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Ethical Capital Partners Announces Acquisition of PornHub, Brazzers, Digital Playground, Mofos and Many More

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"Unlocking value through ethics-first investing" is how a vast amount of internet porn distributions will be handled in the future. Ethical Capital Partners is a private equity firm based in Ottawa. This is done thought the acquisition of MindGeek. If you are like me and tend to research into parent companies of popular brands, you should recognize that MindGeek (formerly Manwin) is like the Volkswagen Group of porn.

Take a look at the following list and see how many your recognize. All these websites will be under the control of ECP.

  • Pornhub
  • PornMD
  • RedTube
  • YouPorn
  • Reality Kings
  • Digital Playground
  • Men.com
  • Sean Cody
  • Brazzers
  • Twistys
  • WhyNotBi.com
  • Mofos Network
  • Babes Network
  • MILF Hunter
  • Milf Next Door
  • Euro Sex Parties
  • Crazy College GFs
  • Wicked.com
  • Adult.com
  • See My Wife

Official Announcement

Ethical Capital Partners website link six team members and six advisory board members. The website claim the follwoing to be their areas of interest:

  • Online content creation
  • Digital spaces
  • Payment processing
  • Streaming video on demand
  • Advertising platforms

What If Porn Got Political?

There are those people who would claim everything to be political. I view it as forcing a political lens onto everything. I advocate for a Night Watchman State. Politics encroaching into areas that does not relate to maintaining a Night Watchman State is undesirable. Ethical Capital Partners present themselves in a vain similar to ESG and does come across as an investment firm that would put emphasis on political ideology.

Porn is Media; Media Can Be Propaganda

I have to researched deeply into porn as a subject. What I have seen is investment firms taking over companies and using them to push various narratives. Take the way fashion ads or razor ads have been used to push agendas. It gets worse with toys get manufactured in very questionable ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVICzQoI6i8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPMZuGtGoXg

Power of Constant Nudging

One cold and stormy night, a Bedouin was huddled inside his tent trying to keep warm. He had left his camel outside in the storm, and there he was. The camel pleaded to be permitted to warm the tent by sticking his nose inside. The camel wanted more and asked to slid its head inside. The camel convinced the Bedouin to allow him to bring more and more of his body inside the tent until the Bedouin was squeezed against the side and the camel was lying comfortably inside.

We have seen how social media algorithms are capable of affecting the views and decisions of individuals. Hard and aggressive attempts at controls face heavy rejection. Constant nudging on the other hand is difficult to counter for most people.

The companies that focus on profits may exploit people for profit and may even commit bad things to earn few extra dollars. They will at least be serving customer needs rather than trying to change them ideologically. Companies use machine learning to serve the content that a would keep the users around for the longest time. What if algorithms were used to nudge users towards specific behaviors.

Example from Bing

I use Brave Search as my default search engine. Compare the results safe search set for "Moderate" and tell me if these two different results will make a difference in potential suicides.

A small nudge is unlike to make a big difference. But even small amounts can compound to create a powerful effect over a long time. Machine Learning could be used to figure out the best nudging strategy.

Algorithm Itself Can Be Propaganda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8

If shadow bans didn't work; companies partnered with government entities will not engage in it and lie to the public about the existence of shadow banning. If the inverse of shadow banning didn't work; YouTube and Big Tech search engines will not bump up mainstream news and make them go trending.

We Are in Unexplored Lands

I do not know how the Ethical Capital Partners acquisition of MindGeek will play out. I'm not very concerned as porn plays only a small fraction of my life. Porn has little power over me. But my instincts tell me that this is merely a beginning and not even people's private fetishes will be kept out of political and cultural wars.

Surveillance, data and machine learning can give tremendous powers to the centralized entities that control large parts of the internet and its most popular websites. A fully decentralized internet with privacy and open source algorithms are becoming a dire need. Projects like @spknetwork and dVPN can be a help to create better freedom from tyrants and peeping toms.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta