June 28, 2022 • 38 mins
A billionaire hedge fund manager reads a scathing column about a popular porn site. He sends an angry text to the CEO of MasterCard. Almost overnight, the biggest porn company in the world changes dramatically.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. We are two journalists from the Financial Times. We've
spent six months following the money in porn. Our aim
has been to find out who rules the industry. In
this episode, we bring you our encounters with some of
the biggest financial companies in the world and some of
(00:35):
the most explicit discussions of sex in this series so far.
So please be aware this is definitely content for adults.
Previously on Hot Money, a secretive former banker bought mine geek,
a giant porn company whose flagship site was driven by
(00:56):
user generated videos. The law allowed mine geek to take
a hands off approach to moderation, largely avoiding legal liability
for the content that users posted to their site. That's
pretty much all the context you need for today's show.
When we started our investigation into the adult industry, we
(01:16):
thought online porn was basically unregulated, uncontrollable in a way,
just too big for any government to handle. But it
turned out we were wrong, well not entirely. We just
missed a real story. Remember STORYA the performer and author
(01:37):
in our first episode, I'm in lagerie and people tip
me and I take my broth or pull the cups
down and I jiggle my shoulders while saying thank you.
Though I get my period and then I have cramps,
and then I really don't want to be vigorously jiggling,
(01:58):
but I also want people to know, like, don't tip
me and be disappointed. We are not doing vigorous behavior tonight.
And you know, it would be nice to be able
to say, because I have my period, but I cannot
because it is a band word. A band word. What
(02:20):
Stayer is describing here is live video work, and it
does sound fantastically absurd. Jiggling naked breasts for money no problem.
Typing the word period in the chat box absolutely forbidden.
But why what stopped Stawyer from being able to type
(02:41):
the word period into a chat box? Who or what
was on the other end of that rule. The answer
to that question took us to a place we never expected.
In this series, so far, we've told you about the
secretive owners of big porn companies like mine Geek, how
they thrived in large part because of the taboos around porn.
(03:05):
It gave them the cover to hide from scrutiny and accountability.
But around two years ago, Mine Geek faced a reckoning.
It was brutal, It was public, and it revealed a
whole lot of things about power and control in the
porn industry. One day in December twenty twenty, mine Geek
(03:26):
went from being the most powerful company in porn to
a business cowering under pressure on the brink of collapse.
In this episode, we're going to tell you how all
of that happened, the chain of events that forced mine
(03:47):
Geek to take the majority of its pawn offline. Mine Geek,
just like Stayer, had to bow to one of the
most powerful finance companies in the world. I'm Patrician Nelson
and I'm Alex Barker and from Pushkin Industries and the
Financial Times. This is Hot Money Act one. Mister persistence.
(04:46):
I think we're known to be a good investor. We're
known for not being shy, willing to kind of share
our views. I've been called the most persistent person in America.
I take as a compliment. That's Bill Lackman. He's a
big name in the land of the Financial Times, and
not just because he's a billionaire. He runs an investment
(05:08):
firm called Pershing Square, and it's one of those firms
that everybody knows about on Wall Street. Bill is not
an investor in Pawn. On the contrary, during the pandemic,
Bill pulled off one of the most insanely successful trades
in the history of modern financial markets. He turned a
twenty seven million dollar bet into roughly a two point
(05:31):
six billion dollar windfall. Yeah, as around a hundred times
the money within a few weeks. Not bad. It doesn't
always go that well. He does sometimes lose two in
an almost as spectacular of fashion. Anyway. Bill first made
his name as an activist investor. He didn't just buy
(05:51):
shares in a company. He bought big stakes and then
told chief executives what to do, and occasionally he even
tried to kick them out. So when he shouts, people listen.
What made him agree to talk to us about pawn
of all things? Good? Question? His communications person asked him
(06:13):
the same thing, said, Bill, do you want to do
this be interviewed by the ft or whatever people just
think reputationally. I don't want to have anything to do
with I don't want my name and the word porn
in the same paragraph or story. And the problem with
that is it a lot of bad things can happen
in the underground, and those bad things he saw them
(06:38):
in December twenty twenty, when The New York Times published
a powerful column by Nicholas Kristoff. It was titled The
Children of Pornhub. Bill was sitting at home scrolling on
Twitter when a story popped up. This Christoph article about
porn Hub I found very challenging to read and depressing
(06:59):
and also made me angry. Bill has four daughters, and
the appalling accounts of exploitation hidd a nerve Christoph basically
pulled pawn Hubb apart. He alleged the free pawn sign
was infested with rape videos, and through talking to victims,
he depicted it as a business that monetized spy cams,
(07:21):
revenge pawn, and other horrid stuff. Recent allegations claimed porn
Hub maybe profiting from footage of sexual assault, revenge porn,
and sex tapes obtained without consent from those embarked accused
of hosting sexual assault footage as well as child sexual
abuse material, doing little to guard against and remove such content.
(07:43):
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also took notice, saying his
government was working with police and security officials to address
the issues raised in the New York Times column. Everyone
in pawn just refers to it as the Christophe piece.
It was part investigation, part opinion column, and hugely contentious
in the industry. Even people who hate pawn Hub saw
(08:05):
it as part of a broader war on pawn mine
geek executives. The owners of porn Hub denied wrongdoing, insisting
they took a zero tolerance approach to illegal content. Pornhub
told us that they now have more comprehensive safeguards than
most social media platforms. Now, we're not going to get
(08:27):
into the details of the piece or who was right
or wrong. We looked at the impact instead. There's no
argument over that, partly because of Bill Atman. You can
destroy a fifteen year old and get them to commit
suicide by just having her boyfriend share a video she
(08:48):
didn't want to see, an embarrasser in front of everyone.
People kill themselves over the kids do and the notion
that people are profiting from this. You know that got me. Now.
Bill is no prude. He's not a posed to pornography.
He's a free speech advocate. But he was so moved
(09:09):
by the stories in the article that he decided to
do something. I thought this is important and the problem
with the topic of pornography is. People don't want to
acknowledge of every even viewed pornography, perhaps, and so it's
just easier to just let it pass. Bill made his
name in the business of corporate influence. His whole stick
(09:30):
was forcing companies to do things they don't want to do,
and he comes armed with the deep contact book he'd
expect of an American billionaire. He's also a finance guy,
so when he read the New York Times piece, he
didn't just get angry and think what can I say
to make politicians do something? He thought about the way
to kick a company where it hurts payments. He knew
(09:57):
that vis unmaster card are the rails that any digital
business depends on to sell online. While so much online
porn is free, big porn companies rely on premium sites.
They either own them or sell ads for them. They
do need people to pay for porn, and how do
they do that again credit cards without payment processing. These
(10:23):
aren't just porn companies. They are failing porn companies. But
he also realized there are good reasons why the payments
industry sticks with high risk sectors like porn. The more
dice into transaction, the higher the scrape, meaning the fees
are higher and so the profit margins are better. There
was no guarantee he could get the big payment networks
(10:46):
to do anything, so he went full actman. He didn't
bother with a polite campaign or letters or whatever. He
just picked up his phone and messaged Aja Banger. Now
Banger was the chief executive of master Card at the time.
You both you're packing for tennis, and I've met him
(11:07):
and made a couple of big tennis tape and it
texts this to them, and I said, a please read
the above piece. MasterCard is facilitating sex trafficking. PayPal is
already withdrawn payment processing from Pornhoub. MasterCard does not want
to be the last company to do so. Please call
and discuss if you disagree, Banger replied immediately. High Bill
(11:27):
just saw this, he wrote, before effectively laying down the law.
If the allegations were proven, Banger wrote, Pornhub would be
blocked from using MasterCard mine Geek's top site would be
partly cut off from the payments world to his credit.
MasterCard very very quickly got on top of this and
(11:48):
came up with some pretty strong principles. MasterCard acted after
its investigation found unlawful content. It banned the use of
its credit cards on Pornhub's premium site. Visa followed by
suspending not just Pornhub but all of mine geek sites.
It basically cut off the use of its credit cards
(12:09):
on premium websites that generate about half of mine Geek's
revenue subscriptions that are paid for by credit cards. We
reached out to Visa, unmaster Card, and both the kind
to be interviewed. The company stressed that their priorities are
to support commerce and illegal activity, but it is fair
(12:32):
to say these payment networks hardly ever remove a company
from their systems. It's a devastating move and the consequences
were immediate. You might be wondering why free porn sites
would crumble because Visa or MasterCard stop them accepting credit cards.
(12:52):
On the face of it, Tube sites are mostly ad funded,
but they are indirectly tied to bank rules. There are
a few reasons for that. They run subscription tiers like
pawn Hub Premium. Some advertisers use credit cards to pay
the Tube sites, and a lot of the Tube site
ad money comes from pay sites that are covered by
(13:16):
Visa and MasterCard. Rules, and for that reason. An industry
insider told us that some of pawn hubs advertisers got
cold feet about spending money with them. The result was
that pawn hubs cash flow dried up overnight. That triggered
all sorts of other problems. Just imagine the conversation with
(13:39):
long term subscribers. You know that pawn company you signed
up to a few years ago, Well, we'd really like
you to subscribe again. You just need to go through
all the hassle once more, but this time, please use
bitcoin or some other complex banking process instead of your
credit card. The MasterCard move, which was then followed by Visa,
(14:03):
was genuinely a watershed moment for the adult industry. Bill's
intervention wasn't the only reason it happened, but with that text,
it's not hard to imagine he helped tip the balance.
The suspension happened very quickly, and within a couple of
weeks they announced a bunch of policies. Was really quick
and impressive. A few days after all of this, something
(14:24):
else huge happened to mine geek, the parent company of Pornhub.
Its lenders served at the notice of default a warning
that mine Geek wasn't meeting the conditions of its loan.
This hasn't been reported before. We heard about it from
a different billionaire who was approached to buy the company,
and it is confirmed and a footnote buried in mine
(14:45):
Geek's latest accounts. The company was running short of cash,
its lenders weren't happy. It was on a brink of collapse.
At the same time, MasterCard was reviewing its policies for
the whole pawn industry, including what permissions you needed to
upload any explicit video onto a site that uses credit cards,
(15:06):
basically all those amateur uploads that helped tube sites dominate
the pawn industry. The pressures on myne geek were building.
It had to do something, and just like that, pawn
Hub went from thirteen million videos down to four million.
You probably were a catalyst for one of the biggest
(15:29):
takedowns of media content off the web in the history
of the Internet. When a nine million videos ever been
taken down overnight, it's pretty extraordinary. Do you remember that
moment and how did you feel? I felt good about it.
It's not good. People want to make their livelihood the
way they make their livelihood. It's their life, their body,
their choice. I'm okay with it. As long as you
(15:52):
know they're a consenting adult, It's fine. It was pretty
interesting talking to Bill about the adult business. His game
is taking the measure of a company, its strength and
its weaknesses, and here he was sizing up pawn. It
isn't a huge industry compared with the larger world of
online entertainment. At its peak, mine Geek made around four
(16:16):
hundred and fifty million dollars a year in revenue. Just
for perspective, Netflix generates more than four hundred and fifty
million during an average week. But online pawn can be
highly profitable, and those profits have drawn in Wall Street
over the years, as we've discovered in this series. To
(16:37):
Bill Ackman, the amazing thing is not that pawn has
access to finance. It's that Wall Street types got into
bed with companies like mine geek while averting your eyes
from potential problems, and when things went wrong, it was
left to payment companies to marp up the mess. It
should be regulated by state actors, you would think, right,
(17:02):
But my experience waiting around for the government to act
to clean up is painfully slow acratic. There are tens
of millions of sex videos online hosted in dozens of countries.
Unless we all take a Chinese approach to censorship, no
government can really police who watches it or control what
(17:24):
is made. So the nearest thing to setting global rules
for porn would come from mastercardam Visa, because without MasterCard
and Visa there just isn't much point in making porn
because no one can buy it. I think there should
be the factor of regulating these companies. Right, They're not
going to let you use a credit card to pay
(17:45):
for a hit on someone, right, That I'm sure is
against their principles. Right. So once you decide that you're
going to decide what people can spend their money on
and what they can charge the master card for or
the Visa card, who should focus? Then they have to
be the factor regulators or what's permissible content and what's not.
There was one more important thing that Bill didn't realize.
(18:09):
He texted the head of MasterCard he wanted MasterCard to
act like a regulator for pawn. But after we dug
into this, we found payment companies were already involved in
setting the rules for this industry. They don't like admitting
to this role, but banks and payment companies do have
a real say in what kind of pawn gets made
(18:31):
and sold online act too the list. Some of you
may have heard about the Haze Code back in the
nineteen thirties, in the early days of Hollywood. The Haze
Code set the standards for what you could and couldn't
(18:54):
depict on screen. No lustful kissing, no nudity, no interracial relationships,
no perversion whatever that meant. It was all self policed
by the industry and amazingly held in place well into
the nineteen sixties. It all sounds so strange today, like
(19:15):
something from a bygone age, and what has this got
to do with online pawn. Well, when we saw the
power of Visa and MasterCard had over mind geek, we
wanted to understand how they could bring the world's biggest
adult company to its knees. What we discovered is that
(19:36):
the world of porn might just have its own version
of the Haze Code. There's a really curious system of
rules rules on porn contents, not enforced by porn producers,
but financial gatekeepers the payments world, a world ultimately overseen
by Visa and MasterCard. We realized this sounds odd, it
(19:57):
is odd, and it raised more questions than answers. I
remember the moment the door to this world was open
for me. I was just chatting with an executive in
the industry and she mentioned these lists basically dos and
don't for pawn production. So I asked her to dig
one up and she shared a document of best practices,
(20:20):
all compiled by a company called Mobius Pay. Now. Mobius
is a payment processing company. If you're a business that
wants to take credit cards, you need a bank to
sponsor you a merchant account. Mobius helps to sort that out.
It acts as a bridge between high risk businesses like cannabis,
(20:41):
pawn or gambling and banks in the visa and MasterCard system.
John Corona is Mobius Pay's chief operating officer, and he
put together that one page primer of things to avoid.
We asked him to read a sample of problematic words twink, nymphet,
any racial slur or symbol, and team. You know these
(21:05):
specific words tend to create problems. Problems with two where
the visa and master card, the acquiring bank, and if
it goes far enough, ultimately law enforcement. When you sit
down to create this list, you know what you based
at on the list, and the words are in the
(21:30):
interest of protecting the Visa and master Card brand reputation.
This was a lot for us to get our head around.
The more we ask people about these pawn lists, the
more we realize they are almost talmudic in nature. Visa
and MasterCard are at the center of this credit card world.
(21:51):
They sit down some broad guidelines on material that might
be legal, but just as in't kosher, stuff that doesn't
fit with their brand and the banks some payment processors,
like John at Mobia's they are expected to flesh that out. Now,
they don't have much to work on, not even ten
commandments they get about five. MasterCard sums it up in
(22:14):
just one short paragraph. They are against the sale of
an image or service that is patently offensive or lacks
serious artistic value. They ban videos involving miners, animals, mutilation,
or non consensual behavior. Now that all sounds reasonable, but
just to make sure they are never wrong, MasterCard also
(22:36):
says they ban any other material that master Card might
find unacceptable in the future. Genius people like John they
need to make fine distinctions on what Visa MasterCard allow
and don't allow. Write down to a twink, which means
a slim, young looking gay man, do you have conversations
(22:58):
with Visan master Card? Do you? I mean, do you
have sit down with them or talk to them on
the phone. I were saying what you think about Twink? Oh? Absolutely, Yeah,
someone complains to the card brands. They take it very
seriously and they will review your content and if they
find something they disagree with, they could terminate your account
(23:19):
effective immediately. Could you call it a type of self
censorship in the porn industry then, I mean you have
performers who are not doing certain things, not showing certain
things because you know someone might cut them off. Correct. Yeah,
it's a self censorship and self policing. Ultimately, it's if
(23:42):
you want to accept the sound master Card, then you
have to follow their rules. John explained that Visa and
MasterCard have had rules on what pawn can and can't
be sold online for more than a decade. It's just
that since the Christophe piece, they are all much more
active in policing them. John says MasterCard has entire teams
(24:04):
devoted to this, conducting investigations and reviews. Other tech companies
are also hired to cruel websites looking for content that
breaks the rules. And here's the thing, that really blew
our mind. The lists evolve and the guidance evolves. New
words or phrases are banned all the time or unbanned,
(24:27):
like so called golden showers, you know, being it was
off limits for a lot of banks and payment processors.
Then suddenly, around twenty sixteen it became kind of okay,
presumably because the term was in the news a lot
and somehow normalized. All of this implies that somewhere there
(24:51):
must be a decision maker, someone blesses these distinctions and
how they might change. They decide what is fine to
stream and what isn't. Now that is a relatively easy
distinction to make when something looks outright illegal. John actually
conducts his own checks, and we should warn you here.
(25:14):
We're about to hear how he has come across disturbing videos.
I started looking for prohibited tech content, and I searched
keywords within the website. He'll type in a word like
rape or underage or the countless variations of those themes.
I did come into a situation where it was kind
(25:37):
of disturbing content. I can't say it with certainty that
it was pedophilia, but what I did was I screenshot
at everything brought it to my first line supervisor, and
we both just file the report with the FBI. I
felt we had an ethical obligation to at least alert
(25:57):
someone in a position of authority to review what we
had seen. If John searches for a term like twink,
he might need to take several steps, For example, look
at ID documents from the performer to confirm that he's
over the legal age. Racial slur we don't allow it,
and I understand there are free speech concerns there, but
(26:22):
I would just tell them, hey, this word here, the
bank's not going to approve it. You need to change
it to something else. There are some areas where the
boundary is hard. As a drawl we're betting pool, like
hypnosis or sex while someone appears to be asleep. Of
course they're acting, they're not actually asleep, and no one's
actually getting hypnotized. But being asleep means that the person
(26:46):
sleeping does not have the ability to render consent, and
the thought of hypnotizing someone into doing what you want
them to do remove the ability to render consent, even
though it's all acting, it's all fiction. Those perceptions is
what makes it prohibited. John talks in a pretty matter
of fact way about the details of these lists, where
(27:07):
they draw a line and what they try to stop.
But it's actually a pretty huge deal. Mobia's, the company
that John works for, essentially acts as a standard regulator
for pornography, doing the work the governments aren't doing on
behalf of Visa and MasterCard. It amazed us that this
level of supervision exists at all, and even more so,
(27:30):
who does it. To see how much of an influence
these codes really had on porn production, we went back
to somebody we trust and what they told us, well,
it was a little graphic, but truly stunning. That's after
the break Act three, more power than the Pope. Yeah,
(27:55):
come on in, So thank you for letting us into
your home. It's great to see you in New York
in person. And the snow is here. Brooklyn is white.
We're in Story's apartment. This is where she told us
(28:16):
about that detail that got us going down this whole
path to begin with, that she can't type period in
a chat box on some pawn platforms. As a performer,
she's seen a lot of different business models, from pay
sites to camsites. To create a platforms like only fans
They all have different characteristics, but there was always one
(28:40):
common theme, one powerful constraint on what content could be
made and sold online. She remembers Visa and Mastercard's influence
coming up way back almost fifteen years ago, right from
the start of her career, when she was shooting for
a big pawn studio. I was on a porn set
for Digital Playground and someone had four fingers in me
(29:03):
and the director was like, watch the thumb. And I'm like, wait,
you can't put a thumb in and he was like no,
And I'm like, what if it's just a thumb And
he's like, just a thumb's fine, And I'm like, what
if it's four fingers and then another finger from the
other hand and he's like, that's fine, it's just the thumbs.
The thumbs make it fisting. And I was like, this
(29:25):
is so strange. It does sound strange. Now, this would
have been back into days when DVDs were being sold,
so the rules have evolved. But on stoy a set
payment companies, we're basically calling the shots somehow. MasterCard and
Visa are deciding this is high risk, right, this is porn,
(29:49):
so this is high risk. They're deciding this is this
kind of sexual act. This is acceptable, this is not acceptable.
So this is actually like an incredible amount of power,
more power than the Pope on this subject. Whoever, these
people are at MasterCard deciding when it comes to rules.
(30:09):
I likes to understand what she's dealing with very precisely.
So at one point she got in touch with the
payment company called cc Bill, which is one of the
biggest important What she wanted was the set of rules,
the detailed rules, the ones that precisely lay out the
limits of what they think MasterCard and Visa tolerate. And
(30:29):
so they shared it, all four pages of it. They
can literally tell you on these lists what you can't
make right over, Yeah, I mean all you could make it,
but you can't put it anywhere, which is akin to
banning it. And you know, some things should be banned, right,
(30:51):
Sexual depictions of miners that is bad. That it is
not okay. It is a problem. It should not be
allowed anywhere. Bestiality again, bad problems shouldn't be allowed in full.
It's a crazy document, totally bizarre in parts, the kind
of thing you might expect from lawyers. Said Lose at
(31:13):
the Fetish Convention with a mission to categorize every little kink.
The interesting part is the gray zone sexual activity that
is technically legal but in practice not tolerated. That's a
different kind of power in pawn. And what's so interesting
and so difficult to grasp is that there isn't just
(31:34):
one set of rules, but many these are. A master
Card don't seem to want to publish a detailed set
of rules themselves that would acknowledge that they're effectively the
biggest regulators of pawn, so instead they just issue deliberately
vague guidelines about what fits their brand. Banks and payment
processes and platforms then have to interpret for their own
(31:57):
customers what the limits of MasterCard and Visa might be.
It's like guessing the wishes of an all powerful king.
You only know you're wrong when you're punished. And like
all efforts to codify and regulate human behavior, the rules
can get weirdly precise. Where do you draw the line?
(32:20):
Like how many slaps before we consider it a spanking
instead of an ass slap? How many bursts of fluid
before we decide what we're seeing is not female ejaculation
(32:42):
is urine? I mean, you can laugh about some of this.
There is would you believe a code about furry costumes?
Two people in furrey costumes having sex, that's okay. But
if one of them is half man, half beast or
in human form, No, No, too close to beastiality. One
(33:02):
platform worried about bestiality band animals even straying into the shot.
How close can a cat be before it is considered
an inappropriate distance? Anyone who has lived with a cat
knows like filming, unless there is a room that you
(33:25):
can shut a cat in, filming anything without intrusion by
a house cat is very difficult. Then there was the
question of blood. These are a master card to clear violence, mutilation.
Those are not things they abide in pawn. But if
you break that down, things start to get complicated. What
(33:47):
about pawn stars dressed as vampires devouring ketchup blood? Is
that allowed? Well, try to find that online on the internet.
Vampire pawn with fake or real blood is like a
forbidden good. And of course not all blood comes from violence,
(34:08):
because they have a uterus. And I'm thirty five, and
I get my period somewhere between every twenty and thirty
one days, and so sometimes there is blood in my
vagina and you can see it in the vulva, and
(34:30):
that cannot be portrayed in a commercial sex video. And
I feel that menstruation is completely natural, and I also
use my vagina for work. Someone at Visa or MasterCard
(34:51):
finds this completely natural biological process to be unacceptable, And
then we're raising people who are becoming sexual in a
culture where menstruation is completely erased. Whoever is the arbiter
of what can be done with sexual media and sexual performance?
(35:16):
Like I have no idea who they are? Did they
take a philosophy class? Like are do they have a
degree in women's studies? When we set out to find
who rules online porn, we did not expect to be
confronted with such a thought experiment. A porn star wondering
(35:39):
who actually regulates the site of certain bodily functions. But
here we are, like a lot of credit card customers,
staring at the fine print and still confused. Do payment
companies control porn in a way? They have a huge influence?
(35:59):
But we sensed that wasn't the full story. For that
we needed to keep digging. We still wanted to figure
out how these payment companies actually use their power. Coming
(36:22):
up on Hot Money, We want to introduce you to
a man with the world's most popular pawn site, a
site with double the page views of porn Hub, running
out of a throwback Soviet block apartment building in Prague.
I mean they're still operating as if they were a
(36:44):
shadow company. It's one of the top ten websites in
the world. And when porn Hub took down nine million
videos because they upset Visa and MasterCard, this guy, well,
he still has nine million videos up. Hot Money is
(37:13):
a production of The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It
was written and reported by me Patricia Nilsen and me
Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.
Edith Russolo is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen
Shakerjie Amanda ka Wong is our engineer. Music composition by
(37:34):
Pascal Wise, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Kusado. Our executive
producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein. Special thanks to
Renee Kaplan and Ruler Kalov at The Financial Times and
Mia Lobel, lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton and Jacob
Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to similar Web for
(37:57):
providing our web traffic data. If you want more from
the FT, try our new app featuring eight essential stories
every weekday. Search FT Edit in the iPhone app store.
Your first month is free, and it's ninety nine cents
a month for six months after that.
Pushkin. We are two journalists from the Financial Times. We've
spent six months following the money in porn. Our aim
has been to find out who rules the industry. In
this episode, we bring you our encounters with some of
the biggest financial companies in the world and some of
(00:35):
the most explicit discussions of sex in this series so far.
So please be aware this is definitely content for adults.
Previously on Hot Money, a secretive former banker bought mine geek,
a giant porn company whose flagship site was driven by
(00:56):
user generated videos. The law allowed mine geek to take
a hands off approach to moderation, largely avoiding legal liability
for the content that users posted to their site. That's
pretty much all the context you need for today's show.
When we started our investigation into the adult industry, we
(01:16):
thought online porn was basically unregulated, uncontrollable in a way,
just too big for any government to handle. But it
turned out we were wrong, well not entirely. We just
missed a real story. Remember STORYA the performer and author
(01:37):
in our first episode, I'm in lagerie and people tip
me and I take my broth or pull the cups
down and I jiggle my shoulders while saying thank you.
Though I get my period and then I have cramps,
and then I really don't want to be vigorously jiggling,
(01:58):
but I also want people to know, like, don't tip
me and be disappointed. We are not doing vigorous behavior tonight.
And you know, it would be nice to be able
to say, because I have my period, but I cannot
because it is a band word. A band word. What
(02:20):
Stayer is describing here is live video work, and it
does sound fantastically absurd. Jiggling naked breasts for money no problem.
Typing the word period in the chat box absolutely forbidden.
But why what stopped Stawyer from being able to type
(02:41):
the word period into a chat box? Who or what
was on the other end of that rule. The answer
to that question took us to a place we never expected.
In this series, so far, we've told you about the
secretive owners of big porn companies like mine Geek, how
they thrived in large part because of the taboos around porn.
(03:05):
It gave them the cover to hide from scrutiny and accountability.
But around two years ago, Mine Geek faced a reckoning.
It was brutal, It was public, and it revealed a
whole lot of things about power and control in the
porn industry. One day in December twenty twenty, mine Geek
(03:26):
went from being the most powerful company in porn to
a business cowering under pressure on the brink of collapse.
In this episode, we're going to tell you how all
of that happened, the chain of events that forced mine
(03:47):
Geek to take the majority of its pawn offline. Mine Geek,
just like Stayer, had to bow to one of the
most powerful finance companies in the world. I'm Patrician Nelson
and I'm Alex Barker and from Pushkin Industries and the
Financial Times. This is Hot Money Act one. Mister persistence.
(04:46):
I think we're known to be a good investor. We're
known for not being shy, willing to kind of share
our views. I've been called the most persistent person in America.
I take as a compliment. That's Bill Lackman. He's a
big name in the land of the Financial Times, and
not just because he's a billionaire. He runs an investment
(05:08):
firm called Pershing Square, and it's one of those firms
that everybody knows about on Wall Street. Bill is not
an investor in Pawn. On the contrary, during the pandemic,
Bill pulled off one of the most insanely successful trades
in the history of modern financial markets. He turned a
twenty seven million dollar bet into roughly a two point
(05:31):
six billion dollar windfall. Yeah, as around a hundred times
the money within a few weeks. Not bad. It doesn't
always go that well. He does sometimes lose two in
an almost as spectacular of fashion. Anyway. Bill first made
his name as an activist investor. He didn't just buy
(05:51):
shares in a company. He bought big stakes and then
told chief executives what to do, and occasionally he even
tried to kick them out. So when he shouts, people listen.
What made him agree to talk to us about pawn
of all things? Good? Question? His communications person asked him
(06:13):
the same thing, said, Bill, do you want to do
this be interviewed by the ft or whatever people just
think reputationally. I don't want to have anything to do
with I don't want my name and the word porn
in the same paragraph or story. And the problem with
that is it a lot of bad things can happen
in the underground, and those bad things he saw them
(06:38):
in December twenty twenty, when The New York Times published
a powerful column by Nicholas Kristoff. It was titled The
Children of Pornhub. Bill was sitting at home scrolling on
Twitter when a story popped up. This Christoph article about
porn Hub I found very challenging to read and depressing
(06:59):
and also made me angry. Bill has four daughters, and
the appalling accounts of exploitation hidd a nerve Christoph basically
pulled pawn Hubb apart. He alleged the free pawn sign
was infested with rape videos, and through talking to victims,
he depicted it as a business that monetized spy cams,
(07:21):
revenge pawn, and other horrid stuff. Recent allegations claimed porn
Hub maybe profiting from footage of sexual assault, revenge porn,
and sex tapes obtained without consent from those embarked accused
of hosting sexual assault footage as well as child sexual
abuse material, doing little to guard against and remove such content.
(07:43):
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also took notice, saying his
government was working with police and security officials to address
the issues raised in the New York Times column. Everyone
in pawn just refers to it as the Christophe piece.
It was part investigation, part opinion column, and hugely contentious
in the industry. Even people who hate pawn Hub saw
(08:05):
it as part of a broader war on pawn mine
geek executives. The owners of porn Hub denied wrongdoing, insisting
they took a zero tolerance approach to illegal content. Pornhub
told us that they now have more comprehensive safeguards than
most social media platforms. Now, we're not going to get
(08:27):
into the details of the piece or who was right
or wrong. We looked at the impact instead. There's no
argument over that, partly because of Bill Atman. You can
destroy a fifteen year old and get them to commit
suicide by just having her boyfriend share a video she
(08:48):
didn't want to see, an embarrasser in front of everyone.
People kill themselves over the kids do and the notion
that people are profiting from this. You know that got me. Now.
Bill is no prude. He's not a posed to pornography.
He's a free speech advocate. But he was so moved
(09:09):
by the stories in the article that he decided to
do something. I thought this is important and the problem
with the topic of pornography is. People don't want to
acknowledge of every even viewed pornography, perhaps, and so it's
just easier to just let it pass. Bill made his
name in the business of corporate influence. His whole stick
(09:30):
was forcing companies to do things they don't want to do,
and he comes armed with the deep contact book he'd
expect of an American billionaire. He's also a finance guy,
so when he read the New York Times piece, he
didn't just get angry and think what can I say
to make politicians do something? He thought about the way
to kick a company where it hurts payments. He knew
(09:57):
that vis unmaster card are the rails that any digital
business depends on to sell online. While so much online
porn is free, big porn companies rely on premium sites.
They either own them or sell ads for them. They
do need people to pay for porn, and how do
they do that again credit cards without payment processing. These
(10:23):
aren't just porn companies. They are failing porn companies. But
he also realized there are good reasons why the payments
industry sticks with high risk sectors like porn. The more
dice into transaction, the higher the scrape, meaning the fees
are higher and so the profit margins are better. There
was no guarantee he could get the big payment networks
(10:46):
to do anything, so he went full actman. He didn't
bother with a polite campaign or letters or whatever. He
just picked up his phone and messaged Aja Banger. Now
Banger was the chief executive of master Card at the time.
You both you're packing for tennis, and I've met him
(11:07):
and made a couple of big tennis tape and it
texts this to them, and I said, a please read
the above piece. MasterCard is facilitating sex trafficking. PayPal is
already withdrawn payment processing from Pornhoub. MasterCard does not want
to be the last company to do so. Please call
and discuss if you disagree, Banger replied immediately. High Bill
(11:27):
just saw this, he wrote, before effectively laying down the law.
If the allegations were proven, Banger wrote, Pornhub would be
blocked from using MasterCard mine Geek's top site would be
partly cut off from the payments world to his credit.
MasterCard very very quickly got on top of this and
(11:48):
came up with some pretty strong principles. MasterCard acted after
its investigation found unlawful content. It banned the use of
its credit cards on Pornhub's premium site. Visa followed by
suspending not just Pornhub but all of mine geek sites.
It basically cut off the use of its credit cards
(12:09):
on premium websites that generate about half of mine Geek's
revenue subscriptions that are paid for by credit cards. We
reached out to Visa, unmaster Card, and both the kind
to be interviewed. The company stressed that their priorities are
to support commerce and illegal activity, but it is fair
(12:32):
to say these payment networks hardly ever remove a company
from their systems. It's a devastating move and the consequences
were immediate. You might be wondering why free porn sites
would crumble because Visa or MasterCard stop them accepting credit cards.
(12:52):
On the face of it, Tube sites are mostly ad funded,
but they are indirectly tied to bank rules. There are
a few reasons for that. They run subscription tiers like
pawn Hub Premium. Some advertisers use credit cards to pay
the Tube sites, and a lot of the Tube site
ad money comes from pay sites that are covered by
(13:16):
Visa and MasterCard. Rules, and for that reason. An industry
insider told us that some of pawn hubs advertisers got
cold feet about spending money with them. The result was
that pawn hubs cash flow dried up overnight. That triggered
all sorts of other problems. Just imagine the conversation with
(13:39):
long term subscribers. You know that pawn company you signed
up to a few years ago, Well, we'd really like
you to subscribe again. You just need to go through
all the hassle once more, but this time, please use
bitcoin or some other complex banking process instead of your
credit card. The MasterCard move, which was then followed by Visa,
(14:03):
was genuinely a watershed moment for the adult industry. Bill's
intervention wasn't the only reason it happened, but with that text,
it's not hard to imagine he helped tip the balance.
The suspension happened very quickly, and within a couple of
weeks they announced a bunch of policies. Was really quick
and impressive. A few days after all of this, something
(14:24):
else huge happened to mine geek, the parent company of Pornhub.
Its lenders served at the notice of default a warning
that mine Geek wasn't meeting the conditions of its loan.
This hasn't been reported before. We heard about it from
a different billionaire who was approached to buy the company,
and it is confirmed and a footnote buried in mine
(14:45):
Geek's latest accounts. The company was running short of cash,
its lenders weren't happy. It was on a brink of collapse.
At the same time, MasterCard was reviewing its policies for
the whole pawn industry, including what permissions you needed to
upload any explicit video onto a site that uses credit cards,
(15:06):
basically all those amateur uploads that helped tube sites dominate
the pawn industry. The pressures on myne geek were building.
It had to do something, and just like that, pawn
Hub went from thirteen million videos down to four million.
You probably were a catalyst for one of the biggest
(15:29):
takedowns of media content off the web in the history
of the Internet. When a nine million videos ever been
taken down overnight, it's pretty extraordinary. Do you remember that
moment and how did you feel? I felt good about it.
It's not good. People want to make their livelihood the
way they make their livelihood. It's their life, their body,
their choice. I'm okay with it. As long as you
(15:52):
know they're a consenting adult, It's fine. It was pretty
interesting talking to Bill about the adult business. His game
is taking the measure of a company, its strength and
its weaknesses, and here he was sizing up pawn. It
isn't a huge industry compared with the larger world of
online entertainment. At its peak, mine Geek made around four
(16:16):
hundred and fifty million dollars a year in revenue. Just
for perspective, Netflix generates more than four hundred and fifty
million during an average week. But online pawn can be
highly profitable, and those profits have drawn in Wall Street
over the years, as we've discovered in this series. To
(16:37):
Bill Ackman, the amazing thing is not that pawn has
access to finance. It's that Wall Street types got into
bed with companies like mine geek while averting your eyes
from potential problems, and when things went wrong, it was
left to payment companies to marp up the mess. It
should be regulated by state actors, you would think, right,
(17:02):
But my experience waiting around for the government to act
to clean up is painfully slow acratic. There are tens
of millions of sex videos online hosted in dozens of countries.
Unless we all take a Chinese approach to censorship, no
government can really police who watches it or control what
(17:24):
is made. So the nearest thing to setting global rules
for porn would come from mastercardam Visa, because without MasterCard
and Visa there just isn't much point in making porn
because no one can buy it. I think there should
be the factor of regulating these companies. Right, They're not
going to let you use a credit card to pay
(17:45):
for a hit on someone, right, That I'm sure is
against their principles. Right. So once you decide that you're
going to decide what people can spend their money on
and what they can charge the master card for or
the Visa card, who should focus? Then they have to
be the factor regulators or what's permissible content and what's not.
There was one more important thing that Bill didn't realize.
(18:09):
He texted the head of MasterCard he wanted MasterCard to
act like a regulator for pawn. But after we dug
into this, we found payment companies were already involved in
setting the rules for this industry. They don't like admitting
to this role, but banks and payment companies do have
a real say in what kind of pawn gets made
(18:31):
and sold online act too the list. Some of you
may have heard about the Haze Code back in the
nineteen thirties, in the early days of Hollywood. The Haze
Code set the standards for what you could and couldn't
(18:54):
depict on screen. No lustful kissing, no nudity, no interracial relationships,
no perversion whatever that meant. It was all self policed
by the industry and amazingly held in place well into
the nineteen sixties. It all sounds so strange today, like
(19:15):
something from a bygone age, and what has this got
to do with online pawn. Well, when we saw the
power of Visa and MasterCard had over mind geek, we
wanted to understand how they could bring the world's biggest
adult company to its knees. What we discovered is that
(19:36):
the world of porn might just have its own version
of the Haze Code. There's a really curious system of
rules rules on porn contents, not enforced by porn producers,
but financial gatekeepers the payments world, a world ultimately overseen
by Visa and MasterCard. We realized this sounds odd, it
(19:57):
is odd, and it raised more questions than answers. I
remember the moment the door to this world was open
for me. I was just chatting with an executive in
the industry and she mentioned these lists basically dos and
don't for pawn production. So I asked her to dig
one up and she shared a document of best practices,
(20:20):
all compiled by a company called Mobius Pay. Now. Mobius
is a payment processing company. If you're a business that
wants to take credit cards, you need a bank to
sponsor you a merchant account. Mobius helps to sort that out.
It acts as a bridge between high risk businesses like cannabis,
(20:41):
pawn or gambling and banks in the visa and MasterCard system.
John Corona is Mobius Pay's chief operating officer, and he
put together that one page primer of things to avoid.
We asked him to read a sample of problematic words twink, nymphet,
any racial slur or symbol, and team. You know these
(21:05):
specific words tend to create problems. Problems with two where
the visa and master card, the acquiring bank, and if
it goes far enough, ultimately law enforcement. When you sit
down to create this list, you know what you based
at on the list, and the words are in the
(21:30):
interest of protecting the Visa and master Card brand reputation.
This was a lot for us to get our head around.
The more we ask people about these pawn lists, the
more we realize they are almost talmudic in nature. Visa
and MasterCard are at the center of this credit card world.
(21:51):
They sit down some broad guidelines on material that might
be legal, but just as in't kosher, stuff that doesn't
fit with their brand and the banks some payment processors,
like John at Mobia's they are expected to flesh that out. Now,
they don't have much to work on, not even ten
commandments they get about five. MasterCard sums it up in
(22:14):
just one short paragraph. They are against the sale of
an image or service that is patently offensive or lacks
serious artistic value. They ban videos involving miners, animals, mutilation,
or non consensual behavior. Now that all sounds reasonable, but
just to make sure they are never wrong, MasterCard also
(22:36):
says they ban any other material that master Card might
find unacceptable in the future. Genius people like John they
need to make fine distinctions on what Visa MasterCard allow
and don't allow. Write down to a twink, which means
a slim, young looking gay man, do you have conversations
(22:58):
with Visan master Card? Do you? I mean, do you
have sit down with them or talk to them on
the phone. I were saying what you think about Twink? Oh? Absolutely, Yeah,
someone complains to the card brands. They take it very
seriously and they will review your content and if they
find something they disagree with, they could terminate your account
(23:19):
effective immediately. Could you call it a type of self
censorship in the porn industry then, I mean you have
performers who are not doing certain things, not showing certain
things because you know someone might cut them off. Correct. Yeah,
it's a self censorship and self policing. Ultimately, it's if
(23:42):
you want to accept the sound master Card, then you
have to follow their rules. John explained that Visa and
MasterCard have had rules on what pawn can and can't
be sold online for more than a decade. It's just
that since the Christophe piece, they are all much more
active in policing them. John says MasterCard has entire teams
(24:04):
devoted to this, conducting investigations and reviews. Other tech companies
are also hired to cruel websites looking for content that
breaks the rules. And here's the thing, that really blew
our mind. The lists evolve and the guidance evolves. New
words or phrases are banned all the time or unbanned,
(24:27):
like so called golden showers, you know, being it was
off limits for a lot of banks and payment processors.
Then suddenly, around twenty sixteen it became kind of okay,
presumably because the term was in the news a lot
and somehow normalized. All of this implies that somewhere there
(24:51):
must be a decision maker, someone blesses these distinctions and
how they might change. They decide what is fine to
stream and what isn't. Now that is a relatively easy
distinction to make when something looks outright illegal. John actually
conducts his own checks, and we should warn you here.
(25:14):
We're about to hear how he has come across disturbing videos.
I started looking for prohibited tech content, and I searched
keywords within the website. He'll type in a word like
rape or underage or the countless variations of those themes.
I did come into a situation where it was kind
(25:37):
of disturbing content. I can't say it with certainty that
it was pedophilia, but what I did was I screenshot
at everything brought it to my first line supervisor, and
we both just file the report with the FBI. I
felt we had an ethical obligation to at least alert
(25:57):
someone in a position of authority to review what we
had seen. If John searches for a term like twink,
he might need to take several steps, For example, look
at ID documents from the performer to confirm that he's
over the legal age. Racial slur we don't allow it,
and I understand there are free speech concerns there, but
(26:22):
I would just tell them, hey, this word here, the
bank's not going to approve it. You need to change
it to something else. There are some areas where the
boundary is hard. As a drawl we're betting pool, like
hypnosis or sex while someone appears to be asleep. Of
course they're acting, they're not actually asleep, and no one's
actually getting hypnotized. But being asleep means that the person
(26:46):
sleeping does not have the ability to render consent, and
the thought of hypnotizing someone into doing what you want
them to do remove the ability to render consent, even
though it's all acting, it's all fiction. Those perceptions is
what makes it prohibited. John talks in a pretty matter
of fact way about the details of these lists, where
(27:07):
they draw a line and what they try to stop.
But it's actually a pretty huge deal. Mobia's, the company
that John works for, essentially acts as a standard regulator
for pornography, doing the work the governments aren't doing on
behalf of Visa and MasterCard. It amazed us that this
level of supervision exists at all, and even more so,
(27:30):
who does it. To see how much of an influence
these codes really had on porn production, we went back
to somebody we trust and what they told us, well,
it was a little graphic, but truly stunning. That's after
the break Act three, more power than the Pope. Yeah,
(27:55):
come on in, So thank you for letting us into
your home. It's great to see you in New York
in person. And the snow is here. Brooklyn is white.
We're in Story's apartment. This is where she told us
(28:16):
about that detail that got us going down this whole
path to begin with, that she can't type period in
a chat box on some pawn platforms. As a performer,
she's seen a lot of different business models, from pay
sites to camsites. To create a platforms like only fans
They all have different characteristics, but there was always one
(28:40):
common theme, one powerful constraint on what content could be
made and sold online. She remembers Visa and Mastercard's influence
coming up way back almost fifteen years ago, right from
the start of her career, when she was shooting for
a big pawn studio. I was on a porn set
for Digital Playground and someone had four fingers in me
(29:03):
and the director was like, watch the thumb. And I'm like, wait,
you can't put a thumb in and he was like no,
And I'm like, what if it's just a thumb And
he's like, just a thumb's fine, And I'm like, what
if it's four fingers and then another finger from the
other hand and he's like, that's fine, it's just the thumbs.
The thumbs make it fisting. And I was like, this
(29:25):
is so strange. It does sound strange. Now, this would
have been back into days when DVDs were being sold,
so the rules have evolved. But on stoy a set
payment companies, we're basically calling the shots somehow. MasterCard and
Visa are deciding this is high risk, right, this is porn,
(29:49):
so this is high risk. They're deciding this is this
kind of sexual act. This is acceptable, this is not acceptable.
So this is actually like an incredible amount of power,
more power than the Pope on this subject. Whoever, these
people are at MasterCard deciding when it comes to rules.
(30:09):
I likes to understand what she's dealing with very precisely.
So at one point she got in touch with the
payment company called cc Bill, which is one of the
biggest important What she wanted was the set of rules,
the detailed rules, the ones that precisely lay out the
limits of what they think MasterCard and Visa tolerate. And
(30:29):
so they shared it, all four pages of it. They
can literally tell you on these lists what you can't
make right over, Yeah, I mean all you could make it,
but you can't put it anywhere, which is akin to
banning it. And you know, some things should be banned, right,
(30:51):
Sexual depictions of miners that is bad. That it is
not okay. It is a problem. It should not be
allowed anywhere. Bestiality again, bad problems shouldn't be allowed in full.
It's a crazy document, totally bizarre in parts, the kind
of thing you might expect from lawyers. Said Lose at
(31:13):
the Fetish Convention with a mission to categorize every little kink.
The interesting part is the gray zone sexual activity that
is technically legal but in practice not tolerated. That's a
different kind of power in pawn. And what's so interesting
and so difficult to grasp is that there isn't just
(31:34):
one set of rules, but many these are. A master
Card don't seem to want to publish a detailed set
of rules themselves that would acknowledge that they're effectively the
biggest regulators of pawn, so instead they just issue deliberately
vague guidelines about what fits their brand. Banks and payment
processes and platforms then have to interpret for their own
(31:57):
customers what the limits of MasterCard and Visa might be.
It's like guessing the wishes of an all powerful king.
You only know you're wrong when you're punished. And like
all efforts to codify and regulate human behavior, the rules
can get weirdly precise. Where do you draw the line?
(32:20):
Like how many slaps before we consider it a spanking
instead of an ass slap? How many bursts of fluid
before we decide what we're seeing is not female ejaculation
(32:42):
is urine? I mean, you can laugh about some of this.
There is would you believe a code about furry costumes?
Two people in furrey costumes having sex, that's okay. But
if one of them is half man, half beast or
in human form, No, No, too close to beastiality. One
(33:02):
platform worried about bestiality band animals even straying into the shot.
How close can a cat be before it is considered
an inappropriate distance? Anyone who has lived with a cat
knows like filming, unless there is a room that you
(33:25):
can shut a cat in, filming anything without intrusion by
a house cat is very difficult. Then there was the
question of blood. These are a master card to clear violence, mutilation.
Those are not things they abide in pawn. But if
you break that down, things start to get complicated. What
(33:47):
about pawn stars dressed as vampires devouring ketchup blood? Is
that allowed? Well, try to find that online on the internet.
Vampire pawn with fake or real blood is like a
forbidden good. And of course not all blood comes from violence,
(34:08):
because they have a uterus. And I'm thirty five, and
I get my period somewhere between every twenty and thirty
one days, and so sometimes there is blood in my
vagina and you can see it in the vulva, and
(34:30):
that cannot be portrayed in a commercial sex video. And
I feel that menstruation is completely natural, and I also
use my vagina for work. Someone at Visa or MasterCard
(34:51):
finds this completely natural biological process to be unacceptable, And
then we're raising people who are becoming sexual in a
culture where menstruation is completely erased. Whoever is the arbiter
of what can be done with sexual media and sexual performance?
(35:16):
Like I have no idea who they are? Did they
take a philosophy class? Like are do they have a
degree in women's studies? When we set out to find
who rules online porn, we did not expect to be
confronted with such a thought experiment. A porn star wondering
(35:39):
who actually regulates the site of certain bodily functions. But
here we are, like a lot of credit card customers,
staring at the fine print and still confused. Do payment
companies control porn in a way? They have a huge influence?
(35:59):
But we sensed that wasn't the full story. For that
we needed to keep digging. We still wanted to figure
out how these payment companies actually use their power. Coming
(36:22):
up on Hot Money, We want to introduce you to
a man with the world's most popular pawn site, a
site with double the page views of porn Hub, running
out of a throwback Soviet block apartment building in Prague.
I mean they're still operating as if they were a
(36:44):
shadow company. It's one of the top ten websites in
the world. And when porn Hub took down nine million
videos because they upset Visa and MasterCard, this guy, well,
he still has nine million videos up. Hot Money is
(37:13):
a production of The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It
was written and reported by me Patricia Nilsen and me
Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.
Edith Russolo is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen
Shakerjie Amanda ka Wong is our engineer. Music composition by
(37:34):
Pascal Wise, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Kusado. Our executive
producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein. Special thanks to
Renee Kaplan and Ruler Kalov at The Financial Times and
Mia Lobel, lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton and Jacob
Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to similar Web for
(37:57):
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