Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content
itch.io320 points by panic 2 days ago
320 points by panic 2 days ago
This is a deeply concerning development, though not an entirely surprising one. While I sympathize with itch.io's position - being caught between their creators and their payment processors - the broader implications here are alarming.
Payment processors have effectively become unelected censorship boards with the power to strangle entire categories of legal content by threatening to cut off the economic infrastructure that platforms depend on. The fact that a single advocacy campaign can pressure Visa/Mastercard/PayPal into forcing platforms to remove legal adult content should concern anyone who values free expression online.
The fundamental issue isn't whether you personally approve of adult games or specific content - it's that a handful of payment companies now wield veto power over what legal content can exist in the digital economy. This represents a massive concentration of censorial authority in the hands of unaccountable corporate entities that face no meaningful democratic oversight.
We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign. Each time, legal content gets effectively banned not through legislation or courts, but through corporate policy decisions made behind closed doors.
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation. When payment infrastructure becomes as essential as electricity or telephone service for participating in the digital economy, treating these companies as neutral utilities rather than editorial boards becomes not just reasonable but necessary.
> "We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign."
And more: before those, there was also Wikileaks[0,1], SciHub[2], and Tor[3]—among other high-profile acts of authoritarian censorship. There's countless others if you search HN—hard to sort them out for the sheer volume.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969048 ("PayPal Suspends WikiLeaks Account (nytimes.com)" (2010) — 74 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808975 ("EU Scolds Visa et al. For Killing WikiLeaks Donations, Initiates Regulation (falkvinge.net)" (2012) — 61 comments)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645305 ("Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin (coindesk.com)" (2020) — 290 comments)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371787 ("PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter (eff.org)") (2021) — 185 comments)
I'm very puzzled as to how these "advocacy campaigns" are able to control all of the payment processors like this. That Collective Shout "open letter" must be the tip of the iceberg.
Yes it's puzzling. And I don't buy the answers to your comment so far. Chargebacks? Wanting to control everything? Those are just silly hand-waving explanations that lack supportive evidence. They sound good to the people who say them, but I want more. I want data. Or at least some "aha!" evidence. Or, at least I can make up my own hand-wavy speculation.
These groups like "Collective Shout" don't seem organic to me. Where do they find members? In churches? I'm pretty clued-in to the going on in various churches, nobody knows anything about Collective Shout. It just materialized out of thin air, with a slick website and loudly claiming responsibility for these bans. "Look at us! We did this! No need to look elsewhere!"
Let me put on my aluminum-foil hat for a minute... Could this all be social engineering by some government agency that wants to ban porn (not outright, but make porn sites go out of business) to increase the birth rate to avoid demographic collapse? Just asking questions here.
I think that payment processors want to be able to control everything. I don't think they care about adult content per se, they care about being able to allow/deny anything for any reason. They also don't really care about "hate speech", which is what gets censored when dems are in power. Republicans are in power now, so they're going after adult content. But to me, it seems like they only do it this way because it's easier than doing everything at once. Their real goal, the goal that they will mask with moral concerns about things like hate speech and adult content, is to have full control over who and what can use their payment systems without any restrictions. It seems be be working really well because instead of everyone fighting censorship by payment processors as a whole, half of us choose not to care when it happens to the other half. I really struggle reading these threads because the "it's a private company that can do what they want and if you don't like it build your own" argument is seared into my memory from when this started happening years ago.
> I really struggle reading these threads because the "it's a private company that can do what they want and if you don't like it build your own" argument is seared into my memory from when this started happening years ago.
My answer to that has always been - if a "private company" is so important and critical to a nation or economy, like a payment processor, then that company has lost the right to be private and needs to be nationalized and become a public service. Had this argument all the time back in '08; if a company needs bailed out by the government or the nation/economy will collapse, its clearly too important to be a private for profit enterprise and should be nationalized and become a public service
Not everything needs, nor should be, a private enterprise for profit. Payment processors, utilities, etc. should just be public services, available to all equally and for all legal purposes.
It need not be that extreme… what with the theft and confiscation of property, etc.
A much milder, and more sensible, expression of your underlying sentiment is:
If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.
Now the incumbent provider has competition, and there is a market participant tied to other incentives, etc.
No theft necessary.
> If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.
I'll admit I didn't even think of that, and yeah I'd agree that's a good solution worth pursuing in cases like this. I can think of many industries where we need to inject competition into the market.
I don't understand how this would work. If the government created some entity to handle processing payments (or whatever), I assume it would be a publicly funded non-profit, since there is precedent for that. How much funding does it get? Where does that money come from? How does it compete with the existing massively powerful corporations? What incentives does the government entity have to compete? What happens if it goes bankrupt or is purchased? What happens to whatever capital was used to fund it?
It just seems like the government entity would need to actively engage with seeking profits or just existing to artificially lower costs. I don't think the majority of people would want the government to have a for-profit arm that exists to compete with businesses, and I don't think corporations would just play nice.
I'd say that USPS is the closest example of this, and it's a pretty good example of how things can go wrong as well. The active attack against the postal service to try to privatize it is terrible. It will do nothing but continue to isolate power to the ultra wealthy and make people's lives worse. For-profit corporations and the government just have (or ought to have) fundamentally different incentives to exist.
I'd be curious to know of any examples of this working well. I don't mean to be so antagonistic, I just am really struggling to understand how this could work in any way.
These are all fantastic and interesting questions and are exactly the same questions you would face if you expropriated the property of the businesses my parent proposed privatizing.
The issue is not how complicated and difficult such an endeavor is (and you rightly identify it as such).
The issue is, if we're going to do this heavy lifting anyway, might we do it in a way that doesn't involve theft ?
> The issue is, if we're going to do this heavy lifting anyway, might we do it in a way that doesn't involve theft ?
Expropriation usually involves paying the owners so it isn't theft, its just the government buying out the stocks just like a private corporation would. Are you saying Elon musk stole twitter? That is the same thing.
Anyway, here since this is shared between countries its better to just regulate what these processors can do, like the EU does when they regulate how large payment processing fees can be etc. Since its used for international trade no single country can own it.
Agreed. When people say that we need to privatize something because the government is not doing its job effectively, I always think that the government is not doing its job effectively because of the lack of competition. If you just replace the governmental entity with a private entity, then you would end up with more problems than before. The better way to approach this would be to create a governmental entity that competes with the private sector. Each can keep the other in check with competition. For example, in the case of tax prep in the US, the government can set up a competing entity that makes the tax prep software and keep turbo tax in check.
> If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.
I'd agree, although considering our nation's decline into an authoritarian state I wouldn't trust a government competitor to be any better about protecting artistic works from censorship. Project 2025 makes the administration's feelings on this topic pretty clear.
The problem: what if the government fails to provide a competitive entrant?
We must NOT expect the government to excel at anything. We must assume it is, and will always be, a mediocre follower of established playbooks. To ensure the government accomplishes X, we must stress in the playbook that X is mandated and cannot be compromised in any way.
You cannot mandate competitiveness.
This goes back to the origin of cancel culture. Businesses hate risk, and here is a group presenting them with a perceived risk against their bottom line.
They're not.
There's always the other, less visible but more lethal attack front..
the CFO whispering in the board's ear about chargebacks.
I think what we need to get a handle on is guys, or gals, telling their spouses, "Oh I have no idea what that charge is doing on our card!?!?!"
Of course it's going to be disputed. We need some method of attribution that is definitive. So that people can't go around doing that any longer.
Make no mistake, these companies are about money. Morality or no morality, if you take chargebacks reliably back in hand adult content would likely show itself to be more profitable than nearly every other segment of their business.
Would there still be a line? Absolutely. But it would be a line that nearly everyone would be in agreement with, and the line would exclude nowhere near the amount of content it does today.
Visa/Master collect higher fees from merchants with high chargeback rates, so I'm pretty sure the CFO is still happy. I agree with the fact that they are all about money, but don't see how they lose money on adult content. This still seems very suspicious to me.
Fee structures don't scale to infinity with chargeback risk. They cut off very high risk merchants. It's the same reason cloud providers need you to request GPUs instead of exponentially raising prices to absorb cryptocurrency fraud losses.
Yeah, maybe they say its because of chargebacks as PR speak, but payment processors already cover for that with higher fees & extra risk assessment fees for businesses with a higher rate of chargebacks. If they are losing money because of a higher rate of chargebacks from adult content, then they designed their fee structure poorly.
Those companies go out of business faster too so dealing with them carries more risk.
That would be a valid point, except something like Steam isn't going under anytime soon over chargebacks, and they could demand larger reserves if they're afraid of that.
I'd love to see this problem solved too, but let's not do it by nerfing people's ability to charge back. Chargeback is pretty much the only tool consumers have to fight a merchant's fraud and abuse against them, and it's already an opaque, flimsy tool. Also, it only exists by the grace of Visa, MasterCard and American Express. I don't think there is any law that compels them to even allow a customer to dispute a charge (although hopefully I'm wrong about that).
>the CFO whispering in the board's ear about chargebacks.
Lies: these transactions don't get charged back at a higher rate.
Eh, possibly, but I suspect it's not just money.
https://apnews.com/article/gun-violence-shootings-new-york-c...
Visa and Mastercard were getting pressure from New York officials to put firearm purchases into their own category, something that the gun control advocates say could help stop potential mass shooters by red flagging large gun purchases. The initiative was stopped by Republican politicians and other lobbyists.
https://apnews.com/article/mastercard-visa-guns-second-amend...
Paypal IIRC also won't process payments for anything firearm related.
How did OnlyFans overcome this issue? They were pressured by a payment processor to stop allowing NSFW content, but reverse their decision. How did that pan out?
I don't know exactly how they did it, but OF was/is unique in that the adult content is their entire business model.
When your company is at risk of being essentially forcefully dissolved, you're gonna be desperate. I was fully expecting them to tell Visa to fuck off and just switch to a different payment processor, because that's more economically viable than complying with Visa.
Maybe they threatened Visa with legal action and Visa felt that it was too risky, lest they lose their entire censorship operation. Just speculation.
I guess the real question to me is why does/would Visa even want a censorship operation?
It makes no sense. They're a Fortune 500 company. They don't give a shit about the morality of nudie magazines.
From what I understand, porn has a higher rate of fraud. It's not about morality at all.
> How did that pan out?
OnlyFans has an insane amount of rules about what's allowed or not. And suspends and bans performers left and right for the slightest BS complaint (apparently usually from a competitor to that performer). That's how it panned out.
That must not be comfortable for OF because this is the kind of insanity that will make every performer keep looking for plausible alternate intermediaries so as to ditch OF. OF makes it because they are by far the largest source of traffic for performers.
I'm guessing shady back office deals with the executives took place, or at least I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
They previously were banned (or maybe it was threatened to be banned) by the payment processors, then suddenly it went away.
I'm guessing they were willing to accept conditions such as verification of performers and censorship of unwanted adult content. OnlyFans has the scale to not be fatally affected by these costs of operation. They can present themselves as a cleaner alternative to an unregulated website.
It's easy: https://simplebeen.com/onlyfans-statistics/ OnlyFans is so big in the US and so widely used in the US (94 million active accounts) which is about 28% of the population (with the caveat that some people might have multiple accounts). It's too big to fail. The American economy will fail and the government needs to bail it and nationalize it as a public goods service. /s
It's either that or shady backroom deals with Visa.
I hate to point out that we have completely free payment options (way too free for most) that could prevent all of this based on b***** technology. But then again maybe itch would get blackmailed even harder by the currently leading payment companies if they were to adopt b***** payments. So only with huge customer demand for free payments could they switch.
> completely free payment options
I thought you were going for direct bank to bank operations.
I think these are currently the most practical and promising way to get out of the credit card duopoly's influence. It is more onerous on KYC check, but that sounds like a smaller price than a paid service just not existing at all.
The issue with bank to bank is that consumers don’t have an intermediary willing to fight (read: chargeback) on their behalf, no?
I imagine few banks are staffed and teched to replicate payment processors’ anti-fraud systems.
Customer protection isn't supposed to come from private third parties in the first place.
Look at it from this angle: why is VISA or Stripe the arbiter of disputes between you and Netflix ? If Netflix made you pay a fee that is not part of your contract or you didn't initiate, you should be able to retrieve that money without asking a racket business to cover you.
And while banks handle fraud issues, arguably they shouldn't be the one reading your contracts and deciding how to interpret it. Some customer agency or small claims court should be more fitting ?
Perhaps you're in a place where that just wouldn't work, fair enough, but the issue should be on why you don't have these laws or institution, not why there's no private middle-men fixing the deals.
> Some customer agency or small claims court should be more fitting? Perhaps you're in a place where that just wouldn't work, fair enough, but the issue should be on why you don't have these laws or institution, not why there's no private middle-men fixing the deals.
In the US, this is effectively non-existent these days.
Best case, now rare, there isn’t an arbitration clause in the EULA, so you have individuals suing companies in small claims.
The problem there is scale.
A company can screw over a lot more people than people will spend time pushing back against a company. Because fundamentally, a company doesn’t give a shit about maintaining a relationship with an angry customer.
The benefit of using payment intermediaries to run arbitration is that the company does want to continue having a relationship with them and is therefore incentivized to care more about the case than they would otherwise.
Granted, there are a lot of ills from payment processors too! But waving a wand and suggesting bank to bank transfers alone fixes the issue is naive.
> If Netflix made you pay a fee that is not part of your contract or you didn't initiate, you should be able to retrieve that money without asking a racket business to cover you.
Allowing customers to claw back money unilaterally opens the door for customers to make a purchase, receive the product, then fraudulently take their money back.
There needs to be a third party in the middle to determine if a chargeback is fraudulent. Chargeback fraud already exists, and what you're proposing makes the problem significantly worse.
My phrasing was poor, I agree there should be a third party to handle the dispute, I just think it should not be a private business.
Because VISA has two customers, me and Netflix. They want that to continue so they are in a good place to be efficient arbirtrators.
Anyone else will be slow/inefficient (courts) or biased (Me or Netflix).
> slow/inefficient
I find it interesting to want speed in deciding who should get screwed in a transaction.
There are economic advantages in people giving around their payment information, but the social impacts (the very existence of Visa/Mastercard and their influence on businesses or prices) aren't worth it IMHO.
IMHO people should be responsible of how they handle the keys to their money, and better tools should be given to secure and manage that, instead of a Big Brother like middlemen.
I mean, you don't pay cash at a restaurant with a string stuck to your money so you can pull it back three months after, because arguing with the restaurant feels too inefficient.
This is an industry where chargebacks don't make sense. You either buy and pay or you don't and if you're on the fence, then don't. The only necessary intermediary is a trustworthy online shop/platform with a reasonable refund policy.
The solution to that is requiring your PIN, 2FA and ML-powered suspicious transaction alerts for each transaction. It's actually not as cumbersome as it sounds and takes less than five seconds at its best; UPI in India has perfected it.
Another reason for chargebacks is fraudulent merchants. If somebody sells me a fake item, I highly doubt they are going to willingly refund me when I complain to them about it.
That should either be handled by a court or customer protection action agency, or by your private insurance (basically like how it works with cash transactions)
Baking it into the payment processing warps the whole situation.
Crypto moves the problem from payment providers like Visa to central exchanges like Coinbase. Until you have a completely decentralized ecosystem built around crypto, you run into trouble when offramping to fiat. If I recall, backpage accepted bitcoin when Visa dropped them, but it was way too much hassle to be useful. If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative.
> If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative.
You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable.
I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies:
The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either.
Edit: typo.
The principle should be that it shifts the problem to payment providers who can be switched out for other payment providers seamlessly. The providers are motivated to behave ethically because you have the option of going elsewhere.
Paying with crypto is still not very usable but you can still do it directly which limits the degree of extortion that can be applied. I think it will get better as it ceases to be 'interesting' and people develop tools that just work rather than try to revolutionize your life.
crypto has well and truly poisoned its own well here, with the sheer number of scams and fraud on the various platforms. It's also hella expensive as a way to take payments, since you usually have 2x exchange fees as well as the network transaction fees on a payment.
But you CAN use Bitcoin without being scammed. It's just new (to common people) and there are new things to learn.
(I hate to defend the crypto space. I don't want the crypto bros to win. I really hope it doesn't come that far and it's the only option left...)
Crypto didn't do that. Investment bros did. Pretty much everything created after 2015 is a scam and hardly related to cryptocurrency at all. Just traditional investment/scam types moving in and adopting the name/language for popularity.
But you're right about the outcome from this. Most people don't know the difference, were only exposed to the post-2015 scams, and just assume all cryptocurrency is a scam.
> Crypto didn't do that. Investment bros did.
So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology?
Unless you're saying crypto created the problem at this scale and can do nothing to stop the problem it created...?
>So why didn't crypto block or ban
I think you have a misunderstanding of the technology.
> So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology?
Bitcoin code is open-source. How do you prevent someone from using open-source?
UPI in India, Pix in Brazil, Interac in Canada, various iBAN schemes in Europe, WeChat and AliPay in China. Everywhere but the US has good options that aren't the credit card duopoly or the scam / crime filled bitcoin.
These examples aren't quite apples-to-apples. Yes, I can e-transfer money to other people in Canada I know or even pay small businesses for their services. But that only applies to one country. When I buy something on Steam or Itch, I must send money abroad, and the same is true for countless other things. And what options do you have for that besides the Visa/MC duopoly or crypto? I'm not a crypto user, but I see it as the only realistic future way of moving money to buy anything that the holy payment processors deem icky, barring the near-zero chance of them being regulated in the US or a popular competitor suddenly appearing.
Steam collects GST so they've already figured that out.
But your basic thesis is correct, it's not apples-to-apples. Debit vs credit is a significant difference. Another major issue is that while the regulations for any one of the alternatives on my list aren't particularly onerous, I imagine the superset of all the regulations/contracts might well be.
I'm not sure how exactly Steam pays local taxes, be it a Canadian third party that siphons the extra money for them or if they just send each region the tax money, but either way the money is flowing abroad at some point. Then there's individual transactions. If you need to internationally send someone money and the payment processors say no for any reason, you're largely SOL. I guess you can mail cash directly, while that still exists. But my point that you can basically only go either through Visa/MC or through crypto stands, even though I don't particularly love either.
Or international bank transfer, or postal money order, or Western Union, or several other unlikely mechanisms.
SEPA allows for free, instant international transfers. Why can't we have something like SEPA that encompasses more than just Europe?
Aren't they already collecting through local entities in the first place and then converting them to dollars? Also, Steam does support local card companies like RuPay in India.
Those aren’t clearing houses, those are fintech services built on top of clearing houses. They still rely on credit card duopoly or ACH reconciliation between banking institutions. Don’t kid yourself.
Not at all, UPI is literally just a platform for direct mobile bank-to-bank payments. No credit cards or duopolies involved, just a public-sector behemoth.
UPI is just fast ACH. It’s still built on top of IMPS, which is regulated by RBI. India’s version of US Treasury. A more mobile and grass roots version of Plaid.
All it takes is for RBI to say “This kind of content isn’t allowed” and you’d have the same effect. Here in the US, we didn’t build an IMPS like system until way too late in the game.
You wouldn't, because the business model and the incentives are different. If anything, free chargebacks make consumers careless and turn them into freeloaders.
Using blockchain would come with other risks.
Such as different middlemen having their own agenda.
A decentralized blockchain has no middlemen, the trust is put in the network to be honest.
If you want a somewhat simple experience you still need to go through the exchanges which could also be coerced into censorship. I guess you can move the coins through multiple wallets but how many people want to jump through those hoops
They aren't free as in beer, which is part of the problem. (The other major part being that the people who build them are in love with deflation, which makes them extremely hard to use as a currency.)
Or how about actually elected alternative: government regulating these payment providers not to do this? (At least in countries where elections have total cap for donors per party.)
Both Visa and Mastercard are American companies. What do you think the likelihood is that the US in its current situation regulates them? As for other countries, I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on.
> I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on.
The fact they are so essential should give the nations all the leverage - "Your service has become too important to the function of our nation, so we are nationalizing your company and making it a public service."
Time to stop being afraid of doing that - if a private company is THAT important to the continuing functioning of your society, then that company has lost their right to be a private for profit business and needs to be nationalized, at least partially to keep them in check and make sure they are following the laws of the nations they operate in.
We, as societies, should have never allowed any corporation to become more powerful than their governments.
why are you censoring bitcoin?
Oh, I thought it was a different b-word
it was
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters
The primary reason is because adult content has a very high percentage of disputed charges.
Typically, it's because some person's partner notices some kind of porn on the credit card statement, and the purchaser claims they were "hacked" or something and then disputes the charge. This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins.
There is also some skittishness about local laws regarding morality. Credit card payments cross a lot of boundaries and various localities have wildly differing laws about adult content and so the payment processors simply don't want to risk it.
I guess what I'm saying is: the payment processors seem like the symptom of a larger problem, not the root cause.
Source: I've never worked in payment processing, but I used to run an online business with spicy content, and had to navigate this to an extent.
> The primary reason is because adult content has a very high percentage of disputed charges.
If that was the driving force, the payment processors would be reacting to the businesses on their own initiative from the dispute stats. But that is not what is happening, they are responding to public moral panic campaigns, which indicates that disputes are not the driving force.
> This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins.
Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy.
What we're really seeing is moral policing.
It's not clear to me from the post what level this is happening on.
I assume by "payment processor" that they are not talking about Visa et al themselves but their merchant services provider.
The alternative to this is to find a merchant services company that specializes in adult industry. Something like https://ccbill.com/ which is going to end up costing you (or your customers) somewhere around 30% on all payments on your entire platform.
It's likely easier to strong arm these providers as they are typically pretty risk averse.
Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy.
Sure, yeah. There are niche payment processors who specialize in such things. They charge exorbitant rates, like 20-30+%. I suspect that itch.io may consider working with somebody like CCBill to allow payments for adult content, and use a "normal" processor for everything else. That is what I would do, or at least attempt to do.
What we're really seeing is moral policing.
But I would hope that anybody bothered by the problem would also want to understand the root causes. It's a little bit more complex than credit card companies being a bunch of prudes who think you shouldn't be playing weirdo dating sims.
You have to understand the economics of the payment processing industry, at least in broad strokes. Then you can understand why mainstream processors stay away from adult content.
- Profits are obviously large, but margins on any individual transaction are miniscule
- Disputes and chargebacks involve humans, which blows away the basic economical model there. The cost of 15 minutes of labor from a human being wipes out the profit on the next zillion transactions
- Adult content, while a big business in absolute terms, is a tiny drop in the bucket overall for these companies. They do not want to devote a bunch of resources for something that is, overall, probably like 0.1% or less of their overall revenue
> I suspect that itch.io may consider working with somebody like CCBill to allow payments for adult content, and use a "normal" processor for everything else. That is what I would do, or at least attempt to do.
Except AFAIK Visa/MasterCard are not okay with this. Because it's not actually about fraud or chargebacks.
> The cost of 15 minutes of labor from a human being wipes out the profit on the next zillion transactions
Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant for card-not-present transactions, regardless of outcome. It's not a real reason, regardless, since there'd be no point to go so fine-grained about what adult content is banned if all adult content has chargeback/fraud issues.
OK. So you believe that the credit card industry really really really wants to be in the business of moral policing.
I, on the other hand, have experiences with payment processing for NSFW material, and based on these experiences my understanding is that the CC industry doesn't particularly want to be in the moral policing business, but avoids NSFW stuff because of legal and profitability concerns. However, as an outsider I admittedly have no direct insight into what actually happens inside the CC industry.
So my question to you is -- what are YOU basing your opinion on?
Based on their behavior. Nothing they do makes sense otherwise.
> but avoids NSFW stuff because of legal and profitability concerns
This, for example. They weren't enforcing a law, and there's no "profitability" issue as they could simply make the fees and reserves higher. So they might say that's why, but it obviously isn't the case. If it were, they'd demand a lot more than a few random handfuls of games be removed, and would target a lot more than adult content. They also would be totally fine if you sell that content through another payment method, because it's not their liability or profit at stake. However, if they're trying to censor content that isn't to their liking, this behavior makes sense.
Hacker News readers should be aware that the Department of Justice has sued Visa for monopolization and other unlawful conduct: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
There was also a recent class action lawsuit by business owners against both Visa and Mastercard accusing them of anti-trust violations, that was settled for $5.5B.
It's not yet clear how seriously the Trump Administration will take the lawsuit against Visa. There is mounting evidence and sentiment that both of these companies are not just self-appointed censors, they're also criminal entities who use their market power to extort and abuse both their customers and partners. Now more than ever it's important to contact whoever represents you in the government and tell them that a settlement won't cut it and you've had enough of criminal enterprises dictating the future of both United States and world society. There simply aren't any other solutions to organized corrupt power at this scale, it's either hand the world over to a tyranny ruled by this growing form of organized corporate crime, or act through the public institutions that we as the People have endorsed to represent us.
Taking one look at the FCC, Americans should be more worried about this administration’s willingness to leverage any government power into coerced private industry action favorable to them.
‘That DoJ action? Might go away if you just _____.’
One of the most concerning parts of this is that these are global companies. Regardless of local laws, these companies still wield enormous power. This is also a sovereignty and self determination issue.
What I am surprised about the most is why do these payment processors care about these moral issues this much? They are a profit-making entity and money is money -- the more money you process, the more profit you get. What is the downside for allowing NSFW content be bought using their processor? Are the boards/CEOs of these companies puritans? Aren't they handing more credibility to these alternatives like Bitcoin Lightning or Monero with actions like these?
The solution is advanced cryptocurrency. Obviously. Almost no point in writing any comments on this site that use that word unfortunately.
This is a perfect use case for crypto/stable coins
If only they weren’t so intent on being untraceable, they could well have served that purpose by now. Sigh.
Ethereum, Polygon, Base, etc are not untraceable. The only untraceable ones I can think of off the top of my head are Monero and Secret Network.
I didn’t realize we knew who owned the Satoshi cold wallets! When did they figure that out, and how?
What definition of traceable are you using? I meant, to a specific person (miner) who wrote value into the system — which could also include a specific cash register or ATM that traded currency for coin, depending on whether it’s a postpaid or a prepaid Visa/MC that we’re comparing to, I suppose. They only charge a few percent extra overhead to issue relatively anonymous prepaid cards, which people either choose to pay or not, but the coin systems have traditionally been operated without the identifiable, lower-overhead, lower-risk tier of users that could have supported a viable postpaid network competitor. To the best of my understanding — am I wrong here? — all coin systems are exclusively unconcerned with the user’s identity other than their password, so their traceability is close to zero without a criminal investigation and wrench takeovers, which makes it adoption almost wholly unviable.
(US folks trying to convert coins to currency without paying taxes may differ, but that’s a relatively new regulatory push and has no particular impact on the majority of worldwide coin users.)
Well, they are more traceable than cash.
I don’t think there should be an obligation that money be substantially more traceable than is provided by bills having unique IDs on them..
Bitcoin is only pseudonymous. Inside the network everything is public and traceable, but not personally identifiable.
Where you lose anonymity is with inflows and outflows to the real world. You may only be able to buy cryptocurrency from a KYC seller. Or your payment can be traced. Or you buy something from an already identified seller. Ironically, a lot of the anonymity of Bitcoin comes from the anonymity of physical cash.
If employers started paying out salaries using Bitcoin, it would suddenly be really easy to identify wallets.
This isn't new, payment processors have exercised this kind of control over online content as long as people have been charging for content on the Internet.
This is a great commentary to think about for the people who believe bitcoin is a useless scam
The thing about them being moral arbiters isn't even imagined. They have had plenty of time to figure out a business model that serves these specific markets without cutting them off altogether. Instead, the payment processors are always threatening to cut off all access even to content that does not infringe upon their terms if there is even a single violation by mistake that gets remediated quickly or the payment method is disabled for the high risk content to begin with.
> By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation.
It's maddening that they are not common carriers at this point. In many ways it is very difficult - if not impossible - to operate in the world nowadays without access to payment infrastructure.
This should also come as a lesson to all the people that base their rationale in "government icky" moronic arguments. Corporations are all too happy to abuse consumers in the lack of proper regulations. While the government should not get blind faith, there are multiple avenues to scrutinize and question the government. Corporations on the other hand can and will fuck over everyone mercilessly without proper regulations.
> This should also come as a lesson to all the people that base their rationale in "government icky" moronic arguments. Corporations are all too happy to abuse consumers in the lack of proper regulations. While the government should not get blind faith, there are multiple avenues to scrutinize and question the government. Corporations on the other hand can and will fuck over everyone mercilessly without proper regulations.
Whoever said governments oppose this development? What makes you they're not ones holding the cards?
The links you sent have absolutely no relation to the case in point.
Your response is just baseless conjecture.
How dare gubmint involve itself in auditing predatory lenders and weapons dealers
For those of you in the US (I'm Canadian), there is a bill in congress right now that would make it illegal for any financial service provider to directly or indirectly prohibit or inhibit any legal transaction. It's called the Fair Access to Banking Act, H.R.987 in the House, S.401 in the Senate. Call your representatives. Get it passed.
Edit: Oh yeah and feel free to copy, paste, share this around, make people AWARE of this, because nobody is! Of course, change if you're not Canadian, but like... Make it happen.
I'm seeing mixed things about HR 987 and S 401 online. There are resistbot campaigns claiming that this law will do the exact opposite of what we want.
https://resist.bot/letters/eb93c1f2-0b25-4fb3-b080-5e75f9c5c...
EDIT: I decided to blog about this topic. https://soatok.blog/2025/07/24/against-the-censorship-of-adu...
Read the legislation for yourself.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987/...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401...
I don't see a basis for the assertion by the resistbot letter that it could "force banks to cut off services to" "marginalized communities". It actually appears to do the opposite - banks that cut off services to law-abiding people would lose their access to the Fed lending window.
I'm not a lawyer and wasn't familiar with the bill until it was brought up in this thread. Looking at the text of the bill I'd guess that it's because the bill specifically calls for making risk determination on an individual basis[1] rather than for broad categories. The worry would be that despite the bill calling for banks to make these determinations based on "quantitative, impartial risk-based standards", this would actually give them more leeway to discriminate in a much more targeted way.
[1] §2.10 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401...
This is a rather paranoid reading of the bill, and I don't think the clause you cite has the effect you describe. For one thing, it's in the "Findings" section, which is not operative statutory text - it's a statement of opinion to describe the authors' state of mind at the time the bill was written. Further, in the scenario you describe - a bank cutting off services after an individualized risk assessment - if the cut-off customer was in compliance with the law, 4(c) causes the bank to lose access to the Fed window, which is basically game over for them. Today, banks can cut off services for nearly any reason with little recourse. If the bill passes, banks will need to be extremely careful when cutting off services to individuals.
I appreciate the thorough response! Again, I'm not a lawyer or even very familiar with it. I looked up the concerns people had, and then tried to find the bit which seemed likely to cause that concern.
I don't know if it sounds likely, and you seem more familiar with this kinda thing than I am, but given the erosion of a bunch of norms I can understand why people would have much less trust in any sort of regulators actually verifying that banks were following the law or their ability to win a lawsuit. Do you know if this would allow private action?
> Do you know if this would allow private action?
Yes - Sec. 8(c) establishes the right of a debanked person to take civil action (and recover attorney's fees) against the offending bank. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987/...
> Read the legislation for yourself.
I tried. My brain isn't very good at understanding the effects of law, only the literal and logical structure of its changes.
> I don't see a basis for the assertion by the resistbot letter that it could "force banks to cut off services to" "marginalized communities". It actually appears to do the opposite - banks that cut off services to law-abiding people would lose their access to the Fed lending window.
I'm inclined to agree, but I'm not a lawyer. I would be a rather awful one if I tried to become one.
It's remarkable that these censors are hiding behind "feminism", as a framing to make their censoriousness seem more palatable, or progressive, or enlightened. Anyone familiar with literature (reading–not burning) might know the OG feminists defied laws and criminal arrests to publish obscene books.
Here's Margaret C. Anderson of "The Little Review", fined $100 and fingerprinted for flouting morality laws publishing Joyce's Ulysses in serialized form,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_C._Anderson
(Did you know the US Post Office used to burn books?)
I'm not sure of the scale of Collective Shout. It may be little more than one person with an agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist
I suspect there is far more church backing behind this organisation than feminist.
There have been multiple waves and competing schools of feminism. OG feminism isn't relevant to what it means today.
That this wave of modern feminists would arrest the 1920's feminists for moral crimes shows they are indeed very different.
Sadly that ban also hit three of our our games that help victims cope with trauma. :(
Please write to your representative:
Dear [Representative's Name],
I am writing to formally request an investigation into the activities of Collective Shout, an organization whose censorship-driven campaigns have caused measurable harm to artists, survivors, and vulnerable communities. Under the guise of protecting women and children, they have erased trauma narratives, suppressed creative expression, and bullied platforms into enacting broad, opaque bans. Their actions disproportionately affect marginalized voices and bypass democratic discourse in favor of ideological policing. There is growing concern that their influence is rooted more in religious moralism than evidence-based advocacy. I urge your office to examine their funding, methods, and societal impact with urgency and transparency.
Sincerely, [Your Full Name] [Your Address / Constituency]
This is useless. You can't stop Collective Shout (their campaign almost surely falls under First Amendment rights), and even if you could, 30 minutes later a new group pops up. Plus your message would fall completely on deaf ears for anyone who agrees with Collective Shout.
Bring attention to the fact that payment processors are acting as active censorship of legal content, rather than neutral infrastructure. Emphasize that if they can censor legal content, anything could be next, including but not limited to political donations of a specific party.
Collective Shout is a foreign organization attacking American companies. The First Amendment does not mean you get to speak and advocate in secret, and it only applies to American residents.
Not quite. The First Amendment applies to everyone within U.S. jurisdiction, not just residents or citizens.
The first, third, fourth, fifth, and ninth amendments have all been historically used to establish various rights of privacy.
That's not to say that one agrees with or disagrees with the outcome here, just that this argument isn't based in an understanding of the law.
The first amendment doesn't "apply" the people, domestic or otherwise, at all. It applies to the government, and what it can't do.
Thanks. So the steelman version is, the first amendment applies to the government when they restrict rights of residents, not just citizens.
Uh, Visa/Mastercard chose to do that. We're talking about payment processors who process trillions of dollars every year. They won't just bend Steam over backwards to make an Australian NGO happy.
It's either that Visa/Mastercard always want to censor porn, or they're pressured by government(s) to do so.
While they also deserve some backlash, I would focus on bringing attention to the payment processors.
Any corporation whose business is financial in nature and focused on facilitating commerce- banks, payment processors, and everything else- should be required to function as a common carrier. They should be allowed to alter prices to adjust for provable differences in risk, for example if transactions involving a particular seller or a particular class of product have a much larger than average dispute rate- but they should not be allowed to deplatform any customer for any reason not directly related to fraudulent or illegal behavior.
It reminds me of net neutrality.
Net neutrality exists defacto in US and Canada.
If we've learned anything from the current US administration, it's should be that defacto is only as stable as consensus is, and takes unacceptably little to subvert.
It really does not, considering all the wiggle room ISPs and websites abuse.
Any example in US/Canada in the context of ISPs specifically? Look, I like to rant about my ISP and their pricing, but I don't see where and how they violate net neutrality specifically.
It's kind of on the border but ISPs are extorting money from Netflix for no good reason.
Over 20K games, book, and other content have been removed with no warning to customers and creators. All because of pressure from Visa and Mastercard, a duopoly propped up by puritans and authoritarians.
It's not the payment processors applying the pressure, it's coming from regulators, through a strategy called jawboning: https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/six-things-about-jawboning
Do you have any further reports on this ? All the news are just reporting the action by payment processor, not much on who is pressuring them to do so.
It's difficult to track down threats, which is the primary means of jawboning, and courts often okay with them, despite the significant conflict with the first amendment. There are many cases of it becoming public though, showing how prevalent it is. It was the primary concern in the Twitter Files (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files) and in the Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart case, (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca7/15...) the Sheriff in Cook County Illinois tried to follow through with the threat, but was overturned by the courts, who tend to have a much stronger response to follow-through than threat itself, despite most of the effectiveness coming from threats.
Also, politicians are constantly threatening to revoke section 230 of the communications decency act, without which hosting any kind of user-generated content, from forums to video streaming to social media, would be effectively impossible in the US, because everything posted would need to be censored before ever being displayed.
There is a lot of paranoia and conspiracy thinking here. Itch in the article says that the main group is Collective Shout which is against violence against women and girls: https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
Collective Shout is just the front and their purpose is to take the heat for this.
There is no chance in hell an organization like that wields anything close to the power required to force these kind of decisions.
Either it is the payment processors or the regulators, or a combination of both, or some other kind of group behind the scenes. Personally I don't know what the true answer is, but it's clearly not some activist organization.
It's not power, it's volume. Groups like Collective Shout are "squeaky wheels". They send enough letters/phone calls/emails to a payment processor, often via the company's legal team, often citing the processor's own terms and conditions, until the company caves from essentially peer pressure and takes all the whining and pushes it back onto their customers (vendors like Steam and Itch).
It doesn't take a lot of people/very big organization or a lot of money to do, just a willingness to be loud and obnoxious, but in a legal way.
It's the same thing with DMCA trolls that send takedown letters to demonetize things like YouTube channels. They don't need a lot of people/power/money, just a willingness to complain in volume and leave the evidence and fact finding to other people and/or automated systems like YouTube's auto-DMCA.
I do not see evidence that they are against violence against women and girls, only that they are claiming to be.
* claim to be against
This is about power, not preventing violence.
It is classic 1970s TERF stuff. Dworkin identified real problems, but her solutions are bad and make the actual problems worse by targeting already-targeted people for greater policing. What they do do is give suburbanite women the rush of power and control, building their own little evangelical theocracies.
And in turn they are ultimately being pressured by Evangelicals.
The pressure against Valve came from Collective Shout, a non-religious feminist NGO.
> feminist
The founder of collective shout Melinda Tankard Reist is against abortions. They are also working with a lot of conservative organizations.
Sounds more like reactionaries in feminist clothing pretending to care about feminism for tactical reasons. Especially as their actions are hurting LGBTQ+ people.
It also the perfect storm to drive more people towards the right by "look those evil feminists are taking our games". Even though these people are not representative for progressive feminism.
Believe it or not, but not all feminists are progressive. Some think that women in porn is negative to all women. Same with abortion.
There is also no reason why feminism would need to support LGBT? The point of feminism should be to support women.
> There is also no reason why feminism would need to support LGBT?
Because lesbian, trans and generally queer women exist?
Even if you were to only care about cis hetero women, it is silly to think that transphobes will only keep attacking trans women. As lot of cis women have been "transvestigated", have been harassed in bathrooms for "looking trans" and so on.
So even cis women will ultimately suffer if no one speaks up against bigots. The window of what they are allowed to wear, look like, how they are supposed to behave gets smaller and smaller.
The enemy is the same. The same patriarchal reactionary ideology that wants to punish any difference to the imagined norm. Ultimately it is a class war and the rich pricks are winning.
It is liking saying "why should I defend Jews, I am not a Jew.". Sure they might not come for you first but they will come for you eventually. United we are strong. Divided they will get us one by one.
If you are pretend to be feminist but throw your trans sister under the bus, you are a traitor not a feminist.
It is mostly the T that feminists have issues with, though the Ls have significantly higher rates of domestic abuse than any other relationships, so I could see some feminists having criticisms. A biological man going into a women's bathroom makes many (most?) biological women feel unsafe. Many feminists think that women feeling unsafe is not a good a thing and are fighting against it.
To call women who want to feel safe in a bathroom a traitor to feminism is just so ridiculous and is a betrayal of women. I haven't look at any stats, but from I have been seeing it appears like the so called trans-exclusionary feminists are growing regardless if you call them a traitor.
Wanting women to feel safe is such a basic tenant of feminism.
I wouldn't be surprised if significantly more cis women were harassed by anti transgender "feminists" in womens' restrooms than harassed by actual transgender women in womens' restrooms. People worrying about whether other people belong in a specific restroom are the real safety risk.