02-01-2021, 08:01 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-01-2021, 02:54 AM by UIOQW.)
FYI: The anti-porn religious lobby....Pornhub acquiesced to.
On Tuesday, December 8th, porn-hosting giant Pornhub removed 10 million videos from its platform. The reason for the massive scrub was the result of the company's recognition that sex traffickers had used the site to post videos of rape, sexual assault, and child abuse.
The Internet Watchdog Foundation found only 118 such cases of flagged items involving sexual abuse on the platform on Pornhub over the past three years, whereas the social media giant Facebook reported 84 million such cases in the same period. In other words, only 0.0008 percent of videos on Pornhub featured sexual abuse.
Pornhub wrote in their announcement, "it is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform".
The organizations behind the curtain advocating for the purge, such as the National Center on Exploitation and Trafficking Hub, have an end game that is not merely about trafficking or the abuse of children. These are abolitionist groups that see all porn as a public health crisis and that seek to abolish all porn as we know it.
The move by Mastercard and Visa immediately following the Pornhub purge was a reaction to Kristof's Times article about the platform hosting videos depicting child abuse.
Pornhub should have stood up for sex workers. This move by Mastercard and Visa has meant sex workers have not been able to make a living because of Pornhubs giant misstep,
Something similar happened several years ago following Congress' passage of FOSTA/SESTA, two related bills whose acronyms stand for "Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act" and "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act" respectively. Though ostensibly a bill designed to halt sex trafficking, it had the ancillary effect of squelching the incomes of millions of sex workers by suppressing or censoring the online platforms where they find clients. Indeed, after FOSTA/SESTA's passage, companies such as Payoneer, PayPal, and American Express stopped taking payments from sexual enterprises. In many cases, this meant that sex workers now had to find new sources of income in more dangerous locales in real life.
Beyond Pornhub, the anti-porn lobby is calling for all credit card companies to stop taking payments from all porn sites.
Jessie Sage, sex worker and co-founder of the Peepshow Podcast:
"Right now, 100% of my income comes from the sex industry. About 30% comes from advertising on the podcast (which by the way, our advertisers are all pornographers), and the rest comes from phone sex, video sales, and Onlyfans. So, if clip sites are no longer allowed to process payments, if the bank accounts of performers get shut down, if I can't sell my content to my customers, this will impact both my sex work revenue stream and my multi-media magazine (Peepshow) because it is all funded from the same sources" .
This moment is a blip on the screen and part of a much longer history of the coalition between the anti-porn and religious lobbies to rid our society of the so-called "filth" that nets billions in profits yearly, providing an honest living for so many.
Update 12/31: A Visa spokesperson said that the "suspension of acceptance privileges for Pornhub and other MindGeek content sharing platforms that host user-generated content remains in effect pending the completion of our ongoing investigation". The spokesperson added that they will "reinstate acceptance privileges for MindGeek sites that offer professionally produced adult studio content that is subject to requirements designed to ensure compliance with the law."
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Nicholas Kristof
Nicholas Kristof has yet to face any professional consequences for his role in advancing the Somaly Mam Foundation, the anti–sex trafficking organization that, thanks to him, was able to launder allegedly invented sex slave stories through the paper of record.
Kristof, meanwhile, became the mainstream writer most responsible for establishing the terms of the sex trafficking debate for liberals and conservatives alike. Now he has pivoted from websites like Backpage, which sex workers once relied on for advertising and which was later shuttered by federal law enforcement, to websites like Pornhub. Poised to get the Kristof bump this time is a campaign run by a religious right organization, Exodus Cry, founded by a member of a Christian dominionist ministry, which has advanced anti-gay, anti-abortion, and antisemitic views.
Kristof’s Pornhub story, which took up the full front page of the Times Sunday Review section, relies on the tropes that have defined his career. He gives graphic, detailed descriptions of “recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls” and their associated search terms. Then, in a passing mention, he introduces the work of Exodus Cry—though he omits the group’s name. “An organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down,” Kristof notes. Kristof’s story now sits at the top of the campaign’s site, boasting an “as seen in” featuring the paper’s iconic masthead.
“This is a war with big porn,” Mickelwait states unequivocally in a November post on her influencer-chic Instagram account. Mickelwait’s current job title is director of abolition at Exodus Cry, “a faith-based organization modeled on the character of Jesus, as the group describes itself, which “fights sexual exploitation and the sex industry” and is the home of the Traffickinghub campaign. Exodus Cry uses “abolition” in the sense used by anti–sex work groups, meaning the abolition of the sex trade, including prostitution and porn, by means of the criminal law. If Mickelwait and her group were not working toward the wholesale eradication of a workforce, that workforce might be allies in the “war” to end the publication of sexual abuse material. But that’s not what the Traffickinghub campaign is about.
“In my work with Exodus Cry, I am daily confronted with the horrors of a world ravaged by the degradation of women and children,” writes the group’s founder Benjamin Nolot, in the foreword to a book called Babylon: The Resurgence of History’s Most Infamous City, published in 2009 by the evangelical ministry International House of Prayer Kansas City, or IHOPKC. “An unprecedented movement of slavery and sexual exploitation is rising in the vacuum of moral decay. As we examine the emergence of Babylon throughout history, it becomes clear that we must see the increase of human trafficking as the tip of a much larger historic iceberg.” For Nolot, human trafficking is a sign of the end times, “one of several troubling trends that will converge in the birth of the next world empire: harlot Babylon.” To fight those who aid and abet trafficking—as Exodus Cry claims that Pornhub does—is to wage holy war.
There is no question that Pornhub sits at the crux of two bad ideas: a race-to-the-bottom gig economy and a tech-determinist business model that values stickiness and seamlessness over content moderation. But the abuses that all this enables are not signs of the end times; to confront them with a religious crusade is not only useless but dangerous. Pornhub can continue business as usual so long as it can say its loudest critics are just pissed-off fundamentalists. Stuck in the predictable pushback to anti-porn “puritans,” the possibilities for challenging Pornhub’s business model—and the working conditions and the exploitation it enables—could be lost.
Kristof is exactly the kind of gatekeeper a group like Exodus Cry—seeking to establish its credentials, elevate its name, and attract liberals to its cause—wants on its side. His track record of using traumatic stories to draw readers in is a perfect fit. So, too, is his ability to sound authoritative to policymakers while also skirting any kind of historical or systemic context that might point the finger back at them. What made Kristof the perfect pitchman for the tent revival wing of the sex trafficking movement is now turned toward its new cause: porn.
Over the last two decades, as the anti-porn groups of the 1980s and 1990s proved to have failed, and as the Christian right sought to appeal to a younger generation, many such organizations have sought to redefine their sexual purity mission as one of social justice. Morality in the Media, an anti-porn group founded in the 1960s, has rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. It is among the religious right groups that have added sex trafficking to their more traditional agendas targeting abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Some of these groups, like Shared Hope International, were founded by former lawmakers with explicit religious right agendas and now operate as national think tanks advising anti-trafficking policy. Other national groups, like Operation Underground Railroad, bill themselves as “modern-day abolitionists” and have strong ties with religious communities (in its case, with Mormons) and, recently, have gained support from QAnon, including one QAnon-linked congressional representative. There are smaller groups in this same space, like Sold No More, founded by an evangelical activist who previously supported crisis pregnancy centers and fought for abstinence-only sex education. These groups have been successful at building coalitions with liberals and progressives, passing anti-trafficking laws and policies that largely ignore labor abuses and instead target the sex industry. Kristof has been an effective message-amplifier for their model, which values the ideology of eradicating sex work over the lives of sex workers and so rejects worker-led organizing, along with public health and harm-reduction approaches to addressing labor and sexual abuse. Kristof encapsulated this well in 2007: “The hope had been that by cooperating with … a union of prostitutes, it would be possible to reduce forced prostitution and the spread of AIDS by encouraging harm reduction strategies such as condom usage. But in reality, I wrote, it didn’t seem to have helped much in Calcutta. In Bombay, on the other hand, a tougher approach had dramatically reduced the number of brothels there.” When these same anti–sex work groups also tried to make the website Backpage culpable for alleged sex trafficking ads, he was there again. Kristof, in 2012: “When Baby Face ran away from her pimp and desperately knocked on that apartment door in Brooklyn, she was also in effect pounding on the door of the executive suites of Backpage”.
As a result of their years spent building influence, “fighting trafficking” as defined by these groups has also led to policies to defund AIDS programs that worked with sex workers and instead support programs mandating abstinence over condoms. Catholic groups used fighting trafficking to block funding to anti-trafficking programs that offered referrals for birth control and abortion. Women’s rights groups teamed up with religious right groups to shut down Craigslist’s and Backpage’s ads for sex work. All this was accomplished by religious right groups marketing themselves as anti-trafficking groups who were invested in protecting women and children from abuse. Meanwhile, their approach led to police abuse of sex workers under the guise of anti-trafficking raids and “rescues,” while also dismantling sex workers’ efforts to work independently and protect themselves. This isn’t fighting human trafficking: In some senses, it has increased the likelihood of exploitation and violence.
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This much detail ought to give you an idea that this broadside assault on Pornhub is coming in from groups that you might not readily connect right away...that is, this is something beyond and much deeper than simply the payment processors shuttering their services to Pornhub.
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