OnlyFans to Ban Sexual Content In October

[PigBoyDallas]

Damn…now I have to get a job

[ErosWired]

Every Roman soldier knew how this works—if you take Caesar’s coin, you do Caesar’s bidding. Any company that is beholden to another financial, or power, interest has already forfeited part of its decision-making autonomy as a cost of doing business in that way. A company isn’t obliged to follow someone else’s rules that aren’t the Law of the Land - but if they don’t they can’t expect to benefit from a business relationship.

Remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

[Sfmike64]

The problem isn’t banks that issue credit cards, it’s the VISA and Mastercard NETWORKS which process transactions. Those are huge corporations in their own right. They find money delicious and porn distasteful, so they pretend that people don’t pay billions for porn every year.  It’s rank hypocrisy, and OnlyFans thinks they can survive without it.

 

Of course that’s a delusion. 

[BootmanLA]

6 hours ago, Sfmike64 said:

The problem isn’t banks that issue credit cards, it’s the VISA and Mastercard NETWORKS which process transactions. Those are huge corporations in their own right. They find money delicious and porn distasteful, so they pretend that people don’t pay billions for porn every year.  It’s rank hypocrisy, and OnlyFans thinks they can survive without it.

 

Of course that’s a delusion. 

I don't think it's quite that simple.

MC, Visa, etc. (the associations/networks) make millions or billions from adult online sites (everything from videos to dildos to slings to... whatever). They'll never back away entirely from handling charges related to adult content and merchandise - it would be too costly.

As noted, there *is* a growing perception of a problem with non-consensual porn, actual obscenity (as opposed to ordinary pornography), human trafficking to produce porn via prostitution, and other actually shady activities. I'm not going to venture a guess as to whether those activities constitute 0.0005% of "adult" transactions, or 75%; the bottom line is that it doesn't take much of a scandal involving one of them to financially destroy a legitimate business associated with them. That would include amateur video posting sites where "revenge porn" ends up, child porn, bestiality, etc.

How *sincere* opponents of those activities are is also irrelevant, for the real-world consequences. It may be true that "Mothers Against Revenge Porn" are actually against every form of porn under the sun, but it's still impossible to defend a site that allows revenge porn to be posted without engaging in a reasonable amount of diligence in making sure all the "performers" in the porn are fully consenting.

And the card networks understand: if they're targeted for facilitating that kind of commercial transaction, it's going to cost them massive amounts of unrelated business. So they're cracking down - as noted, they're not ruling out processing cards for porn online, but the places that supply it will have to adhere to stricter rules about documenting consent by performers, the way they already have to for age. And that's going to hit the amateur sites the hardest, because the video that John and Tom shot of themselves (and friends) while fucking at P-town or PigWeek is the least likely to have that kind of record keeping.

[ErosWired]

8 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

they're not ruling out processing cards for porn online, but the places that supply it will have to adhere to stricter rules about documenting consent by performers, the way they already have to for age. And that's going to hit the amateur sites the hardest, because the video that John and Tom shot of themselves (and friends) while fucking at P-town or PigWeek is the least likely to have that kind of record keeping.

This is where I think the fundamental discontinuity lies in this whole approach to the issue: Those mandating strict requirements for identification of the performers in depictions of sexual activity entirely overlook the fact that the great majority of the people who had been contributing to the mass of uploaded amateur porn are not in any way professional performers - they’re simply exhibitionists. And instead of running about in trenchcoats flashing people on the street, they found an outlet to share that aspect of their personal lives where it would (to a greater or lesser degree) be appreciated.

Yes, some naturally sought to monetize the opportunity, but the reality is that you couldn’t just throw up two or three or five x-rated clips of yourself in flagrante delicto and expect to make any money - you couldn’t even expect to be noticed. It was like pissing into the Atlantic during a hurricane. So how did those who made money at it do so? They became businesslike about it - i.e., to some degree, professional.

The steps these platforms must now take to ensure that they never again allow a single frame of video of illegal sexual congress pass their screens will do the following:

1. Place a burden of reporting and record-keeping upon both the platforms and the content producers so weighty that it will place the activity beyond the practical reach of amateurs;

2. Force every person who gives thought to displaying him- or herself in a sexual position to do so under the risk of having his or her full identifying information made public in the event of a data breach, and placed under the scrutiny of their neighbors whether they did anything illegal or not; and

3. Absolutely nothing to prevent a pedophile from preying upon a child. They confuse the video evidence of the abhorrent act with the act itself, and imagine that preventing distribution of a video will prevent the action the video documented; this is delusional. The only way to stop such monsters is to hunt them down, one by one, until they are all destroyed.

But the credit card companies aren’t actually concerned about correcting any social ill in the first place - this is all because someone, somewhere, tallied up how much it would cost them if they got sued. Perhaps someone with an agenda even already threatened to do so - who knows?

So this absurd dance will go on a while, a noisy pirouette going pointlessly round and round, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

[Guest]

As of reports this morning 08/25/21, in the mainstream news sources, OnlyFans has back-tracked on it's policy changes and all is safe for the time being and are going to continue with things as they were before.

[BootmanLA]

19 hours ago, ErosWired said:

 the great majority of the people who had been contributing to the mass of uploaded amateur porn are not in any way professional performers - they’re simply exhibitionists.

That's true. But it's the minority, the other people, who have to be considered as well. Specifically, those who didn't consent to be filmed in the first place, or even if they did, with the understanding it was for no one else's eyes. Sometimes those were lies (by the recording party) from the start; other times, after a bitter breakup, the recording party violates the conditions of the limited consent given.

19 hours ago, ErosWired said:

They confuse the video evidence of the abhorrent act with the act itself, and imagine that preventing distribution of a video will prevent the action the video documented; this is delusional. The only way to stop such monsters is to hunt them down, one by one, until they are all destroyed.

There's a hole here, too, as the courts have acknowledged: distribution - even downloading - of child porn contributes to the problem too, because as long as the demand is there, and there's a mechanism to supply it, the supply will be found. I'm not sure I agree with the anti-child porn activists' claims that "every time that image/video is downloaded/viewed, the child is re-victimized" (I'd say the victimization is pretty complete as soon as the act(s) are done), but as long as people keep distributing the videos, there will be demand for people to make more. I'm not sure how best to stop this, but the idea that you can hunt all of them down - that they aren't going to keep popping up to meet the demand - strikes me as naive. 

[ErosWired]

5 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

the idea that you can hunt all of them down - that they aren't going to keep popping up to meet the demand - strikes me as naive. 

Oh, by no means do I believe that they’re all going to be hunted down - I’m just pretty certain that’s the only way we’d ever see the end of them. The difficulty I see with the argument about the distribution of child pornography contributing to the problem is that it supposes that the problem can be solved by eliminating a mechanism of supply. But this is akin to saying they’ll stamp out gluttony by shutting down the grocery - the root of the problem lies in the pathological appetites of specific individuals, and those appetites are not going to become any less keen if this or that mechanism they employ to supply those appetites is shut off. They’ll simply shift to, or create, another mechanism of supply.

Similarly, the approach here does not, I think, effectively address the quite real problem of depictions of persons without their consent. The current approach is so heavy-handed, monolithic, and angled toward professional production that it fails to contemplate the basic human phenomenon driving all of this - the collision of human sexuality and a new world of tech rapidly changing the rules about how we interact with each other.

Just because a person now has to submit photo ID of everyone shown in a video to upload it to a particular platform isn’t going to stop people from using their ubiquitous smartphone cameras to keep right on filming. They’ll find other ways to share them, because people are clever, and because not every platform is going to be beholden to the censors. And the censors can crack down, but just as Leia said, “The more you tighten your grip, the more they’ll slip through your fingers.”

I don’t think I’m being particularly naïve - if anything, I feel kind of cynical about it all.