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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25753 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?

In related news, Pornhub has apparently been pushing gay and transgender content on men and children, per a leaked recording.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pornhub-pushes-gay-transgender-videos-convert-straight-men

Rice added that children need to be helped to figure out their sexuality and orientation preferences because they are more "pliable."

Speaking about children who may be sexually confused, production coordinator Sylvian Fernandez said Men.com, a gay pornography site run by the company, can be used as a resource, adding, "They'll find their kink in there, I'm sure."

Pornhub and co have made a partial denial:

"The person who was illegally filmed in this video is very clearly speaking of converting free users into paid subscribers, and any insinuation otherwise is disingenuous, reckless, and hurtful," an Aylo spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. "It is egregious for a journalist to misrepresent this information in order to push outlandish and harmful conspiracy theories."

As far as I'm concerned, the whole company should be razed and the earth salted. Their verification for content creators has been historically atrocious, there were a bunch of rape videos that were put up there, the women involved struggled to get them taken down while Pornhub got advertising bucks.

How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?

I still remember the old days of Usenet where you got porn from small communities that uploaded it one image at a time and had a community with discussions and small talk and etc. built around it. Being a young adult forced to get porn there vastly increased the chances of running across a groomer - or getting a virus for that matter.

Getting porn from Pornhub is vastly safer for kids than any of the less-moderated alternatives.

This is the classic 'will refusing to do any sex education make kids not have sex, or make them have unsafe sex with pregnancies and stds and coercion and etc.' debate.

If you had a policy that makes it so no kid ever sees any porn ever, cool, do it.

This policy can't possibly do that, it can just punish the largest and therefore generally safest and most well-moderated venues, forcing kids into more dangerous venues instead.

Websites such as Pornhub, which is less targeted to specific sexual attitudes and is more a repository for a wide array of content, are designed to "push the envelope" with straight users by suggesting gay and transgender videos to them, Rice explained.

I noticed that. Pornhub is showing more gay/trans/kink into the little thumbnails. I dismissed that as changing mores, a neutral algorithm just showing what is popular. But now I wonder how much ideology is behind that? If one registers a PH account (shock!) instead of incognito browsing, is there a way to set preferences and filter effectively?

How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?

MindGeek's official position is that inconsistent enforcement will drive under-18s to platforms where enforcement is lackluster or non-existent. And while that's probably motivated in part by their investment in different blocking approaches, it's not exactly an unreasonable concern, nor one that is limited to minors seeing the same porn they'd get exposed to otherwise, or some just slightly-sketchier stuff.

There's a small army of creeps, blackmailers, and unabashed pedophiles that trawl for people they can offer 'illicit' content and then use that to demand money and/or threaten their targets. While the highest-profile cases usually depend on a variant of catfishing, there's been no small number that use approaches based on outre content (whether the victim was looking for that or not) and social engineering.

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