When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic?
None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal.
BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored.
So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt?
Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!
But the lack of reading comprehension on this site is making me lose my marbles.
I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with.
If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting.
Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.
Sounds news to me. Do you have any origin for this?
You might want to check that because it's not so cut and dried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.
There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.
The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally. That’s worth the investment than that pipe dream of a global, frictionless cryptocurrency.
Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.
What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.
But you're doing this with credit cards already? Different amounts, but still supporting everyone in a chain. If you want to "buy" something without supporting intermediates, then barter is the only way to go. Everything else requires common trust, and common trust comes with operating cost.
That's not true, at least not in general. Polygon (and USDT/USDC on Polygon) fees are near zero, Ethereum is lately very cheap, and even Bitcoin fees are no longer outrageous. EDIT: ...and Bitcoin Lightning is cheap.
A lot of p0rn payment processing is done in crypto for exactly the censorship reasons. If you can't use the payment processor, who cares what their fees are? (not saying they are cheaper or more expensive than crypto - I don't know)
Though almost all of the sponsors are from almost 6 months ago, so it might die in committee anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
> Operation Choke Point was an initiative of the United States Department of Justice beginning in 2013 which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies that, while operating legally, were said to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
There's a whole list on the Wikipedia article of the kinds of legal businesses that were targeted by this. Some of them make sense, but others look like very serious 1A and 2A violations.
Had to look into it a bit.
From looking at the text of the bill, it looks like the sponsor did not like Operation Choke Point [0], which was specifically targeting banks that did business with Payday Lenders, Ponzi Schemes, and other shady vendors.
This also included pornography, but I'm willing to bet that's not what Sen. Cramer was upset about. More likely, he's simply serving the interest of his donors.
He also might have extremist "small business" constituents that are perhaps selling racist/sexist/homophobic merch, and they don't like being told that their bank/credit card processors are refusing to process payments on that swag.
ammunition sales
ATM operators
cable box de-scramblers
coin dealers
credit card schemes
credit repair services
dating services
debt consolidation scams
drug paraphernalia
escort services
firearms sales
fireworks sales
get rich products
government grants
home-based charities
lifetime guarantees
lifetime memberships
lottery sales
mailing lists/personal info
money transfer networks
online gambling
pawn shops
payday loans
pharmaceutical sales
Ponzi schemes
pornography[5]
pyramid-type sales
racist materials
surveillance equipment
telemarketing
tobacco sales
travel clubsIt seems to me like if you thought something was good and then switched to thinking it was bad based just on who proposed it, you need to stop being prejudiced. Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.
You can read the bill's author (Kevin Cramer) discussing that bill and his motives for writing it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250715113010/https://fedsoc.or... ("Debanking: The Newest Threat to Free Speech and Religious Liberty?) (2024)
> [Senator Kevin Cramer] "...I've heard that one from some pretty big bank presidents - but they get a lot of noise in their left ear and you have activist investors and whatnot that are saying, hey, you know what? We don't like coal. We don't like oil, we don't like natural gas. We don't like private prisons, or we don't like ammunition shops or gun manufacturers or whatever the case might be, the entire category or industry and says, "Well, so we're not going to bank them. We're going to debank them. We're not going to bank them. You're disqualified from getting money from us.”, and they're starving these industries out. And all this really is, in my view, you guys is this is a political agenda where they're utilizing the leverage of the financial services sector to accomplish policy goals that they can't accomplish any other way."
If they are easy to sway in one direction, why not the other? Simply do what Collective Shout did, but in the opposite direction?
I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Now what?
If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
Step 4 gets you thrown in jail for violating AML.
The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible.
Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well.
But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media.
I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing.
That’s why.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
eliminate central promotion of abortion; comprehensive
sexuality education; and the new woke gender ideologyThis way, abusers can disagree about what constitutes abuse in private, but can form a bloc in public, unifying around the common ground that the boss's whims should be respected in matters where the bandying about of facts is taboo. Might makes right, etc.
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.
That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough. Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.
> (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Wow, not crypto, but GP fucking nailed it.
Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.
> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.
If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
Charge backs, etc... can be effectively solved by appropriately pricing in such risks (or not offering those services at all).
This isn't a payment processor issue, it's a political choice.
This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.
But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.
Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.
Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
I'm speaking of Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best chess players in the world. He is also a streamer on kick, and actually talks in the way I demonstrated. It's not an exaggeration, he actually repeats the same thought ~5 times in the regular.
He is the only kick streamer I know, so that's what I think of when I hear kick.
And yes, you need a lot of private capital to pull this off.
In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong.
Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726
> I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.
> So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.
> Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.
Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits.
What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.
2015 article that starts "For nearly a decade, PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa/MasterCard, and now Square, have systematically denied or closed accounts of small businesses, artists and independent contractors whose business happens to be about sex."
https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-02-paypal-square-and-big-ba...
Last Tuesday we got a notice that one of our merchant accounts was shutting us down. One of the card companies contacted them directly and told the bank to stop processing for us. The bank asked for more information, but the only thing they could get from the card company was that part of it had to do with "blood, needles, and vampirism."
https://mascherari.press/financial-censorship-when-banks-dec...
Feels like we really need something like India's UPI that doesn't have a central company imposing beyond-the-law level rules.
My pro-fascist brother-in-law with massive social anxiety hated it for some reason..
The government doesn't need to touch you to ruin you, if they can yank your payments.
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
I mean this sounds reasonable until you also consider that shows like Game of Thrones would then also be banned, and probably plenty of popular books.
Hell, you could use the same reasoning to target most video games, since most video games use some level of violence.
Worth pointing out that their definition of "right to object" is evidentially identical to "right to censor".
They are simply participating in the once-maligned "cancel culture" which was protected as "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". These kinds of escape hatches always have these results because one's enemies find a way to use them as well.
0: Just for the sake of argument. I'm not actually insulting you.
Why not? Like, I'm a full on anarchist, but how do you create any sort of functioning society without out people being able to say "we as a group don't like that shit and are going to do things to stop it from happening"? Like if burger king comes out and says "We sell dogs here now" am i not allowed to say "fuck this, I'm allergic to dogs but I loved whoppers, I'm going to picket outside BK until the king fixes this travesty of hamburgers?"
Again, I'm an anarchist so I have weird views on a lot of topics, but isn't this a problem that "the capital class wants to continue to have profit go up and to the right on their charts, they're cowardly and uncreative so they fear anything that destabilizes this movement on their charts, and large networks of people are the only thing that can utilize this fear to cause them to change their behaviors"?
Really? How is it different, specifically?
If you're a guest in my house and you say something racist and I ask you to leave...
Or you're a customer in my restaurant...
Or you work for the company I'm a ceo of...
Which one of those freedoms should I be disallowed from using?
(The actual issue here is that mastercard/visa are effectively a duopoly with no competition. The only reasonable way to have a monopoly provider of a vital service is to make it part of a democratic government)
They know this logic doesn't make sense. People are unfortunately happy to lie about it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
They insisted rock and roll, jazz, and dancing they didn't like were going to harm women too. Somehow that didn't seem to happen either.
RIP Ozzy.
If men don't, then neither should women, who are murdered at 1/10th the rate men are.
Trans people suffer a wildly higher rate of violent crime than either cis gender.
EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (189 comments)
Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (51 comments)
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (306 comments)
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)
When did pornography become protected speech?
For this specific topic in the US, it's necessary. The third prong of the Miller Test is "Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, 1966 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=101895573599950...)
Miller v. California, 1973 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=287180442152313...)
Jenkins v. Georgia, 1974 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=106399862265120...)
-- https://reason.com/2019/10/04/pornography-is-protected-by-th...
That said, there's a de facto duopoly on payment processing that gives these companies near government-level power to dictate terms. Realistic alternatives don't exist and would be insanely hard to start.
Not so sure about 4K video footage, though. Or videogames. That's more a 'freedom of art' issue.
Exactly, the Heritage Foundation doesn't define porn the same way a reasonable person might. From Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".
It should be up to individual platforms to moderate this content on a case by case basis, not the payment processors.
Ban all the games, I don't think videogames are very valuable.
Ban all TV shows, I don't think TV shows are very valuable.
Ban all televised sports, I think sports are very boring and not very valuable.
In fact, ban all the things I don't particularly find valuable.
Doesn't sound like you support free speech at all then if this is your red line. Criticism of politicians is needed to keep them in line. Being about to criticize the US government is true freedom.
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
Okay. If you have any wisdom or ideas, I'd love to hear them. But as is, this comment is about as effective as mine on fighting Visa/Mastercard. "Just come together and yell at Steam!"
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm ignorant of it. The big issue of the internet is that we are all scattered very wide and that makes it harder to collect ourselvves under one goal. And as of now, I'm a laid off tech worker (who doesn't live in SF) who has no real capital to contribute to such a cause. I feel powerless.
If none of us know, then the next alternative is "can we point to any existing organizations to throw support at"? Or at the very least, an adjacent organization who can tell us steps to take?
The basic sequence is simple:
Set up a Discord. Market it to attract a handful of early adopters. Run a book club using Organizing for Social Change[1] or Beautiful Trouble[2]. Along the way, you build shared language and alignment. People start to get a feel for tactics: collective letter campaigns, pressure targeting, framing, etc.
By the time you wrap the first book, you’ll have a core group with a working vocabulary and some trust. You’ll know how to set up a continuous recruitment and onboarding loop. You’ll be ready for a second round of action. For example, something sharper, louder, more public-facing. From there, it's just iteration after iteration.
The most important seed is a vision holder, someone whose primary job is building solid relationships and gradually offloading the core functions: facilitation, comms, outreach, tech, and education. Don't worry. You don't need money and you don’t need credentials. You need consistency above all, social fluency, emotional and logistical endurance, and a bit of luck.
Trust me when I say it's not easy, but the overhead is basically zero. The only real cost is showing up (again and again and again).
1. https://www.amazon.com/Organizing-Social-Change-Bobo-Kendall...
2. https://orbooks.mybigcommerce.com/beautiful-trouble-paperbac...
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.
I'm not sure I agree. In the context of gaming, perhaps, but most of the Internet traffic is basically pornography.
I’m quite sure there is not a lot of people paying for porn. The money people are making surely comes from ads and data hoarding.
I agree with this point but I don't agree with the premise. I don't really care about the censorship of porn, but it is a slippery slope to censorship in general. If you give them an inch they will take a mile.
I think there is sometimes a business justification of putting your foot in the ground, even if the short term consequences are harsh.
(Unaffiliated, I hold some pocket money on there not to run a Lightning node myself)
The on-chain transaction is just to "fund" a channel between two parties. These two parties can then make unlimited trasnfers between each other instantaneously for free. These nodes are organised in a network and can relay payment from other nodes as well. It's a bit like the Internet. You don't need to peer with everybody, you just need a path from A to B.
If you and I have a channel funded with 100 sat, we can move these around as many times as we wish, even on behalf of others, but if you need to transfer more than you have on your side, you need to fund the channel with another on-chain transaction. That's where the Phoenix 1% fee comes from, as they deal with this exact problem for you, so you don't have to worry about it.
Sort of defeats the purpose then, doesn't it? Why not just make lightning payments directly from your bitcoin exchange?
For all of the talk (hype) about how crypto has the potential to avoid the exact type of meddling and manipulation and pressuring we’re seeing now, it surprises me that no equivalents to PayPal have really popped up - that best that can be done is apparently something along the lines of what Linux was on the desktop a decade or two ago. Basically, before Valve and others picked up the slack and worked on things your average person actually cares about - notably, gaming and simple(r) to use desktop environments and software stores.
Where’s the flagship platform for payments that’s built on crypto but lets you ignore the technical details, that’s trivial to implement as a merchant and is a download away on app stores? If there are a few of those, why would anyone bother with these puritan payment processors?
I would argue it's worth investing infrastructure into it, for the same reason that valve has invested infrastructure into linux to gain leverage over microsoft. Without leverage, negotiations get ugly: see the Epic vs Apple saga.
* anything using proof-of-work is still gonna be a hard sell * good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD without ever having to give a shit about the constantly-fluctuating value of BTC * fun times ahead when you get big enough for the government to notice you and start requiring you to comply with all kinds of arcane regulations
2. Just do the conversion at the time of sale.
3. Government prohibition and restriction of our rights is a terrible problem and it's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. It's a necessary fight if only to keep government power in check, unless one really believes the State is always right and always has our best interest in mind. I don't.
I think it works out fine with fixed/float exchanges. These are exchanges that let you agree on a fixed exchange rate for a small (<=%1 fee) or trade at a floating exchange rate. The fee covers the price risk
Even companies working in large amounts of cash end up hiring companies to handle the cash logistics and all the other complications in dealing with it.
It is a very liquid asset - easy to move and easy to sell.
Bitcoin can be used as currency for occasional transactions between individuals. But you don't want your business to depend on it. It doesn't scale, not due to technological reasons, but because of legal issues and customer experience expectation.
Bitcoin adoption is a chicken and egg problem. But my guess is that censoring porn creates a very big incentive for people to start using it.
I personally worked in the crypto payment processing space and we had to say no to many very well known porn companies for this reason.
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
& want to bring back laws that sex would only be used to 'recreate' not recreation.
But let's be real here, they were a bunch of jerks. There's a reason it took no time flat for Rhode Island to exist.
Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?
What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?
Dutch society in New York?
Poor Scots in Appalachia?
And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?
I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.
I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.
In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.
The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.
A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.
A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."
We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.
During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.
One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.
The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."
But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.
And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.
While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.
Here is an article from the Reykjavik Grapevine that deep dives on it better than I could: https://grapevine.is/mag/2021/05/07/ask-an-expert-why-is-por...
And for a broader overview, see "Pornography laws by region" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
There are ongoing debates about how this applies to Onlyfans etc, with one faction claiming all sex work is abuse even if you're doing it solo in the privacy of your own home, so payments to Onlyfans should be banned.
The frame the problem as being vulnerable to escalating customer demands if you make custom content. Like, "insert this object and take a photo, insert this larger object and take a photo, insert this uncomfortably large object and take a photo, insert this painfully large object and take a photo, insert this clearly damaging object and take a photo".
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/fda-vapes-vaping-elf-bar-juul-80b...
If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)
And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.
Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?
And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to
1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and
2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?
I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.
Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
You don't have to agree that it should be banned, but you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom.
A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.
The issue with GGP is that in context it appears to be an argument in favor of increasing restrictions (ie in favor of the events that the article is talking about) despite disclaiming that "You don't have to agree that it should be banned". That's analogous to a loaded question. Expressing agreement with the literal wording of GGP seems to also carry an implication of agreement with some rather different things as well.
It's perfectly fine to say "I think porn is generally unhealthy and would suggest people not partake, but I think they ought to be able if they'd like". It's also reasonable to say "I think things like porn, alcohol, cigarettes, violence, and/or gambling should be accessible to adults, but they should not be able to advertise in spaces where children are likely to visit (like an online video game store), and stores should check ID to purchase those things, and 'paying via advertising' should not act as a loophole for those ID checks." There's a wide range of reasonable positions to debate that are entirely shut down by basically implying that people are unreasonable to disagree.
So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.
Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.
Though Steam is not weak. But small-time game devs probably don't care to fight unless they're making bank.
What makes you think they aren't? Because it hasn't been discussed in the HN bubble?
What else should we arbitrarily ban based on this criteria? It doesn't seem to hold up to much scrutiny.
Sure video games can be unhealthy. Maybe I'm weird but I would much rather prefer my son plays video games 8 hours a day than watches adult content 8 hours a day. Let's stop pretending like they're comparable.
Isn't it the end result that matters? Presumably you'd like your son to become a functional adult. Neither of the scenarios you describe there sound like that to me (excepting perhaps "professional competitive gamer" but somehow I suspect most parents don't really approve of that outcome either).
It's no worse than reading a lot of books or watching a lot of TV shows, activities that are not disparaged as much.
That's the context of this entire discussion though, that these things are being banned…
Or maybe put another way, if my child was at a neighbors house and one of the parents watched an adult movie with my child I would have a huge issue. If they watched Terminator or something similar, I would have much less of an issue.
They're not even close to the same thing.
A better question would be if you would be more comfortable with your child being shown porn or snuff movies. For me the answer would be neither, in about an equal measure
I think parent comment is asking you to consider why you think young children watching violent movies is way less of a problem. E.g. "Terminator or similar" - why draw the line there?
I'd actually hypothesise that if you locked three sets of teenage boys in rooms, one with only porn games, one with only social media and one with only sitcoms, that the first group would likely emerge the healthiest of the three. I'm basing this on my bias towards activity and that nobody seems to have bothered with actually doing research on porn games, the organisation pushing for these bans included [1], instead proxying research on porn as a whole for this specific category.
Whatever you want. Substance abuse rates. Marriage or long-term partnership rates. Employment. Income. Wealth. Serum cortisol.
My assumption is someone actively participating in something, even something unhealthy, is going to maintain cognitive and executive function above someone simply observing. (To the degree these games may be destructive, I'd argue it's in its game mechanics.)
We have no evidence pornography causes negative outcomes across population. (Versus among a vulnerable subset.) We have lots of evidence for social media addiction causing broad psychological issues, particularly in children.
I'm genuinely curious to see how this plays out in the American partisan landscape.
Conservatives around the world talk to each other.
The real motivations seemingly have nothing to do with protecting women, which appears to simply be a palatable facade for the true intention to suppress all depictions of sexuality, including the depictions that offer good-faith representation of historically marginalized groups.
And video games are just art.
So, women, drawing and writing stuff they like, being banned and losing an income stream.
I don’t think drawing or writing porn is exploitative at all.
If somehow the puritanical mob banned stuff like that, I'd be genuinely sad.
There's a tendency for social liberals to see their view as the only legitimate one. Sometimes they are right. But this is an area where there is lots of international push back from undeveloped, developing, and even many developed socially liberal countries.
That's getting somewhat off topic though. In the context of this thread it's merely the observation that attributing this to "puritans" or "christianity" or "US history" is rather misguided. The US and western Europe are very much the outliers here.
It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.
To be clear, I'm not accusing you of promoting these practices, just asking you to clarify your position.
I think it also follows from such a principle that in general the relevant reasoning should be explicitly articulated when discussing the topic.
> It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.
Suppose that a thing is explicitly chosen by the majority of the world's population, or dictated by the majority of governments, or imposed by the majority of cultural norms. I am suggesting that dismissing it in favor of your own reasoning is fine, but that doing so lightly is arrogant and misguided.
Humans engaged in tribalistic groupthink committing moral atrocities is a tale as old as time.
It is never wise to accept a majority or status quo position reflexively without thoroughly interrogating the ideas held within. A great deal of majority positions are morally reprehensible and ethically indefensible, and that has always been the case throughout human history.
Human sacrifices of the innocent were not a "different culture", they were barbaric murders that were always wrong. They were also normative in much of the world for much of human history.
The values espoused (but not always upheld) by western societies that many of us take for granted today are the exception to the rules throughout human history - rules that promoted needless bloodshed, widespread suffering, and persecution of the innocent.
It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned. To assert otherwise isn't simply innocuously defending pluralism, it's defending atrocities.
All life is inherently valuable and I will not apologize for asserting that, no matter how many billions of people disagree for tribalistic, persecutory reasons.
Perhaps the fact that you made a claim without bothering to explain this supposed "extensive, careful, and deliberate thought" of yours? Also the fact that your tone generally comes across as ideologically charged; in my experience zealots rarely engage in patient critical thinking.
Certainly I don't suggest that one should blindly favor the status quo when given the chance to think things through. However absent careful thought the status quo is the obvious default. When in Rome and all that. There is nearly always a reason that things are done the way they are done although often the particulars will be quite convoluted.
> It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned.
Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.
No, that was not my intention. You are right to object here. I allowed myself to get worked up by inadvertently framing your more methodological perspective as a moral perspective, and your perception that I came on too aggressively in response to that is correct. I'm sincerely sorry. This wasn't an attempt to attack you or your character, but it did come out looking like that, and that was my fault. My bad on this one.
However that isn't a free standing view on my part. I acknowledge that the conservatives raise a number of hard hitting points about corrosion of the social fabric, but observe that even jurisdictions with far stricter laws than the US still appear to suffer the same ills (in addition to those caused by the laws themselves).
My view is that this is due to modern technology having fundamentally changed the social dynamic. Continually eroding civil liberties in a doomed attempt to regain some imagined ideal of the past strikes me as nothing more than an obscene parallel to the war on drugs.
Given that we clearly recognize that certain activities are detrimental to society when flaunted in public surely we could apply the same principle to various forms of expression? It's not much of a leap - you'll already land yourself in trouble if you go around shouting your head off or intimidating people for example. Analogous to alcohol consumption, I'd much prefer a clear distinction between standards for public displays, secluded public business establishments, and private gatherings than the bizarre scenarios that the current obscenity laws inevitably give rise to.
See the Steven Donziger[1] case. It was just done more Americanly. Private corporation threw their full weight at a lawyer defending an indigenous population who had their water supply poisoned. Chevron hired a private prosecutor who had him locked up on house arrest for years.
Similar to this porn case, the censorship and suppression is coming from market interests rather than government, but they're nearly equally untouchable and even more difficult to hold accountable. You can't vote out the leadership of mastercard or chevron.
I’ve been following the case closely. This is the first time anybody has claimed he’s a journalist, AFAIK.
Am I missing something?
Edit: according to Wikipedia he worked as a journalist for three years before attending law school. So I guess he’s an ex-journalist, and ex-lawyer for that matter.
But calling the persecution of journalists is false. Maybe persecution of environmental lawyers, but lawyers, unlike journalists, are heavily regulated, and face much higher liability for bad acts.
Then I realized that it was all wrong, countries accept western liberal democracy only as long as the free aid keeps flowing. And the libdems were in for a rude awakening if they ever ran out of kibble.
Hence comments about the U.S. being extremely puritanical, when anyone can look at laws throughout the world and see that the U.S. is more open on most of these issues than the vast majority of countries.
It’s a very strange form of self-loathing. I’ve discussed it with a lot of people from non-Western countries, and they find this behavior extremely confusing.
Most people are unaware of Australia's long history of censorship which continues to this day.
Like slavery, smallpox, and tipping, Puritanism was Europe's gift to the new world.
What would you do if you harbored that belief?
I hate to ask the question again, but if you believed the same thing and felt like you empirically proved it, how would you behave?
Granted, I've skimmed, but I'm genuinely not seeing it [1].
The closest is this study [2], which counted how many times thirty-eight women "who self-identified as having experienced unwanted or non-consensual sexual experiences in relationships" and were "recruited via social media," when "given the opportunity to reflect on their experiences of [intimate partner sexual violence], with prompting to speculate about their partner’s motivations or any underlying causes for the violence" mentioned pornography. That's...that's not a study.
[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/research
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10778012209713...
So then what? Since they really believe what they said, how can you blame them for their actions?
You might argue that since they are wrong, their beliefs should be changed. Well sure, maybe they should.
You could commission a study to confirm that, then try to persaude people. Perhaps form a collective to persuade others of that belief. Oh wait....
>> It doesn't matter if what they did is or isn't real science. They believe it is, and so as far as they are concerned, it's proven
There is a massive gap between someone having done something and their (wrongly) believing they've done it.
They just want to hide behind "those games made me do it" when they eventually get caught.
I’m sure that there are dating sims that are just fine, but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff . Some of them even enter the morally grey areas imo.
Sure, games can be beneficial for living out fantasies, but how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content? The bottom line of my point is that I think this type of content is too easily available nowadays, and especially too much of it.
I personally don't see the difference. Violence is a primal instinct and studies on video games and violence only concluded short term increases in aggression. Why would a similar conclusion with yet another primal instinct not conclude with short term increased arousal? I don't see arousal as inherently dangerous.
>how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content?
Do you feel that people just find "sexist content" from some algorithm, or that already sexist people seek out content to conform to their views? I have my criticisms of Steam, but I am glad they are one of the few bastions left that aren't driven by "engagment boosting" algorithms. Just a simple tag system recommending other content with similar tags and good ratings.
I agree with the undertone that we need better sex education. Those early years where we don't sell content to 10 year olds should be used to talk about the dangers before sending them off. Too bad such groups also go for an all-abstinence approach.
Seriously, outside of special, clearly delineated cases with indisputable negative externalities (especially on the production side), when has [effectively] banning certain [types of] media been a net good? Seems to me that all it's good for is political repression and fueling moral panics.
Also, I don't see how women in porn are any more objectified than men. In the porn that I've seen, men are 100% objectified and portrayed as only good for "one thing".
several Otome and BL content was hit by this as well. I don't think this is about protecting the women and children.
>not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
It's not 2005 anymore. Show me any modern AAA game still doing this.
in terms of porn... well, yes. Your reward is sexual gratification with your chosen mate in any given game. Porn is inherently objectifying. I don't think you're seen enough of the porn market if you think porn is focused onobjectifying women, though.
>but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff .
We're on Hacker News. I really hope we had enough background growing up to not wish for "weird" to be illegal.
"what is the best sex position?"
[blah, blah, ... non-answer]
"How do you get a sex change?"
[long detailed answer]
I'm also not entirely sure what this has to do with the comment you're replying to.
the point was that content is blocked almost by default nowadays
Next you will ban games where you are killing people instead of focusing on real killers? I would prefer we have laws for what is legal and not let religious extremists decide what music we are allowed to listen, what type of books and games should we play, I guess there is no evidence they can bring to ban this content so they push their FUD around.
So please either make it illegal or stop focusing on virtual crimes, maybe focus on real crimes or use those money religious people have on helping real people.
Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games? [this is the only addition that I wasn't aware of from previous investigations, but I still don't think it's valid to call it a "slippery slope" yet]
A lot of customers don't want to be shown such games in the first place (keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice).
We can argue about whether "it's better to sell pedos fake content rather than real content" etc. (keep in mind that some of these things are actually illegal in many countries even when no real people are involved), but if so we should be explicit that that is our argument, and not falsely claiming this is some attack on sex in general. (Also keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions.)
> Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
> Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
So ban the things you believe are the problem instead of blanket banning everything.
So they want to censor far more than just porn.
If it really is an example of a rare false positive, a manual fix for that one specific game is a reasonable thing to seek, without giving the pedos their heyday like most of the comments here suggest.
Do you really think Visa and MasterCard should be making decisions what is acceptable for like everyone?
Otherwise any random weirdos from UK or Australia will censor what are you allowed to watch or play in the US.
And China can also put pretty good pressure on payment processors too. They'll certainly want many games gone since they are worse than pedos for CCP.
Games that are pedophilia is very different form games that appeal to potential pedophiles. The first one is not only not allowed on Steam but outright illegal overall. Steam doesn't even want you using adult models in their games for this very reason; they don't want to need to verify ages.
For the latter: I guess so? It's really hard to determine what triggers someone to commit crime. I don't think any but the most blatant cases are as simple as "play video game with teenagers in it -> I want to have sex with a real teenager". This is why it's better to focus on who's victmized instead of who may or may not be influenced.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
there are 1000 games released on steam every month. A game's existence isn't a compelling factor to buy it.
With that in mind for all subsequent answers: yes, I dont mind games with rape being sold. I will not buy it, but if they find a market: so be it.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Sure. Maybe this is a hot take, but I never had a stronger attraction to my mom because I watched porn of someone else banging their "stepmother". I'm into it because it's other people doing forbidden acts (or toeing the line with the "step" aspects), not because I'm interested in doing the forbidden act myself. This goes all the way back to Romeo and Juliet; people are engaged by romance fighting against societal norms.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games?
GTA has been a thing for some 30 years now. I think this boat has set sail. But yes.
>keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice
okay. So how about we fix that instead of just banning content we don't like. Steam is already too strong for my liking, but they very much can enforce a system where an account is suspended for too many clearly bad tags.
>keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions
Itch has a donation system on all game pages. So that's not quite the case here. Also, pressurign payment processors will endanger the entire store, even if every NSFW game is free.
Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn? Rolling coal and other egregious pollution? Online gambling? Abortion? Fentanyl?
Side stepping local country government, and applying pressure to payment processors to enforce your own rules globally should not be able to happen. Even a government should not be able to dictate what other countries do.
Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives. For his view to be even considered, he should be required to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that whatever he is against is actually harmful. And after that, only after that, should the voting whether this finding should influence public policy begin.
People should be allowed to harm themselves when they are informed about the consequences. Similarly, society should be allowed to harm itself because not everything has to be a race to the bottom of productivity and strength.
Do abortions lower the birth rate and are more populous societies stronger? Even _if_ the answers are yes to both, I don't see why any society should optimize this metric to the extreme. And theological arguments quickly fall apart in the first step of proving harm.
The pragmatics of activism prove contrary to this ideal. The reality is that this is a failed argument and it will continue to fail regardless of how often it's repeated. I hate to say it, but the only way to counter is to win at the activism game rather than complain about the rules.
Are you, personally, harmed by someone watching porn?
Maybe it makes society as a whole weaker compared to other societies but that doesn't mean your society actually loses anything. Countries have nuclear weapons and multi-national defense pacts now. Just because China has several times the population of the US and could win a conventional war, doesn't mean it's gonna invade.
We don't live in tribes of a few hundred people who are constantly on the brink of starvation and/or genocide anymore. But many people are still governed by instincts from that environment.
A better example would be to consider that pre-op transgender people, namely MtF, can share the same spaces that were reserved to biological women. For instance in sport. If I'm a woman and now I have to compete with a biological man in MMA because society chose that it's the new normal, yes, I'm going to suffer from it.
If society decides that it's fair to feed Tiktok to toddlers who end up having their neurons fried, I'm going to suffer from it as well when they grew up as they won't be able to do their job well. If society decides that it's fair to allow CSAM everywhere, I guess that a few children are going to suffer as it becomes mainstream.
We don't live in a vacuum.
And the difficult thing about that is that externalities do exist for some things. Pollution affects everyone, for instance, and those externalities need to be accounted for. It's not a trivial definitional problem to distinguish valid externalities from spurious/invalid claims, unfortunately.
That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.
>Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?
My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.
simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)
Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.
This seems to suggest that broad sexual preferences are remarkably stable.
When a river had carved a canyon, it is hard to redirect it. That doesn’t mean the canyon was always there.
End of page 3, the author does a litterature review and finds that current studies show that exposure to CSAM increases probability of offending for those with predispositions.
The first is that you're banning free expression, and banning free expression is inherently harmful.
There's also the displacement theory - with the legal content being much more accessible and regulated to ensure minors aren't involved in production, it displaces illegal content that does harm minors.
In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.
How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?
Thing is though, if violent video games caused people to become violent, Columbine wouldn't have been a rare incident.
But it's a difficult one. People play video games but for most people it doesn't change their moral compass; it doesn't make them think ripping out people's spines is normal or acceptable. It desensitizes them to a point I suppose.
Does porn, porn games or simulated CSAM make people normalize objectification and violence towards people and children? I can't answer that, and I don't know if there's been any studies towards especially CSAM since it's such a taboo. N=1, but 20+ years of porn on occasion hasn't turned me into some rampant sex addict.
Evidence. If you think something is harmful to society, you have a hypothesis. The next step is to test it. Not assume it's true and ban everything.
I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful. If I had to hazard a guess, and this is again just a hypothesis, I'd actually suspect that a teenager exposed to porn games is less likely to suffer mental-health issues than one on algorithmic social media or forming intimate connections with chatbots.
If cigarette was banned from the beginning, we would still see people getting mad without much evidence.
The truth is the evidence is coming half a century after when everyone got cancer.
Precautionary principle should always prevail.
That's why we just don't go full GMO, and you would still not wait for any proof that "it's harmless".
You also don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless.
Additionally, without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette).
TL;DR: You actually need a proof, but it's a proof that it's harmless and not the other way around.
Yes. Then the evidence was suppressed for decades more. We have no analogy here.
> Precautionary principle should always prevail
Why? Why assume the status quo is perfect? Also, what part of pornography isn't embedded into the human status quo?
> don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless
There is no such thing as "full proof."
> without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette)
Now do vaccines, antibiotics, filtered water, the agricultural revolution and every other life-saving invention.
No one said that. But you should fool yourself saying that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Here is your own quote:
> I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful.
If the precautionary principle should always prevail, then yes, that's what's being said.
In this case, it's difficult to even disentangle what the status quo is. Pornography, this group's bogeyman, is millenia old. Computer games, decades. The combination is a bit novel, but it's also more precedented than these bans.
> I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful
Yeah. I see evidence they're demanded by the people who we're putatively protecting, however. And I see lots of evidence of other harmful things that aren't banned. Herego, why the fuck are we kneejerking on this?
This makes sense. If anybody at any point thinks that something might be bad, it should immediately and permanently be prohibited for everyone. We don’t need a mechanism to check this because people are never mistaken or misled, and there is no such thing as a bad actor.
Since the principle should always prevail, it applies to people as well. If anybody thinks that another person could do harm in the future, they should be allowed to kill them in order to protect society from harm.
A system where the only rule is “every person gets to make the rules for everyone else” isn’t the stupidest imaginable thing because
Of course, these things don't live in a vacuum; the manufacturers of e.g. pesticides have a vested financial interest in selling their product, because money. They pay for scientific studies in favor of their product, they schmooze (= bribe) with decision makers and politicians, they overwhelm the system, they take their product global and sell it to whoever is buying, etc.
Same with cigarettes or asbestos or lead paint; it's part "we didn't know" because it's long-term effects or the science wasn't there yet, but part "shut up and buy my product" too.
Anyway, proof that it's harmless is not easy to get in certain cases, not when the effects only show up long-term or when the science doesn't yet know how to test. Was science at a point where they could test for the presence and endocrine effects of microplastics in the human body?
This is sort of like Jordan Peterson's claim that something is true if it improves evolutionary fit - a claim that seems reasonable on the surface but is rotten nonsense inside.
For them, n=1 is enough evidence. For their moral compass or larger scale goals, n=1 is one too many.
There will always be some people - teenagers or otherwise - that develop mental health issues from e.g. porn games. But there's people developing mental health issues from Farmville or ChatGPT supposedly turning sentient and sharing the infinite Truth of the universe too. Somehow those aren't an issue.
It's not about preventing mental health issues. It's not about protecting women.
And in the case of addiction like drugs or gambling, instead of stigmatizing the victims, they should be there to support them.
Let people make their own decisions, not the government.
It seems fine now when it's something you don't like but what happens when it's a situation that isn't so agreeable? like being legally oblidged to do business with South Africa during apartheid or working with a chocolate company that (allegedly) used child slave labor to farm it's cocoa??
The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society".
I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
> No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.
There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.
Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea and if anything they have some of the worst gender toxicity.
> Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea
Making something legal or illegal is just signaling. The real part is how it actually is implemented in practice. And as you imply, things are pretty complex. We really need to be careful about our own tendencies to want things to be simple. It always backfires...
I hope with this added context that my previous comment will make much more sense and you can interpret it closer to what I intended.
I'll just add, I don't think most people work in those absolutes. So I'd be wary of jumping to the extreme interpretation. People might interpret you as being disingenuous and using the logical fallacy "logical extreme" or "reductio ad absurdum". But I'm pretty sure you're not doing that because then I'd be grossly misinterpreting you, right?
The debate is weather or not credit card providers should ever be able to blackmail independent companies, for any reason they feel like.
I say no.
If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.
If we are to talk about exploitation, then capitalism itself is subject to be attacked and prohibited.
If we work for a living, we sell our bodies to someone else for a time (40h a week or more). Does it really matter if we work on a factory floor doing parts, sitting and coding at a desk, or having sex in front of a camera? Labor is labor.
Sure its the christian 'sex is bad' in various stripes (puritanical to catholic to baptist etc). But in reality, its just different labor.
Now, capitalism in exploitive in that you generate X value, and you get a small percentage of your labor's output. Some owner is who collects the surplus.
So if exploitation is the problem, then its time to start looking at worker cooperatives, unions, banning shows like Shark Tank, and all the capitalist propaganda.
But no, its just 'sex icky'. We won't actually look at the root of exploitation.
The human experience has never been pure reason. A picture of a naked person will have wildly different effects than a picture of a dog, even though you could technically say they're both "just pixels on a screen". Reductionism doesn't get an argument anywhere; it's too commonly an intellectually lazy defense of the vulgar.
I prefer reductionist rather than the current standard of 'whatever 9 fucks think of it'.
This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.
Sounds great, where do I sign?
Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
> it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person.
Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...
Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals.
In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.
It may not be good logic, or even self-consistent, but everyone is always using some logic. I'm saying "find it if you want to convince them." Very few people see themselves as evil, or more accurately intentionally choosing evil. And I say this as someone who was once a member of a religion that has its own state. You're not going to pull people out of that by acting like they're evil. They're trying very hard to be good, just misguided.
There's an saying that I believe was popularized during the Cold War. I think you should consider it.
The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders.You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy.
Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die.
It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.
People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn.
So is the NoFap/incel movement.
There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories.
People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.
How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.
what damage is it causing?
(Except, remove the last panel)
Like, the people with the “blueberry expansion” one, you really think they were born with that? No, of course not, that would be dumb.
I think the main reason people put forth the “latent fetish” explanation is in order to argue that pornography is harmless.
As for why it harms me?
The purpose of sexuality is for relations with one’s spouse. On average, I expect it to be counterproductive in that regards. Most women wouldn’t find it appealing, and looking for specifically women who would find the idea appealing would substantially restrict the pool to search among. Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible?
And, generally, lust promotes lust.
Says who?
That's not actually true.
That doctrine has been used to guilt-trip people and control their lives for many hundreds of years - but it isn't true. People are complex. We're not self-replicating machines whose sole purpose is to breed.
Irl, if a crazy person gets on a soapbox and starts shouting at everybody, then people can shout back. Online, anybody who flamebaits is protected by the platforms and can censor the responses. They delete opposing comments, shadowban users, harsh language usually gets automatically deleted by the platform - and all that shouting-down is actually just counted as "engagement" which algorithmically boosts and spreads the bad idea further. The argument just directly profits the person with the bad idea, and incentivizes them to come up with even worse ideas to make everybody even madder.
This kind of censorship is causing a whole lot of problems right now.
The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation.
[0] Magic The Gathering Online eXchange
I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.
I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.
That's their framing, it's not what they actually do.
If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand.
They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does.
In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.
They aren't talking about actual harm to individuals within that society. Porn is a useful lever to them, because it is documented to cause some harm to some individuals, and they can gather support from the general public on that basis. But it's not their primary concern.
Their primary concern is that consumption/tolerance of such media damages society as a whole, dragging it further from their puritan western-christian centric view of what society should be.
They don't give a shit about individuals, just society as a whole.
No they say they give a snot about society a whole.
I can say a lot of things too.
If anything, it's actually the other way around. Their puritan views of what makes a healthy society is what informs their likes/dislikes.
They are legitimately fighting for what they legitimately think will make a healthier society. If you assume otherwise, you will misjudge them.
This defines them as identical. Morals are what people think makes society better, and their absence worse.
There's lots of other ways to dislike something besides morals.
For example, I don't like spectator sports. It's not a moral issue, just taste, so me not watching sport is genuinely sufficient.
Conversely, I think analytics tracking is harmful to society even though I also find it interesting to see the results, and should be banned. Me simply not using it isn't enough.
Anti-porn people? I disagree with them. If they are motivated by religious fundamentalism, then I disagree with the foundation of their worldview. But this is how it is not simply enough to respond with "if you don't like it, don't buy it".
You've indicated two things here which you assert are legitimate:
* Their fight for their goals
* The thinking underlying these goals
On the latter: Nobody except the people doing the thinking can (at least with current technology) truly know. And it may be entirely unimportant. My best guess is that u/fenomas has it about right; their aesthetic seems to have informed a manufactured narrative about societal impact. It may be that these people have personal unresolved sexual trauma which is activated by these subjects. Surely no matter their reasons, they deserve to be treated with compassion. But I don't think that u/fenomas is being illogical here, or failing to steelman their position; I think that it's perfectly reasonable to question someone's basis for advocacy of censorship.
However, on the former, I more strongly disagree with your use of the word "legitimately". Using the heavy hand of the state (including the unfortunate configuration in which payment processors need its anointment and good graces and are thus vulnerable to political pressure) to censor the internet - a resource characterized chiefly by its cross-cultural and cross-political availability and unity - is not a legitimate tactic. The internet does not seem to tolerate this variety of censorship; in every instance, the Streisand Effect, May 35, and similar phenomena have quickly and decisively punctured the erected walls.
Whether these people truly view these materials as likely to harm society or not, their legitimate avenue of change is through voluntarily persuasion, not censorship by way of force.
In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.
Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.
To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.
Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.
They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules.
The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems.
I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.
There is actually a bipartisan bill proposing precisely that: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987
I like that idea. The USA actually used to trust bust :|
Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.
don't like porn? run a for-pay pornsite, bleeding revenue from the other porn sites, which you will spend fighting porn; also, you'll have better targeted customer lists. extremely effective altruism.
As a result, you get collections of fuckwits like this one [1] finding the 2% of the internet who will give them money to get upset about an imaginary problem, a problem so imaginary that nobody is on the other side of the issue because the entire issue was made up for clicks.
Perhaps we could develop some form of secure digital currency that is not reliant on central authorities such as banks, payment processors, or governments?
One would expect stablecoins to be more popular but I haven't seen them as valid payment options anywhere except crypto exchanges. That's just me though.
The issue is that for now, and for a long time ahead, all these content providers feel that most of their clients would prefer to use a credit card. So they need all of their content to be acceptable to these people. Which comes with lots and lots of lowest common denominator rules. Even if some people do not use credit cards.
I don't like the conservative angle which is to be "proper" or it's against god, but from the scientific side this stuff is bad.
Now I also agree that censorship is bad too and on a moral level this stuff doesn't harm anyone morally.
I'm still a staunch 90s liberal, but over time I'm starting to realize that there's an evolutionary reason why conservative values exist. Humans weren't designed to live in a world of only fans where every girl who's slightly hot can gain so much power over hundreds of men. Like there are 4th - 10th order effects here that go past morality.
I mentioned the population problem right, that's just one example. We have no idea wtf is causing it. But we do know that the population issue correlates with so many changes in society, and it's a big freaking deal.
Another thing is rising womens power. I'm all for it. It's moral and right to give women equal rights and equal power, but humanity has never encountered such a scenario. It's always the men that lead the hunt and the family and they were the bread winners for millions of years. Were humans evolved to support such changes? Like if we satisfy every moral imperative in our primitive brains and build a utopia but human biology was never meant for utopia is it right?
That's the problem. The population is declining. We don't know why. But we do know everything is different.
So I know I got off on a huge tangent here. But i feel porn is one of these things. It's right to keep it open and free, but it's causing unexpected side effects. Most of us were not meant to deal with that level of extreme hedonism.
But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing? There's 8 billion of us, isn't that enough? Housing prices are through the roof and most young people can't even hope to be able to afford a house. Human population has doubled about 4 times in the last 100 years. If it doubles yet again there's going to be 16 billion of us. Do you think the world and humanity can sustain infinite exponential growth? I don't think so. The only reasons to want population growth is because the pension system is a Ponzi scheme, but that's a completely different problem.
I also find it interesting that on one hand the argument against porn is, "porn is bad because it encourages X behavior in real life", but then another is "porn is bad because it discourages sex in real life".
The older I get the more I start to believe that industrialization and pervasive technological adoption have come with a cost to humanity that maybe we don’t want to bear.
Until you abuse your market power. See Apple store vs adult content, see credit card companies vs an endless list of obsessions.
The problem is actually the slippery slope happened earlier, with advertisers. The slippery slope was advertisers not wanting to advertise on porn sites and adult content. It is the same thing we see with the creation of Algospeak and self-censorship. As the article points out, it is also very hard to accurately classify this information. I mean even on YouTube the other day I got a video in my shorts feed that was flagged for sensitive topic. The video? About a veteran who was wearing a shirt that said "Do not give in to the war within. End veteran suicide." Here's the vid, it still has the content warning[0]. What about this video is sensitive? That it mentions the word "suicide?" (Twice?) There's not even options in the settings and YouTube definitely knows I'm in my 30's.... How do I even say "this was improperly flagged?" We're just letting algorithms shape our culture in a way we clearly don't want. We wouldn't have Algospeak if we wanted it... Sure, covert speech has formed in the past but mostly under duress and the current form allows for a much more rapid iteration and I really don't think that's good for society. It comes with the best intentions, but I guess we all know the old clique, right? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. As much as it sucks to admit, a lot of "evil" is created by "good" people trying to do "good" things (quotes to let you define good and evil however you want)
The reason I point out the argument is we can modify "Don't like porn? Don't buy it." can be modified to "Don't like porn? Don't advertise on those sites."
But I think payment systems should have a different regulation. Similar to internet, common carrier. I'm actually surprised this isn't already a rule (it has to be, right?). As long as it is legal, they should be compelled to perform the transaction. Anything else seems like it is actually holding your money ransomed.
I'll admit I'm biased and I think payments should be private and we should try to make the system so that digital transactions are as similar to cash transactions as possible, but I'm not convinced either party is in favor of that, nor the banks themselves which would like to make money on that information.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/education/2025/0...
Ok.
Don’t like porn? Don’t sell it.
“CENSORSHIP! PURITAN NAZIS!”
Even though I’m against using payment processing restrictions, I do believe we need laws to prohibit this kind of content. There’s data suggesting that it impacts real people's behavior during sex and shapes harmful social expectations.
Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.
Porn is just the thin end of the wedge (as was "violence in video games" a generation ago) - porn is something society considers as distasteful, so politicians are less likely to go on record as supporting porn. Once the porn bans go into effect, they'll move onto the next target in the conservative playbook: gay marriage, birth control/abortion access, etc.
Let's assume there is a payment processor where anything goes, the company utilizing it would still be punished by the other payment processors.
I don't think Visa/Mastercard would care that you only sell the things they don't want through other payment processors, they still would threaten to cut you off entirely for having the content they don't like
It goes even further.
What was wrong with those people poisoning Socrates? For what? Don't like what he says, do not listen to him.
You know how in higher dimensional space everything is almost orthogonal? I think people are like that, some like porn, some are afraid of it, some want to be impregnated by aliens, some hate aliens.
Through good intentions democracy can be just as tyrannical as any tyrant; a pinch of incompetence and good intentions and it can not be stopped.
When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
Also additional context, before the 12th century priests were allowed to marry and have children. It was taken away, to consolidate the church's property.
People are just accustomed to being insulted for willingly associating themselves with it, on the basis of imputed perversion, bad taste etc.
>must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not?
I don't think war or violence is most people's thing to begin with.
Guns, that's definitely a thorny issue. Especially in the US. I'm personalyl fine with much stricter gun control
>we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
indeed. It's not the first wave, it won't be the last. Gotta do the same thing either way and push back.
The other context is that global companies must cater to multiple countries cultures which conflict so they take the path of least resistance.
Why? (Genuinely)
Why are filters not sufficient? If I enjoy adult games and non-adult games, why should I have to manage two storefronts?
The reality is you are not the only customer or market. While you may find it to work well enough for you, myself along with many others do not.
If the platform doesn't want kids to see them, and the creators don't want kids to see them, it's pretty easy for kids to not see them.
If creators, platforms, and users all say, I would prefer to not see the content, it's pretty easy to make that happen.
DLSite is another good site but that was hit last year by this.
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
I guess every publisher could just sell direct to customers on their own website, but that wouldn't address this issue at all (it would make it even easier for payment processors to abuse their duopoly), while also severely damaging the discoverability of games.
And, considering that companies can already do this if they want but still choose to sell via a platform, I'm guessing there are several benefits beyond discoverability that I'm not thinking of.
The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service. The distribution of it can remain wherever and you can go via a side channel if you want. But being tied to a platform is utterly wrong.
If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere. With Stream as the distributor, you can't. It's a single point of failure.
I agree, but that could still be done even when using a centralized distribution platform. I would say those are two separate issues. I think (not positive) that's the whole premise of GOG, isn't it?
>If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere.
Not really, though. If the payment processor stops doing business with your company, your shit out of luck. Instead of pressuring steam or whoever, they just pressure you directly. The single (well, double) point of failure always chains up to the payment processors.
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
See also decrim.
Exhibit A - emotional: the government has outlawed violent crime and wants to outlaw intimidation. Argument “once they outlaw intimidation, next they’ll outlaw regular insults, next they’ll outlaw criticism”. This is a bad slippery slope argument because (I’m assuming) intimidation should be outlawed. Insults and criticism should not, but are not. If the government votes in evil-gov or you encounter evil-cop, it’s as easy for them to harass you for insults and criticism, as it would be had intimidation never been outlawed.
Exhibit B - physical: the government wants to give every citizen a brain implant that can be remotely activated to stun them. This would significantly prevent crime. However, it would also be a terrible idea, because now if you get evil-gov or evil-cop, it’s significantly easier for them to remotely stun you for non-crime.
The key is that in Exhibit A, evil-gov and evil-cop face equal resistance for punishing insults and criticism regardless of whether intimidation is outlawed, because either way, people understand that intimidation should be outlawed and insults and criticism should not. More generally, moving the Overton Window to contain a “good” thing doesn’t make it contain a “bad” thing, at least not enough so that the “good” thing isn’t worth it. But in Exhibit B, evil-gov and evil-cop face ineffective resistance for stunning people for insults and criticism, because people allowed good-gov and good-cop to give them stun implants for punishing crime; whereas if evil-gov or evil-cop stepped up and said “alright, we’re going to give everyone stun implants to punish insults and criticism”, they would face effective resistance.
—-
Put into perspective: Visa and Mastercard using their Monopoly to effectively prevent payment for depictions of incest and rape, assuming you think that is OK, is Exhibit A. However, Visa and Mastercard having a monopoly in the first place is Exhibit B. My argument is “we should break the Visa and Mastercard monopoly (or popularize crypto) to prevent them from restricting LGBTQ and firearms etc. in the future” (this argument still applies if they’re restricting some of that now). A counter-argument is “this will allow incest depictions, hate speech, and moreover actual drug and sex trafficking*, etc.” and my counter is “those things are bad, but are they bad enough to leave us vulnerable to power shifts restricting good content in the future?” I support free speech with a similar argument**.
It’s an argument that relies on the uncertain future, but nonetheless the change here clearly and significantly decreases the probability of a bad future, because bad-gov or bad-cop must acquire power then revert the monopoly breakup; whereas the emotional example can’t even rely on the future, because if bad-gov or bad-cop acquire enough power to cause the bad thing, they would’ve just as likely acquired enough power had we not avoided causing the good thing.
* Also note these things are already exchanged with real money, and breaking up the Visa/Mastercard monopoly won’t make them legal nor stop law enforcement from tracking and prosecuting them. The more general argument is that it’s better for society to make it hard for law enforcement to prosecute crime then give them the resources to do so, but also make it hard for them to prosecute non-crime; then make it easy for law-enforcement to prosecute crime so they need less resources, but also make it easy for them to prosecute non-crime. The justification is that we spend extra resources and let some crimes avoid prosecution, in exchange for decreased risk of non-crime prosecution now and in the future.
** and that speech is mild enough, sans confidential information etc., that it shouldn't be blocked simply to content whoever says it. But even confidential information doesn't warrant e.g. a universal backdoor and filter that could be stolen and exploited by a bad actor.
I think many of these slippery slopes are defined in hindsight. What all of these represent are simply struggles for power.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
That game advocates staunchly for civil rights and the autonomy of women, children, and other minorities. The Holocaust allegory is so on the nose you can't even call it veiled. It says domestic abuse is unforgivably, undeniably wrong.
They don't even care about marginalized groups or even women themselves. Any piece of content that gives them the heeby jeebies, any media that has conflict: banned. Doesn't matter if it even supports their purported agenda.
Say 50% of the queer content on itch is innocuous dating sim games much which may not have any pornographic images at all.
There is another chunk, idk the amount, that is clearly not nice and what dishonest groups bundle that 50% into.
There is seemingly little interest even acknowledging that other chunk of content as being a problem though. I dont want queer dating sims to be banned but they are gonna be if no one is honest about what shows up next to them in places where they exist.
Why does an LGBT creator that makes a game exploring how the Matrix is a transgender allegory have to actively distance themselves from bisexual dating simulators when I don't recall seeing anything from "Enter the Matrix" distancing themselves from straight anime girl dating simulators?
I don't have strong feelings around wether steam or itch sell adult content, but its the fact that a duopoly and using their power to exert political influence.
Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.
One of the slippery slopes here would be that initially they go after smaller players and then work their way up. Would they ultimately go after Amazon or Warner Bros? It’s not totally clear to me that they wouldn’t.
It takes a certain kind of person to stand up for pornography. And most are not that kind of person.
— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Keep all the porn that is great. But there has to be a line somewhere and even the most accepting countries have a line.
Often the groups defending porn are defending the most egregious stuff which makes it hard for people to support.
There's a whole buisness model of russians paying to a company in Kazahstan so that they buy a steam game and gift it to a russian user
But there’s also nothing wrong with allowing this type of content. Who wants to help me build an uncensored game distribution platform? We could call it Steamy.
I think this stuff has no place on 'normal' store fronts like Steam and Itch. It should be on an 18+ only store front at the very least.
In the current atmosphere, it might just pass.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...
Which makes sense - you have buyers and sellers who insist on anonymity, services that leave no trace once rendered, buyers and sellers lying to family and friends about what they're doing, etc.
There's often no "normal" amount of consumption, for example, some sellers receive million dollar tips.
Money laundering is a massive problem, and it enables some really terrible things.
I suspect the fact that American banks are so anti-porn comes from the fact that the American financial sector has such strong anti-money laundering regs (as opposed to, say, the American real estate sector, or the UK financial sector).
One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws. Not many porn platforms could function that way.
> However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable.
Many users still suspect it happens, although it's hard to prove.
The initial regulation also didn't suppress content, it just made you have to go through age verification, which everyone knows doesn't work.
You’d think so, but nope. Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I ended up subscribing to someone who’s catfishing. All their pics on OnlyFans and other socials were just stolen from random Instagram models. I reported it to OF, but got no response.
Whatever verification system OF has, it’s bypassable. It doesn’t matter much when it’s just regular subscribers - nobody really cares about consumer rights in the adult content space. That’s why so many creators can get away with pretending they’re the ones replying to messages. But I’m betting there’s going to be a CSEM scandal linked to this in the next few years.
Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.
There's no law (as of now). If there was a law, Valve would happily de-list these things. For example, a recent custom map for Mount and Blade that was banned in South Korea: https://automaton-media.com/en/news/valve-cooperates-in-bann...
I think one solution for Valve/Itch to continue with the 'no policing policy' is for governments to step in and say all video games needed classification like films do.
I think a few of these video games that are sold would be found to breaking some law if anyone cared to test it.
> governments to step in and say all video games needed classification like films do.
Valve and (I believe) Itch are both US companies. In the US, films are not required to get a rating anymore.
Video games don't even involve actual human bodies like GoT does. It's crazy that "Collective Shout" thinks this is worth invoking violence and violating peoples volition for. Certainly not consistent with all other aspects of entertainment in society. Makes me think there are probably other fame, power and money motivations behind their behavior. But it doesn't explain people agreeing with them. That's the weirdest part of this.
Itch.io is heavily saturated with anime porn games along with steam to the point I find both difficult to navigate even with nsfw filters turned on. Turning those filters off and it is pretty egregious the volume of it all let alone subject matter. I dont care about porn but the platforms have done a piss poor job for the majority of people who are not looking for porn games but find games like cyberpunk totally acceptable. How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?
This is happening because it was too easy for someone to pull up the home page on said platforms and point to several incest porn games. Using payment processors is not a solution i favor but people cannot find that experience acceptable.
On a personal note, i dont want to live in a society that deems it acceptable to have a “no incest” filter for games. That is line for me and not for religion but because I find incest disgusting.
There are filter by tags too. Works pretty well to filter out like all anime or hentai games.
The fact the default is porn games in your home page IS the issue. It gives all this ammunition for xyz group to do whatever.
The politics of payment processors being the bad guys is nonsense. They have to bow down to too many governments to play ball so will always take the politically expedient option. Almost all bitcoin validators bowed down to us sanctions banning wallet addresses for example. That cat has been out of the bag for years.
And no, Steam don't mess them up with Cyberpunk.
Can you imagine if youtube launched an onlyfans like filter to allow nsfw content?
Why is there so much demand for these games?
Why do we think government intervention is the solution in this domain but not others?
Why is there so much demand for these games???
To the point where the only way to stop people from playing them is making them illegal.
Is anyone else worried about this??? I am!
Also this reminds me of Apple that for example demanded Telegram to block adult channels (including non-porn channels where authors blog about their sex life) from AppStore's Telegram version.
Also if cryptocurrency were more popular and widespread, then banks would have less leverage to do this.
And besides, why do payment processors even know/care what their customers use their money for as long as it's legal?
If you want to ban porn, fine, but do it through the law, and don't let every company make their own laws. Especially if they are a quasi monopoly (have power).
You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?
Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
While being removed from general stores, porn has become very visible on big gaming platforms which majority of customers don’t associate with porn. Backlash is inevitable.
I think we can expect a bigger push against porn in general as pendulum swings back on the other side.
But the problem isn't porn. That's the low hanging fruit for a massive power grab The problem is that card companies can/will/did blackmail multiple companies into changing, and in some small cases shut-down their entire businesses.
In a post-cash world, this is completely unacceptable, and a blatant power grab. If the payment processors are allowed to set this precedent, then there will be nothing to stop these for-profit companies from blocking anybody, anywhere from buying anything - for any or no reason.
People are blaming a specific protest group. Personally I believe they are being scapegoated. And honestly if a tiny group from a tiny economy are so easily able to control international macroeconomics, then the root cause is still that the card services are vulnerable to such an attack.
The only appropriate response is swift and severe regulation of these critically necessary card and banking services, up to and including the dissolution of both Visa and MasterCard - and in the US strict caps on card fees, as well as an amendment to the Constitution ensure that our right to own property permanently includes the right to buy property.
Are the payment providers going to weaponize their de facto control over all purchases to target guns next? Churches? Birth control? Inner-City hospitals? Which apps or social music companies do you think they'll allow to live, or die? Will they blackmail the Internet service providers? Political parties? Entire countries? Which side of which wars do you think Visa will force us to support? Is a company called "MasterCard" for or against letting people with your skin color buy food? You don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody should have to know.
It doesn't matter where you land politically, the point is that these companies cannot be allowed to wield this kind of control. Our society really does depend on it. ...Because we can't go back to cash anymore, and they very much know it.
Credit has become ubiquitous, in a manner that belies its supposed purpose, at least as was originally practiced before consumers were offered and employed credit for absolutely everything.
Then again, governments and "regulated" entities are also capable of blackmail. I'm not sure these private companies would ever have an incentive to care about what you spend their money on unless governments gave them a reason to - which is why this is happening. At the end of the day you run into the same perpetual problem - you want x, some mob wants y. Good luck.
I mostly agree with this. There are legitimate issues with even the biggest and most respected porn sites being very lax with taking down underage and nonconsensual content. The card companies AFAICT aren't being pressured to reform because of this kind of content, but more the LGBT content which is harming nobody.
Under Community Content Preferences, you'll see an option for Mature Content and Adult-Only Sexual Content.
You'll also be preventing from accessing mature content depending on the filters in your account settings, and in the Family Management section of steam, for Family Shared Libraries.
It's not complicated to realise that this achieves none of the stated objectives
I'm no prude, but it's really weird to me.
Personally I think this is a good thing.
On their presence in the first place, I'd say if a shop is going to sell condoms and lubricant, also holding basic sex tools isn't a big stretch.
I'd be more interested in questioning these than why porn is available on Steam. I mean, Disney is essentially an anti-porn product, so I get that, but Netflix is a perfectly reasonable platform for porn. I don't see any reason adult toys can't be sold in Walmart or whatever.
> Backlash is inevitable.
I don't know. This doesn't seem like a grassroots movement.
Because the payment processing is unreliable and prohibitively expensive. For all the whining about "moral pearl clutching", the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs. Visa and Mastercard couldn't care less about the ethical issues, it's simply a risk calculation for their business.
The risk is not from Valve; disputes pass through to the processor. This is the same problem dating sites, gambling, etc. all deal with. Any sufficiently large adult oriented business becomes a de-facto payment processor, where their entire core business function is in managing this risk, not whatever they actually do for the end user. It's either that, or charge the exorbitant fees that come with using a niche provider who takes on that risk.
Until now, when they did.
In the US at least the classier vibrators have been starting to be sold first at shops like Sharper Image, and now, indeed, grocery stores. The packaging of course would not raise any questions from kids, and they are sold in the same aisles as condoms and lubricant. "Sexual health" is the umbrella term which feels like it is in play.
Why not? One shouldn't confuse games with real life.
Steam also has extensive parental controls: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49...
Collective Shout, the group behind this latest censorship push, also wanted Detroit Become Human to be banned because the story depicted someone abusing a child. If we're banning that, why not ban memoirs of child abuse survivors or "James and the Giant Peach"?
You suggest it would be easy for Steam and Itch to run alternative storefronts. Given that they removed content that was offensive to their payment processors, they'd need to engage with high-risk payment processors to power these new store fronts. To say nothing of the technical work involved, those high-risk payment processors certainly charge more for their services. That'd raise the already high 30% that Valve takes on most transaction.
Additionally, if a games journalism website also has relationships with payment processors, are they allowed to review adult games even if those reviews don't include pictures? Or are they going to be equally punished for giving adult content a positive rating?
This all limits the options available of responsible adult consumers and costs creators of LEGAL content revenue.
===
†Here's a longer look at your examples:
Define adult toys. I assume you mean dildos. Walmart doesn't sell those in physical stores, but they do sell them online. Additionally they, like most other stores, do sell lube, condoms, and vibrating rings in their brick and mortar store. Every clothing store that sells underwear sells something many would describe as lingerie. Target has an entire lineup of "after dark" board games stocked right next to Candyland.
"After Netflix published a marketing poster showing the [11 year old girls] twerking in revealing cheerleading outfits without any context, an online petition calling for the cancellation of the US release received more than 140 thousand signatures."
'According to a source close to the production, Pixar’s next feature film, “Lightyear” does feature a significant female character, Hawthorne, who is in a meaningful relationship with another woman. While the fact of that relationship was never in question at the studio, a kiss between the characters had been cut from the film. Following the uproar surrounding the Pixar employees’ statement and Disney CEO Bob Chapek‘s handling of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, however, the kiss was reinstated into the movie last week.'
Googling for news, it seems like the story between DLSite and M/V is a push and pull. Many articles turn up that say they have an agreement, then a disagreement, then an agreement again, then a suspension, then they bring it back again etc.
My point here is that their relationship with M/V seems to have failed to actually change them, so, the point "they're powerless to change Japan" stands.
Some examples, like this one are for porn but the same approach could be used for anything even remotely controversial.
Anyway, maybe Witcher 3 could be next. Great game, but it happens to have some sex scenes, so....
You aren't the only one who seems to think this way though, we have more things than ever to pacify men and even increase estrogen and decrease testosterone probably because some believe that men are inherently dangerous.
We shouldn't be privatising money.
Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes! As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
>Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes!
Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?
>As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
There is a good difference between something being generally available to access (and getting promoted even), and being technically available to some. There is material worthy of being suppressed, hate speech and calls for violence being some of them. Did this censorship stop anybody to access Mein Kampf or other such vile stuff? Not really, but it helps a lot that these are not in the front and center.
EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point
righthand•16h ago
All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
cosmic_cheese•16h ago
Not that I agree with censoring that (I don’t), but the double standard is puzzling.
gotoeleven•16h ago
some_random•16h ago
righthand•16h ago
some_random•15h ago
righthand•15h ago
Let me respond with your attacking-style:
Just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s representative of feminism at large. It doesn’t mean it’s not a conservative think tank hiding behind a veil of feminism.
bluescrn•15h ago
With something like OnlyFans, where there's money to be made, the 'sex work is real work!' slogan comes out. And there's a reluctance to criticise big porn sites even after claims of links to sex trafficking etc.
But at the same time, scantily-clad videogame characters designed to appeal to the male gaze are deemed unacceptable/objectifying/regressive. And 'sex robots' are seen as a horrifying prospect.
some_random•14h ago
the_af•14h ago
The specific organization we're discussing is not feminist. It's religious conservative, using some of the trappings of feminism.
some_random•14h ago
the_af•10h ago
Yes, it is.
Let me see: they seem to receive funding from evangelical organizations; the founder speaks/writes at Christian venues and is pro-life, anti-gay/trans; they are targeting games because that's what they happen to focus on right now. They've also campaigned against Rap music and artists in the past. They managed to get articles critical of them pulled from VICE, etc. Their modus operandi is typical of religious conservatives.
cosmic_cheese•16h ago
some_random•16h ago
sjsdaiuasgdia•15h ago
some_random•15h ago
Dweller1622•14h ago
nosignono•13h ago
Compare, for example, Sex and the City, where 4 women were regularly engaged in a variety of sexual encounters and say, background dancers in a music video or advert that exist to appeal as objects to a male audience.
Dweller1622•12h ago
In a different context I might be more sympathetic to this specific formulation of the concept since it's not always clear how much agency the background dancers in a music video or advert have. However, on the original topic of video games, the notion of "character agency" is rather pernicious.
nosignono•10h ago
In Kotor 2, there's a character called "The Handmaiden", who will join your party if the player character is a male. She talks at great length about her situation and the decisions the player should make. She's depicted as a chaste, virginal religious character. But one of the very first things you can do with her when she joins your party is spar with her. And she strips into black lingerie to do so. Then she stays in black lingerie on your ship while you go and do other stuff.
She's clearly there as an object for the audience to drool over. It's given a very surface level justification ("we always spar with only our bodies"), but that justification is provided the instant before the player sees her in her undies. (Which, it's important to note, aren't like modest undergarments one might expect from a religious figure like this, but are specifically sexy underwear.)
Compare this to another Star Wars game, Jedi: Fallen Order, where the Night Sister Mirrin can becomes romantically involved with the player character. She has a well developed culture, and is given space to articulate her personality, choices, and opinions in a cogent way. She can be a romantic interest without being an object. She is as complex as all the other characters, and we don't see her positioned in sexy lingerie suddenly out of the blue.
I can come up with other examples if those aren't illustrative.
Dweller1622•9h ago
What I'm disputing is any application of objectification theory to media analysis wherein there are no actual agents involved. Neither The Handmaiden nor Night Sister Mirrin ever possessed any agency, nor were they deprived of it. There is simply no moral valence in how one treats or regards them.
The demand here is that they be treated as if they possessed agency. I see no reason or obligation to do so.
the_af•14h ago
poszlem•14h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
the_af•11h ago
Or, as in this case, it's not a feminist organization.
morkalork•14h ago
the_af•10h ago
nosignono•13h ago
For the better part of a decade feminists have been wildly anti-objectification, not anti-sex. It's an important distinction.
For example, most modern feminists are pro sex-work, but only under conditions that guarantee safety, autonomy, and health care for the sex workers. That's very different from how most sex work is done today. So a modern feminist might say that we should be doing more to protect the sex workers who are held in bondage by a pimp, and forced to walk the streets while simultaneously arguing in favor of well regulated, protected brothels or private sex work.
numpad0•16h ago
nemomarx•15h ago
and you have to assume MasterCard is willing and cooperating here to some extent
the_af•14h ago
The founder is Christian and writes and speaks in Christian venues and publications.
She's not a "feminist" by any reasonable and modern definition of the word.
BJones12•14h ago
the_af•11h ago
I meant that this person chooses Christian venues to voice her opinions, and shares with them non-feminist values such as being "pro life", etc.
Hers is not a feminist organization, and Collective Shout is perceived by some as a right-wing group seeking to also ban LGTB+ depictions in videogames (which is not standard feminist agenda). Like another commenter mentioned, Collective Shout receives funding from evangelical organizations. And really, you have to ask yourself: since when exactly payment processors paid any attention to what genuine feminist organizations had to say about anything?
At some point you cannot ignore the evidence anymore. At best you can point the non-empty intersection of conservative Christian groups and some sex-negative feminists who both seek to ban pornography, but this doesn't make them the same thing.
TL;DR this is a variation of "will somebody think of the children!?" pearl-clutching, and everyone should know by now it doesn't lead to anything good.
baobabKoodaa•14h ago
tumsfestival•12h ago
johnnyanmac•12h ago
tracker1•16h ago
There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.
alexjplant•14h ago
I used to work for a fintech. As new employee I had coffee with a colleague who explained KYC, AML, and other compliance topics to me. They mentioned that marijuana businesses can't bank their money due to these considerations as it would make banks knowing accomplices to the federal crime of trafficking a controlled substance. This threat is material because cannabis, unlike adult content, is actually illegal, so I don't think it's a substantially similar example to what's mentioned in this thread.
tracker1•13h ago