report
Believe it or not, I’m behind the times. I’m ill-informed enough not to know until I read the comments to this OP that Mr. Hawley is a US senator. I thought (and still think) Pornhub is pretty much what its name sounds like.
Therefore, I expected the discussion to be about whether a credit card company should rescind its services for a porn site. Or why it might do so–presumably because (I imagine) children might be exploited.
I realize now this is primarily about Mr.Hawley’s politics. And to read (most of) the comments, I’m to criticize Mastercard for its decision because Mr. Hawley supports the decision.
To be sure, not all comments here fall into that line. But the general gist of the thread does.Report