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.