There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.
Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea and if anything they have some of the worst gender toxicity.
The debate is weather or not credit card providers should ever be able to blackmail independent companies, for any reason they feel like.
I say no.
It's called regulations, not blackmail, and yest the government should, because it's accountable to its people, meanwhile CC companies are not. Everything all companies are allowed to to is regulated by the government. Companies only exist at the mercy of the government, otherwise angry mobs can break in and ransack the place.
> Do you really think the credit card companies care where you spend your money?
Obviously they do care, when you see their rulings on this matter they care very much(did you not read the articles before commenting?), otherwise they wouldn't be pushing censorship rules on sellers. Or more specific they care about activists complaining how CC companies let you spend your money.
> Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea
Making something legal or illegal is just signaling. The real part is how it actually is implemented in practice. And as you imply, things are pretty complex. We really need to be careful about our own tendencies to want things to be simple. It always backfires...
I hope with this added context that my previous comment will make much more sense and you can interpret it closer to what I intended.
I'll just add, I don't think most people work in those absolutes. So I'd be wary of jumping to the extreme interpretation. People might interpret you as being disingenuous and using the logical fallacy "logical extreme" or "reductio ad absurdum". But I'm pretty sure you're not doing that because then I'd be grossly misinterpreting you, right?
* It models unrealistic and possibly unhealthy notions about sexuality
* It can be exploitive of its subjects (yes, sometimes empowering too)
I believe that "free speech" is critical to a well functioning society, but we need to recognize that it can have negative impacts. A key example is the right-wing Hate Industrial Complex: decades of right wing propaganda have conditioned tens of millions of Americans to consider their fellow citizens as non human.
I don't have an answer for how to address this, but you can't fix a problem until you recognize the problem and that it needs fixing.
Sounds great, where do I sign?
Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.
If we are to talk about exploitation, then capitalism itself is subject to be attacked and prohibited.
If we work for a living, we sell our bodies to someone else for a time (40h a week or more). Does it really matter if we work on a factory floor doing parts, sitting and coding at a desk, or having sex in front of a camera? Labor is labor.
Sure its the christian 'sex is bad' in various stripes (puritanical to catholic to baptist etc). But in reality, its just different labor.
Now, capitalism in exploitive in that you generate X value, and you get a small percentage of your labor's output. Some owner is who collects the surplus.
So if exploitation is the problem, then its time to start looking at worker cooperatives, unions, banning shows like Shark Tank, and all the capitalist propaganda.
But no, its just 'sex icky'. We won't actually look at the root of exploitation.
The human experience has never been pure reason. A picture of a naked person will have wildly different effects than a picture of a dog, even though you could technically say they're both "just pixels on a screen". Reductionism doesn't get an argument anywhere; it's too commonly an intellectually lazy defense of the vulgar.
I prefer reductionist rather than the current standard of 'whatever 9 fucks think of it'.
This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.