Payment processors and financial institutions sure do seem to hold disproportionate amounts of power.
And a single woman and her organization seems to hold a disproportionate amount of power over the payment processors.
I don’t understand it. Payment processors could easily tell her to pound sand, but they don’t.
talk to anyone that works in the porn industry. Mastercard and Visa have ALWAYS been like this ever since the late 90s/early 00s. they set the rules for what the adult entertainment industry can produce and sell and only now are people discovering because of video games that they’ve been this way for decades.
Welcome to capitalism. 1 person and their company can influence an entire country while being top 10 retards.
Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article. They recently claimed credit for the campaign that saw payment providers pressuring the online storefronts to remove content the group deemed unacceptable.
It’s not hard to empathise with the folks behind Itch for being placed in an impossible position, but their lack of forewarning has left creators blindsided and in some cases, seemingly without income. “I wish we had gotten some warning from Steam and Itch,” wrote game developer Robert Yang on Bluesky, “but we already know it’s Collective Shout + payment processors waging culture war against LGBTQ people and sexual expression. I guess there’s nothing else for Steam and Itch to say”.
Personally speaking, I’d be willing to extend that good faith to Itch.io themselves, but they aren’t the one holding the gun to their own heads here. That’d be financial companies, pressured by Collective Shout, who themselves have ties to an organisation whose CEO once described gay marriage as an “unspeakable offence to God”. It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of expression these groups might decide to deem as unacceptable next.
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 listedFuck.
These.
Fucking.
Shitsucking
Subhuman
Leeches
We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn’t literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there’s no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.
Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)
There’s just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo
To me it’s insane that food also isn’t on that list. Anything that isn’t a luxury can’t be trusted to be handled by capitalism.
Putting the ridicoulous idea that governments are fair and transparent aside, payment processors need to be international. Otherwise, most countries will not be able to access services because their local payment processor is not supported by smaller websites.
However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality so they can’t discriminate payments. And EU could probably launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.
So you want Trump and MAGA politicians to be able to deny your payments instead?
The problem with “just let the government do it” is when the government is run by people like this.
So don’t let them.
Basically nothing works if no one cares about their community. One of the reasons Trump is in power right now is because of a deep seated American apathy for, like… everything.
Trump, et. al., are dismantling USPS, but I like USPS. It’s bad that they’re doing that.
How naive can you be? You think your vote matters here?
When every single district has been gerrymandered to death for 100 years, nobody’s vote really matters anymore.
How does Putin’s boot taste?
Oppression isn’t inevitable, even in the US, and you’ll never have anarchism if the state doesn’t put a stop to these oligopolies.
You are wildly off base if you think I have any love for that monster.
You are also completely wrong in that oppression is the natural state of power.
How naive can you be? You think your vote matters here?
When every single district has been gerrymandered to death for 100 years, nobody’s vote really matters anymore.This is a very Russian mindset and exactly the kind of beliefs that created Putin. I’m not saying you support him, but I’m saying you are giving him your support either way.
Your cynicism can’t defeat me, man. I am God’s holy warrior. I crush weak pessimism like yours beneath the weight of my iron will.
How is it you think private companies will be more easily coercible when Trump’s cronies are the private sector?
Rofl. Your god can eat a dick. I’ve seen exactly what your god does.
It’s easier to start a competing company than it is to start a competing government.
You need a powerful standing army for the latter, and standing armies are part of why we’re in the trouble we’re in.
It’s easier to start a competing company than it is to start a competing government.
Not when Trump’s government refuses to do anything about all the slapp suits PayPal levies against you for treading on their financial turf.
You need a powerful standing army for the latter,
Corporations, without oversight, just become warlords with their own standing armies. You’re not getting out of this one through the low effort of simply buying a different brand of latte, man, I’m sorry.
Do you really think most governments will administer payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner?
They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.
So you expect governments like the Trump administration or Saudi Arabia will less likely block porn games than for profit companies?
You do realise this happened because thousands of people called the payment processors to complain about it, which means with thousands of people, you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government, let alone a foreign government.
you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government,
Jesus christ.
Okay, buddy, I’m giving you homework: you need to attend 10 city halls and 5 protests by the end of this year.
Tell me when you guys finally get free healthcare and sane gun control laws.
How about something simpler, then? Get back to me when you guys finally stop funding Israel’s genocide.
Even easier? Get your government to stop vetoing any UN resolution for a ceasefire in Palestine.
Show me how easy it is to change your government’s mind. I’ll wait.
Why should it be easy? Do you only do things that are easy? Was World War II easy?
Your forefathers spent months, years, working on projects some of them didn’t even live to see completed. You want your activism to be easy? This is pathetic.
Of what use are you to humanity if the only victories you’ll reach for are ones doable over a saturday? Whose grandchildren should even bother to remember your name?
When we win this one back, I think VISA should restrict you specifically from buying any porn games.
Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.
And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.
But what’s important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can’t take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.
But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform’s decision to do a kind of business?
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
Payment processing should be treated like a utility.
That “treated like a utility” approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don’t like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be ran by the state.
Wonder how long it will take for them to start going after LGBT+ stuff. Hope I’m wrong.
They did, day 0.
It’s the same religious organization that went after them NSFW games on Steam. Like the games or not, it’s always a slippery slope with this kind of censorship.
Of course it would be the bible thumpers. Gotta stick their nose into everyone’s business.
The fact that they’ve been successful at censoring stuff is a problem. It will likely embolden them to do worse.
Not just successful. But praised.
Even on Lemmy, if you go check out the initial threads on the Steam censorship you’ll see lots of “It is just incest and furry shit. Of course that should be banned” style comments. Less so here, but plenty of other boards and influencers immediately then chimed in that porn addiction is the real problem and you should watch a stream of a nice bigoted white man rather than give in to it and blah blah blah.
And it didn’t even start there. It ALSO isn’t the start, but the attack on Pornhub a few years back was a big watershed moment where this exact same attack was used (pressure the credit card companies to not do business with a morally dubious site). On the surface? Pornhub is full of revenge porn and child porn so it needs to be destroyed. No rational person would disagree with that… and everyone quietly ignored all the data showing that (and this was early 2020s…) facebook and twitter and instagram and so forth had MUCH more of both of those. But hey, Pornhub Corp complied and actually instituted some REALLY good policies that more or less equates to signed consent forms for every single performer. And… they were still on the shitlist. But everyone had stopped caring.
If it’s against your religion to play porn games, fine. Don’t play them.
But fuck off if you think you can tell other people what not to play.
Well that is at least something Bitcoin could have fixed
And probably would have if it wasn’t being manipulated by speculators.
At this point I would only try something untraceable like Monero. I don’t want the moral police to come knocking to my house saying that I bought something against the glory of the Lord.
This is like shitting your pants to ward off bears.
If shitting your pants is cool, then I’m Miles Davis.
Wow, I might actually have to stop using itch.io, is nowhere safe from the craziest anymore? I dont even make NSFW games, but bending the knee to dickheads over some overtly religious bullshit isnt gonna work for me.
It wasn’t Itch.io’s fault, but the fact that payment processing has been globally monopolized and can force it’s own arbitrary will on anyone without recourse.
Blame Visa and MasterCard and the christofascist scum from Collective Shout, who is responsible for pressuring the processors into harming the stores and artists.
Agreed. Game and movie ratings already exist, who the fuck are they to say what we can/can’t access with MY credit card.
I don’t play those games nor use itch.io, but fuck this nonsense.
