The precedent setting supreme court ruling I’m thinking of is very recent, and there are other recent significant changes to law that could also be relevant. My guess is that the phone calls didn’t make the difference on their own, but rather prompted internal conversations about legal liability given the new landscape and how they should be handling it to best avoid potential damages.

Or if there is any possible ambiguity in the law. I’m thinking it’s possible this has something to do with the recent weakening of constitutional protections for adult content in the US, where censorship by states of somewhat arbitrarily “obscene” content can be deemed illegal. The quote in the article by Valve seems to reference the concept of offensiveness in Mastercard’s policies:

Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand. See https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/na/global-site/documents/mastercard-rules.pdf.

the rule including the text:

2. The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.

So what I’m reading between the lines here is, there is now doubt among the lawyers of credit card companies or the lawyers of their middlemen that these games are for sure legal, and not in violation of obscenity laws that rely on hazy standards of offensiveness.

Competing for grades is so dumb, really glad to have school far behind me

Any ideas for that? My main thought is to further develop technology for the anonymous web and get people using it, although probably some form of overtly political activism is also needed

If these types of laws keep coming there might be a lot of legal liability for running instances of things

Kind of inevitable when automated moderation becomes the norm

Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/Steam.

Hmmm

I wonder if the real reason credit card companies have been responsive to these groups is the potential for lawsuits that drag payment processors into them, which is a result of various shitty laws that have been passed to generally empower these sorts of regressive trolls to do so. If so petitions from the other side might not be as effective, because they can be sued for providing services to the wrong people but not so much for cutting off service, and there’s not much actual risk to them even if a lot of people are mad about the latter.

the main function of the contemporary media: to convey the message that even if you’re clever enough to have figured out that it’s all a cynical power game, the rest of America is a ridiculous pack of sheep.

This is the trap.

-David Graeber, The Democracy Project

What are the criticisms? Genuinely curious, have no idea what problems anyone might have with it, other than some quotes from the Ubisoft exec trying to act like implementing user run servers is borderline impossible

So I guess funds were cut, but then the courts ruled the president doesn’t have authority to do this himself since the funds were allocated by congress, and so as of now they have been restored, although congress needs to approve them every year and there’s concern they might not do so for next year.