Description
– Discuss about this topic “Should Pornography be Legally Restricted?Discuss
– 500 words in length
– follow the example attached
Pornography is an industry, and all industries need to have regulations in place. However, the current attempts to restrict Pornography hurts the creators the most rather than target the abusers of Pornography. The explicit nature of Pornography as a genre makes it more difficult to control how and what type of content is being distributed. Pornography is an inherently sensitive topic and has had to come a long way to be established as a legitimate business.
This topic has come to the forefront recently due to several major companies taking it upon themselves to place regulations and pressuring the porn industry to abide by their terms. For example, VISA, MasterCard, and Discover banned using their cards on PornHub (a major distributor of professional and amateur porn). This was due to alleged claims of unlawful content on their site. This amount of pressure forced Pornhub to remove content uploaded from any unverified sources, which was a considerable amount of content. Just recently, on 19 August 2021, Onlyfans, a website that houses more than 130 million users has announced that they will ban all adult content on 1 October 2021. The company that runs the website did this to comply with their financial partners’ terms. The porn industry falls under the entertainment business, and like most businesses, it falls under the first amendment. Attempting to cut off any means of cash flow could possible make the financial companies liable for infringement. In the case of Perfect 10 vs. Visa International, the subscription-based website for adult photographs sued the credit card company Visa for holding knowledge that other websites containing the infringing photos owned by Perfect 10. The case was then dismissed as they argued that “that credit card company represented an essential part of the infringing transaction. If consumers were unable to use Visa to buy the infringing photos, the infringement would cease.”
Perfect 10 Vs. Visa has demonstrated that many of these companies care little about the content but rather care more about the money than filtering their content. Regulations need to be made in place so that certain types of Pornography, such as obscenity (Revenge Porn) and child Pornography, should never come to rise. Besides looking for these industries to take the initiative in handling these issues, federal laws should be in place to criminalize any content with non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). States have laws that help regulate website usage to minors, but it doesn’t stop someone from using a program like a Virtual Private Network to access it from a different state or country where there are fewer restrictions. Not only would federal laws have small agencies and or organizations crackdown on NCII. Perverted Justice is a notable organization for carrying out sting operations by posing as children on adult websites and reporting NCII activity on the dark web. Their stings have been well known with a Dateline segment called “To Catch a Predator with Chris Hansen.”
Overall, these companies should be more accountable in moderating what is being put on their websites while at the same time ensuring that creators can produce the “appropriate” content. If a porn site can handle the amount of child porn and other NCII that is popping up in their website, then the restrictions and taking the money away from the industry is justified
Work cited
https://www.wired.com/2007/11/perverted-justi/
https://ilt.eff.org/Perfect_10_v.html
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqjjy/pornhub-suspended-all-unverified-videos-content
https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/ncii-legislation-limitations
