michaelkeenan

Two of my attempts:

2018 was the year of the SESTA/FOSTA law, which was ruinous to many sex workers. The sudden increase in adult entertainers being banned by Instagram and others is correct, but can entirely be explained by SESTA/FOSTA. You can read about it on Hacker News – here's a link to a Hacker News search about it[2]. The top result has 715 points, linking to an Electronic Freedom Frontier column about it, which begins: "The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users."

The lawsuit doesn't mention SESTA/FOSTA. It includes no evidence that OnlyFans or MyFreeCams users weren't affected by the SESTA/FOSTA crackdown, and I'm pretty sure they were. A friend of mine is successful on OnlyFans, and if I recall correctly her Instagram was banned and restated at least once. It's a standard occupational hazard for online adult entertainers.

The lawsuit only speculates that terrorist watchlists were used, just noting that they'd have been "ideal" for this: "One or more [Dangerous Individual and Organization] lists, combined with the GIFCT Shared Hash Database and URL sharing program, would have served as the ideal training data for a classifier/filtering tool to create this blacklisting effect, particularly in 2018 and 2019."

The talk of bribery is entirely speculative. After noting that OnlyFans has a Hong Kong office, and "The law of Hong Kong makes it very difficult to obtain discovery for a proceeding in a foreign court", they speculate "Radvinsky could have used either Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong or Fenix International Hong Kong to make the scheme-facilitating payments."

I don't read a lot of lawsuits so I don't know what's normal, but this all seems really off to me. Maybe the lawsuit only exists to cause bad press, so journalists can write pageview-harvesting lines like "OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist" and "OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist", and then append "lawsuits" or "according to a group of explosive lawsuits".

> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.

> But “ability to concentrate” is a normally distributed trait, like IQ. We draw a line at some point on the far left of the bell curve and tell the people on the far side that they’ve “got” “the disease” of “ADHD”. This isn’t just me saying this. It’s the neurostructural literature, the the genetics literature, a bunch of other studies, and the the Consensus Conference On ADHD. This doesn’t mean ADHD is “just laziness” or “isn’t biological” – of course it’s biological! Height is biological! But that doesn’t mean the world is divided into two natural categories of “healthy people” and “people who have Height Deficiency Syndrome“. Attention is the same way. Some people really do have poor concentration, they suffer a lot from it, and it’s not their fault. They just don’t form a discrete population.

> Meanwhile, Adderall works for people whether they “have” “ADHD” or not. It may work better for people with ADHD – a lot of them report an almost “magical” effect – but it works at least a little for most people. There is a vast literature trying to disprove this. Its main strategy is to show Adderall doesn’t enhance cognition in healthy people. Fine. But mostly it doesn’t enhance cognition in people with ADHD either. People aren’t using Adderall to get smart, they’re using it to focus.

I downvoted for the obnoxious phrasing of "Wrong. Try again." It goes against the first paragraph of the HN commenting guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

World medicine spending[0]: $1.2 trillion

US prescription drug spending[1][2]: $348 billion (29% of world spending)

US drug advertising[3]: $30 billion (1% of US drug spending)

Health insurance net earnings[4]: $23 billion (0.8% of US drug spending)