The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before.
There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
There should be laws forcing payment processors to be neutral. They should have to accept any transaction that would be legal if made using cash.
Considering how long payment processing as a business has been a thing, I’m amazed its not more regulated in terms of being forced to be neutral or being unable to decline processing payments that are related to completely legal transactions.
Noooooooooooooooo
Removed by mod
How the fuck did we get to the point where a company which literally only takes your money and gives it to someone else (and also gets paid for that) can decide what kind of content people consume?
To be clear - “Collective Shout” both is and isn’t responsible. It’s the payment processors who actually enacted policies and are using them as the scapegoat for negative feedback.
How many times have people reported Twitter after Elon Musk took over for showing Nazi propaganda alongside their ads - with no response. An ‘open letter’ in July about a game already banned in April? DELIST EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY.
Goddamn cookers the lot of them. Perhaps I’ll make an abortion game on Itch in protest.
“Cookers”?
Local slang word that derives from “their brains are fried/not working” which also implies stupidity and fanatical adherence to things like religion, anti abortion, anti vax, and the like.
Collective shout finacials year: 2024 revenue: 458043 employee_expenses: 107000 other_expenses: 215488 net_surplus: 135555 employees: total_fte: 2 full_time: 0 part_time: 1 casual: 4 volunteers: 15 donations_and_bequests: 389800 government_grants: 0 commercial_income: 0 expense_to_revenue_ratio: "70.4%" average_expense_per_employee: 39400 Leadership - name: Melinda Tankard Reist role: Founder, Movement Director public_socials: - Twitter: @MelTankardReist - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Caitlin Roper role: Campaigns Manager public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Renee Chopping role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - LinkedIn public_email_address: r******@collectiveshout.org salary: Not publicly listed - name: Lyn Swanson Kennedy role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Coralie Alison role: Movement Operations Manager public_socials: - Twitter: @CoralieAlison - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listedAnnoy them, call their bullshit, but don’t harass or threaten them, those are likely to backfire spectacularly
I wonder who major porn sites use as payment processors? (I don’t know the answer, I’m just saying…)
Most of the large ones only take bank transfers and cryptocurrency now.
I’m completely fine with certain content being delisted because it is considered essentially on par with hate speech or something like that.
However, I really do not like that it is payment processors making that call. If someone makes that call, it should be the store in question (itch.io, Steam, whatever) or it should be the government.
I bet a lot is money that these companies would take money from Trump and never child fuckers.
Let the Digital Euro become a thing. It will wreck havoc on the current payment ecosystem.
And the Digital Euro is not a crypto. It will be a digital currency, backed by the ECB, at a one to one exchange rate with standard euro currency.
Time for Brazil’s PIX to be exported around the world. That’s likely to be hard, as here it is a direct, bank agnostic account-to-account transfer without middlemen and without any tax, so it’d need cooperation between the involved countries.
You’re describing the same system behind Wero and MBWay. We can just use cellphone numbers to move money from account to account, regardless of the banks at each end of the transaction.
I mean the issue here is not with the money itself, it’s the payment processors
The eEU is supposed to be one, itself. And even if it fails Wero and MBWay are growing, which are direct money transfer systems.
be careful. stablecoins are a step towards central bank digital currency. once CBDC is established, it’s all over for freedom to spend money.
Euro(pe) is the MVP
The various groups trying to ban payments for NSFW products and whatever else they don’t like would just target the ECB and member states to restrict transactions they don’t like
Sure. Targeting a central bank and several independent nations will be as simple as pressuring two US companies. /s
You’re a dick. Hope you get better
Practically the whole world has been having an authoritarian/conservative shift. I would not expect the EU and ECB to be a progressive force for sex work. The EU has been pushing to break encryption for a solid decade now. Visa and Mastercard process 90% of transactions outside of China. They’re huge. I don’t see why ECB leadership would be particularly less conservative and risk averse than Visa and Mastercard. Bankers are usually on the conservative side of politics
The Nederlands, Germany, Spain, if I’m not wrong, France and Italy have prostitution as legal. My own country abstains from legislating on it, instead opting to criminalizing procuring and the facilitation of prostitution, as well as human traffic for such end.
Europe has a well established culture of sex work, with a good number of organizations lobbying - openly, through open public debate - in the way of making sex workers being recognized as any other worker and increasing their social relevance and recognition.
If you inform yourself a bit, in my country, you can legally establish yourself as an escort, under a very specific tax code, and pay taxes according to the money you make and have tax deductions and social benefits.
Currently, we already have a direct payment and transfer system, called MBWay, that through your phone number, allows for transfering, paying and collecting money, from one account to another.
No fintech, no middle agents, no shit: direct transfers from one account to another.
The Digital Euro takes this a step further. And even if the eEuro never takes place, this system is to be widened to all EU and abroad, to run against AliPay, Visa, MasterCard and others.
Bankers want money.
American bankers should spit out the “holy” book they have stuck up their arses.
At least Germany, Spain, and Italy have resurgent far right political movements. I am not about to trust government payment systems to not eventually be abused as technology makes control and surveillance easier. A holy book can be replaced with whatever new age self-help, health movement, anti-<ethnicity/sexuality/religion> movement. All it takes is some instability and desperation and people will support whatever or turn a blind eye to whatever they may think is not their problem or they may potentially benefit from. Good for the EU to run their own payment systems. When a conservative wave takes a large enough majority in governance someday, it’ll be the same problem as Visa/Mastercard/etc
The governance powers we give with results being leftist in mind will someday be in the hands of conservative who will use them with a kind of zeal that leftist don’t
@network_switch @Jackhammer_Joe even authoritarian states doesn’t like dependencies which can tell them what they have to do. So those companies are a risk for their independence… my personal feeling europe’s right people might not like porn but they probably would rather fight for porn then let a none european company tell them how they have to handle business ;)
To me it’s an inevitability that if the EU weans itself off Mastercard/Visa, then EU based payment processors whether credit based or something like SEPA payments for a digital EURO would be censored. The EU would be happy to handle their own business and that may just end up no different than American companies and the American government. The European right can fight against porn while fighting for independent finance infrastructure
@network_switch @Jackhammer_Joe oh on a sidenote -> https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22641095/onlyfans-sex-work-ban-online-porn-payment-processing-controversy << just a reminder …
It has its moments.
This is one of the big use cases I could see for a crypto like Monero. If someone made a Patreon-style site that used XMR, I’d be all over it.
It’s one of those network effect catch-22s though. There’s probably not enough people using Monero to justify creating a site like that - but we’ll never hit a “critical mass” of Monero users if there aren’t ecosystems that encourage its use.
I have the impression that the American government is doing all it can to delegitimize the American Dollar. Between that and the cultural impetus of sexuality, there is going to be a huge opening for Monero and friends to establish themselves as genuine currency.
I hope those “Payment processors” get vored alive!
Ew no. Not vore.
Oh, suddenly it’s not ok when it’s not your thing? Yes, vore!
“My thing” is vanilla. But of all the weird yet somehow socially acceptable kinks out there, I will go out of my way to kinkshame vore.
Understandable. Yet it’s such a shame. You can never have what I can have. You can never imagine it.
Meanwhile, on my feed there’s a post directly below this one about a compiler that will give you BSDM messages for good and bad coding and can even be hooked up to a remote butt plug to pleasure you when you compile a successful program.
Gives a new meaning to the term “code smell”.
The Rust community just knows what’s up.
cargo mommy reference
This is becoming the norm. Don’t think there can be some new payment processor based off traditional finance and banking that can get around this. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Square, SEPA, FedNow, etc will all rather block transactions to companies that deal in NSFW or whatever is considered dangerous content than try and be some neutral payment rail.
Any in terms of cryptocurrency, any stablecoin will end up subject to the same problems where the issued stablecoin is backed by a governments currency or bonds or even like corporate bonds which are regulated by countries and those are all clear ways to regulate what is appropriate for spending money on. Stablecoins have freeze and clawback mechanisms, at least the ones that are legally compliant. Really to me the only solution is for non-stablecoin/gold/etc backed cryptocurrencies to become popular for payments
Problem is the same as it has always been though.
Sex sells.
It’s gonna be a hard push for a lot of these companies to stop accepting transactions for NSFW stuff unless they can prove it’s harmful or they get legal repercussions because it’s a big part of business. In an economy where “year over year growth” is such a big deal, neutering transactions that account for (guessing generously) 7% of your revenue is a hard pill to swallow without serious force.
We already have the example of now itch and steam getting hit by payment processor restricted on content. YouTube and advertisers wanting to not be shown on categories of content and demonetized channels. I remember headlines about Pixiv and payment processors some time ago
Lose access to the major payment processors and they’ll lose far more than 7%. Until there’s a means of payment thats popular enough to replace centralized authority payment processing, it’s an easy choice for businesses to sacrifice their sex related sales to not sacrifice the larger portion of their sales that they’d lose without support of major payment processors.
The way things are going, there’s going to be the need for popular NSFW specific stores that don’t use Visa/Mastercard, private bank transfers, or national bank transfers. There’s a split in internet video where porn sites are separate from stuff like YouTube. This payment processor content moderation is in the same vein as advertisers on YouTube and other social media networks
