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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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I really haven't been paying attention, can someone eli5 this whole situation with adult content and gatekeeping that's going on. I know about what the UK is doing but now it's coming to the USA? It's to stop kids from seeing lgbtq content right? Just papered over with "protecting kids"?
The world has enabled a monopoly on payment processing and as a result Mastercard and visa hold the keys to censorship in various domains. If they refuse to do business with your company because it’s too naughty you are basically locked out of receiving funds and starved from doing any commerce. All mastercard has to do is add you to their match database and you’re blacklisted from accepting credit cards from all vendors their partnered with, which is basically everyone in the fucking world
They should be limited to only denying things that are actually illegal like child pornography and drug trafficking since they are a pseudo government entity. But since they are a private business they instead are not content agnostic and refuse to do business with objectionable content that is legal but otherwise toxic to be associated with from a business perspective.
It’s the cloudflare vs tier 1 internet provider argument, basically. A tier 1 internet provider is basically a utility and content agnostic. That’s why they will route to disgusting content like kiwi farms, 8chan (when it had a website), etc. because unless there is a court order saying otherwise they have to show that content. But cloudflare, which controls access to a significant portion of the internet (like 50+% at this point), is privatized, and can decide they dislike a site or more likely that supporting it is toxic to the brand, and abandon it leaving it to get ddosed offline. No one cared when this happened to those right wing shitholes because they’re garbage but when the needle swings (like now) and left wing media gets targeted the precedent has been set that it is fine for them do to this.
Mastercard and visa (and paypal) have similarly done this before. They have taken small businesses and websites down numerous times because they do not want to be associated with controversial content. Sometimes it’s right wing nutjobs but it’s also kink stuff a lot of the time. It wasn’t really publicized before though.
Thanks now I have a better grasp on the situation!
Kind of bizarre that a monopoly would care so much about brand image
I wonder how feasible it would be to demand that payment processors drop some of the companies on the BDS list.
lgbtq content today, anything "unchristian" tomorrow
Step 1. out of context screenshots of feminists to depict them negatively on YouTube become popular around 2012
Now: modern day satanic panic.
my understanding is that this actually originates with an Australian christian group. their tactic consists of 1) targeting payment processors as a means of "going over the heads" of vendors so to speak and 2) start with content that most ordinary people would agree is objectionable (we're talking real CW i don't want to type that out stuff) and then 3) hope that lets you expand to much broader cultural censorship of much more popular media.
always papered over with "protecting kids" of course. these are the kinds of people that would say they're performing the Holocaust on behalf of the kids.
but how is this seemingly random Aussie group (I’ve never heard of this group until recently) powerful enough to force Mastercard and visa to rethink?
two important things here: they did quite a bit to masquerade as a secular action group and not a religious moralist group; it is actually quite unclear from anything i can find why exactly the payment processors caved so easily. its actual clients, itch.io and steam, dispute the claim that the listed games constitute illegal content. i'm not sure what exactly convinced them to side with this group. their website does not seem to lay out any particular action they're inciting like mass call-ins to the company headquarters or something annoying like that.
Apparently they use methods that target the boomer CEO executives e.g phone calls and mails. This seems to be quite more effective at getting noticed than social media campaigns that end up being filtered by some shit department before it ever reaches the top.
this round of it yes, but the processors have gone after other groups before over the years.