The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before.
There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
There should be laws forcing payment processors to be neutral. They should have to accept any transaction that would be legal if made using cash.
Considering how long payment processing as a business has been a thing, I’m amazed its not more regulated in terms of being forced to be neutral or being unable to decline processing payments that are related to completely legal transactions.
Noooooooooooooooo
(Litteraly downloaded only two games front there)
How the fuck did we get to the point where a company which literally only takes your money and gives it to someone else (and also gets paid for that) can decide what kind of content people consume?
To be clear - “Collective Shout” both is and isn’t responsible. It’s the payment processors who actually enacted policies and are using them as the scapegoat for negative feedback.
How many times have people reported Twitter after Elon Musk took over for showing Nazi propaganda alongside their ads - with no response. An ‘open letter’ in July about a game already banned in April? DELIST EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY.
Collective shout finacials year: 2024 revenue: 458043 employee_expenses: 107000 other_expenses: 215488 net_surplus: 135555 employees: total_fte: 2 full_time: 0 part_time: 1 casual: 4 volunteers: 15 donations_and_bequests: 389800 government_grants: 0 commercial_income: 0 expense_to_revenue_ratio: "70.4%" average_expense_per_employee: 39400 Leadership - name: Melinda Tankard Reist role: Founder, Movement Director public_socials: - Twitter: @MelTankardReist - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Caitlin Roper role: Campaigns Manager public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Renee Chopping role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - LinkedIn public_email_address: r******@collectiveshout.org salary: Not publicly listed - name: Lyn Swanson Kennedy role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Coralie Alison role: Movement Operations Manager public_socials: - Twitter: @CoralieAlison - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listedAnnoy them, call their bullshit, but don’t harass or threaten them, those are likely to backfire spectacularly
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I’m completely fine with certain content being delisted because it is considered essentially on par with hate speech or something like that.
However, I really do not like that it is payment processors making that call. If someone makes that call, it should be the store in question (itch.io, Steam, whatever) or it should be the government.
Meanwhile, on my feed there’s a post directly below this one about a compiler that will give you BSDM messages for good and bad coding and can even be hooked up to a remote butt plug to pleasure you when you compile a successful program.
The Rust community just knows what’s up.
cargo mommy reference
Gives a new meaning to the term “code smell”.
Goddamn cookers the lot of them. Perhaps I’ll make an abortion game on Itch in protest.
“Cookers”?
Local slang word that derives from “their brains are fried/not working” which also implies stupidity and fanatical adherence to things like religion, anti abortion, anti vax, and the like.
Let the Digital Euro become a thing. It will wreck havoc on the current payment ecosystem.
And the Digital Euro is not a crypto. It will be a digital currency, backed by the ECB, at a one to one exchange rate with standard euro currency.
I mean the issue here is not with the money itself, it’s the payment processors
The eEU is supposed to be one, itself. And even if it fails Wero and MBWay are growing, which are direct money transfer systems.
be careful. stablecoins are a step towards central bank digital currency. once CBDC is established, it’s all over for freedom to spend money.
You can still pay with gold and silver.
Time for Brazil’s PIX to be exported around the world. That’s likely to be hard, as here it is a direct, bank agnostic account-to-account transfer without middlemen and without any tax, so it’d need cooperation between the involved countries.
You’re describing the same system behind Wero and MBWay. We can just use cellphone numbers to move money from account to account, regardless of the banks at each end of the transaction.
Euro(pe) is the MVP
It has its moments.
The various groups trying to ban payments for NSFW products and whatever else they don’t like would just target the ECB and member states to restrict transactions they don’t like
Sure. Targeting a central bank and several independent nations will be as simple as pressuring two US companies. /s
You’re a dick. Hope you get better
Practically the whole world has been having an authoritarian/conservative shift. I would not expect the EU and ECB to be a progressive force for sex work. The EU has been pushing to break encryption for a solid decade now. Visa and Mastercard process 90% of transactions outside of China. They’re huge. I don’t see why ECB leadership would be particularly less conservative and risk averse than Visa and Mastercard. Bankers are usually on the conservative side of politics
The Nederlands, Germany, Spain, if I’m not wrong, France and Italy have prostitution as legal. My own country abstains from legislating on it, instead opting to criminalizing procuring and the facilitation of prostitution, as well as human traffic for such end.
Europe has a well established culture of sex work, with a good number of organizations lobbying - openly, through open public debate - in the way of making sex workers being recognized as any other worker and increasing their social relevance and recognition.
If you inform yourself a bit, in my country, you can legally establish yourself as an escort, under a very specific tax code, and pay taxes according to the money you make and have tax deductions and social benefits.
Currently, we already have a direct payment and transfer system, called MBWay, that through your phone number, allows for transfering, paying and collecting money, from one account to another.
No fintech, no middle agents, no shit: direct transfers from one account to another.
The Digital Euro takes this a step further. And even if the eEuro never takes place, this system is to be widened to all EU and abroad, to run against AliPay, Visa, MasterCard and others.
Bankers want money.
American bankers should spit out the “holy” book they have stuck up their arses.
At least Germany, Spain, and Italy have resurgent far right political movements. I am not about to trust government payment systems to not eventually be abused as technology makes control and surveillance easier. A holy book can be replaced with whatever new age self-help, health movement, anti-<ethnicity/sexuality/religion> movement. All it takes is some instability and desperation and people will support whatever or turn a blind eye to whatever they may think is not their problem or they may potentially benefit from. Good for the EU to run their own payment systems. When a conservative wave takes a large enough majority in governance someday, it’ll be the same problem as Visa/Mastercard/etc
The governance powers we give with results being leftist in mind will someday be in the hands of conservative who will use them with a kind of zeal that leftist don’t
My own country too.
Now allow me too share a conviniently forgotten fact about most far right governments of the last century: they all were very at ease with having sex workers.
My own very catholic and repressive country had a very detailed law on prostitutes, which mandatory registration, regular medical exams and visits, etc. It’s a good way too pacify populations.
The current hunt on independent adult themed art/entertainment/etc is more about good old fashioned religious zealotry than anything else. Pornography gets some flak but it’s a lot harder to successfully target.
This isabout forcing people into conventional set roles and definitions and closing minds and shutting down free independent thinking. And stopping people from being or becoming humane.
@network_switch @Jackhammer_Joe even authoritarian states doesn’t like dependencies which can tell them what they have to do. So those companies are a risk for their independence… my personal feeling europe’s right people might not like porn but they probably would rather fight for porn then let a none european company tell them how they have to handle business ;)
@network_switch @Jackhammer_Joe oh on a sidenote -> https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22641095/onlyfans-sex-work-ban-online-porn-payment-processing-controversy << just a reminder …
To me it’s an inevitability that if the EU weans itself off Mastercard/Visa, then EU based payment processors whether credit based or something like SEPA payments for a digital EURO would be censored. The EU would be happy to handle their own business and that may just end up no different than American companies and the American government. The European right can fight against porn while fighting for independent finance infrastructure
The issue with the systems being proposed and already in place in Europe is that the money flows directly between accounts. Banks don’t have a way to know what is being payed for.
And there is even another system, where blocks of payment references can be bough from a slew of independent entities (all must be registered as financial entities at central banks) and used to transfer money that way. The issuer either charges a token value for each reference, a % on the payment value or both. Money flows directly between accounts, instantly.
The all-mighty PayPal uses a third party payment reference provider for people who want to use their service but don’t want to put their card into it.
I’m wondering who gave these credit card companies the moral authority.
Finicial authority beats moral everytime.
The fact that they hold the keys to the kingdom. Online retailers and businesses rely on credit card processors to be able to do business, which is all the leverage they need to exert tremendous pressure on the businesses they service.
This is something that really should be getting legislated against, but good luck in the US under the current administration. Maybe the EU has a shot.
I’m sure this is no coincidence that cbristofascists are in control of all the top branches of US Government.
Tbf, Collective Shout group is actually Australian
Visa and Mastercard are based in the US, though.
It’s not about morals. It’s purely about money. Porn sites are labeled as high risks because things like chargebacks, stolen credit cards etc happen more often at these adult websites. Not to mention the thin line between legal and illegal content. Therefore payment processors charge companies in the high risk category a higher fee since they need to audit these companies more frequently and deal with these chargebacks etc. more.
So either Itch.io goes into the high risk category and pay more for transactions or they remove porn. Maybe itch.io should just create a separate company to host these adult games.
But wasn’t that true before Collective Shite decided to piss on everyone else’s day?
Plus, I thought NSFW works were a large market driver. Back in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war, they said the winner would be determined by the porn producers.
maybe it’s because itch mostly sells non-porn games so they probably flew under the radar since they could have less fraudulent transaction or chargebacks as a porn site. Or the payment processors didn’t care too much that itch broke the compliance rules until someone reminded them of their duties. Like PornHub was showing illegal content for years and the payment processors only gave a shit about it until someone went to the news.
Fuck these god-bothering pieces of shit. No, seriously. It sounds like they need it.
I suspect the reason why is that most of them are under pressure from the USA government, which is trying to recrete Gillead
First they came for the incest/rape games, which most people somewhat agree with (although the principle is still wrong) Next up is all nsfw games. After that, it’ll be mainstream and indie games altogether. This never stops with just one “victory” for these groups.
It’s going to come down to anything with even a whisper of LGBTQ+/minority/disability/etc representation, just like with books.
They start with the “egregious” content (not that it’s necessarily right to remove that either), then narrow it down until it shapes up into hegemonic conformity and systemic oppression via media (there’s a term for it, kind of like stochastic violence but not quite that I can’t remember atm).
Exactly this. It is so transparent that the goal is to target minorities and lgbtq+ folk. After that, who knows. “Unchristian” games probably.
it doesn’t even stop there - it will be used to punish people who do not exactly like it’s expected, with the mere accusation of playing/reading/watching/thinking something “unchristian” as reason.
BDSM games have been targeted as well for “sexual violence”. Only straight, vanilla PiV missionary for the express purposes of having children within the confines of marriage where nobody is enjoying it porn will be left.
So what do I, a common shlub, do to resist this? Boycott Steam and itch.io until they reinstate the games?
Steam and Itch are both victims in this matter, their hands are tied. If the payment processors simply refuse to process any payments unless they comply, there’s no point in trying to put pressure on them. I’m pretty sure they were happy to take people’s money for these games and still would be, if they could so while saving face.
So what useful action can I take to push back against this censorship?
This is gonna be down vote central but use crypto to pay for games whatever that looks like.
There are specific games in steam’s case I’m very ok with getting removed, but at the same time its very fucked up that we’re in a situation where the world is beholden to payment processors. Ideally this would be a case where they go directly to Valve and say “hey we think you should take a look at your content policy and at these specific games” and Valve makes the call from there on where they want to draw the line.
What kills me is in most cases you have to pay for the game, then you have to download the game, then install it and finally play it. It’s not.like the game is going to one day pop into your computer and then force you to play it.
Bottom line. If the game bothers ornoffends you just move on.
Im curious what games and type of content they contain you think should be removed from steam. Ive seen a few cartoon pornish type of things pop up before but didnt appear outwardly outlandish. Having never intentionally sought out this content Im curious is there a dark depraved section of the steam store Ive never seen before?
mention of sexual assault
not OP, but for example the first game collective shout went after a few months ago (“no mercy”) was explicitly a game about raping women to make them obedient. this is bad not because its NSFW, it’s bad because it’s rape apologia, and a misogynistic hate game.
to me, it’s not much different than “chad vs the gay nazis”, another hate game (with a pretty self-explanatory name) that was released around the same time and was also quickly delisted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other games that just got delisted were as bad as no mercy. but also, the blanket banning of anything NSFW (or even just kinky) sets a terrible precedent.
The main stuff I saw removed was related to incest and rape, not in a “it contains it” way. Somehow Corruption of Champions 2 escaped the ban hammer which makes me think those games probably took things pretty far, or were basically built to simulate assaulting people.
For reference, CoC2 is uh… Well when you lose in combat the enemy fucks you, and vice versa. It’s like a lot of fetish stuff too. So not that I know exactly what’s in the games, but I feel like you have to really be trying to outdo CoC2.
Edit: I’m not criticizing CoC2 btw, it’s fine. Its… I don’t wanna say tasteful but non con is like one of 90 things you can or cannot opt into. Idk how to put it. It’s an actual game that happens to have non con content I guess is what I mean.
In childhood and teenage years I played a lot of games like Carmageddon, Postal, Grand Theft Auto. In first two games slaughtering innocent people en masse is part of gameplay loop. Yet I somehow didn’t grow up to be maniac, and mostly didn’t even hurt anyone physically in my whole life. It’s games, fiction, you’re not supposed to take any of that seriously or to project it onto your real life.
I’m aware, I promise you that, I’m not saying games make you violent or awful. That argument has been annoying me to hell and back my whole life. To be honest I’ve not heard the argument for video games made for porn games before, but yeah, fair. So yeah. I don’t like those specific rape/incest games, they’re kinda yuck to me, but you do you.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed? (I wanna say thats how ao3 works) Or is steam having final say your preference? What if steam decided to make changes on its own?
If I had my way, I’d just have filters and tags, and let steam manage their storefront. I might disagree on how they do it, but that’s up to them(or it should be). It just feels weird and loopholey that a payment processor is making this sort of overarching decision.
The only line is depictions involving real people without their consent. A flexible line is a exploitable one.
It is very clear that MasterVisa will use any and all excuses to eliminate queerness from existence, and my perverse games will be the excuse.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed?
For me the line would be fictional-vs-non-fictional. So if a game contains photos or videos of actual people being hurt or abused IRL, that is illegal. But anything fictional is fine. For shocking/kinky stuff, there might be some special tags, and tag-based extra warnings like “this game contains scenes of …, do you want to open the page?”. So when you find and open any game with certain tag you get a warning corresponding to this tag. After confirmation it might remember your consent and enable some flags in the options to not bother you next time. But you can go into the options any moment and hide it all again if you decide you don’t want to see this kind of stuff in future. Also, before you enable/consent to this content, it probably shouldn’t be randomly recommended to you.
So I think that’s all pretty fair, of course including the fact that it should all be legal too.
Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they’ll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.
Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.
Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.
I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?
Sorry if this is a little philosophical, I just honestly wonder where the line should be for the least amount of harm.
Once they get rid of the sex they’ll come for the violence.
Steam is gonna look mighty empty if every game with violence is removed tho.
They’re not going to ban 90% of video games, not everything is a slippery slope
They’ve been trying to ban violent video games for several decades, you knob. They absolutely will come for them.
And it won’t happen because companies won’t allow them to ban a trillion dollar industry, you knob. Banning adult games isn’t remotely comparable. Most video games rely on violence and it’s too big of an industry to fail, adult games have a tiny following and were an easy target.
They banned adult games?! That means they’ll ban all violent media! They’ll eventually come for all media, they’ll come for our computers, they’ll trap us in cages! It’s a slippery slope!
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Isnt itch.io only indie games?
Yes, but.
Everyone should read the open letter that’s linked in the itch statement, to have a fully informed opinion.
There definitely is a line. Everyone can choose were they draw it. You don’t have to draw it in a way where you end up defending things that are kinda messed up.
There is definitely a hill worth fighting on in that area. I don’t think it’s this exact one.
My line is these payment processors being judge, jury and executioner about what material they deem valid. So I am fundamentally opposed.
I agree, but they aren’t.
I am specifically saying this, because my democratic country has laws that would also cover these things the letter mentions and would also deem them wrong. The people normally charged with upholding that law, are just dumb, “not from the internet” and overworked with other stuff.
Please check what laws your country has around the topic of glorification of crime and violence.
We also don’t know what the payment processors told itch and steam.
Itch and steam are doing what they are doing as a blanket move, to create a situation where they can stay in business for now and deal with the problem at all.
My bet would be that they “allowed nsfw stuff”, turned a blind eye, and now suddenly noticed they actually have a really big legal problem, with actual laws and the fact that it was an NGO and not an official legal institution that started this, was dumb luck and now they mostly need time and cover their own arse.
And I fully support the opinion that it shouldn’t be the payment processors forcing these sorts of things. But reality is messy and if this was the path of least resistance to get something done, such is life.
If GTA V is allowed, I’m pretty certain most of what we’ve seen from NSFW games is as well. Regardless, a payment company should not be acting as judge for such things, just as media companies should not act as judge on copyright infringement on YouTube.
I feel like there is nuance that is really getting lost on some people and that is the way that people engage with these games. Let me try to explain: I like playing NSFW games - even with tags like Rape, Corruption or the occasional Incest. Without trying to go into too much detail, it’s simply erotic to me in the correct context.
Now, do I know that these topics are incredibly taboo and/or offensive in real life? Yes, of course. I keep these things private and never put them out in real life. I would rather noone knows about what I do privately in my own time at my own PC. The way I see it, I simply paid an artist to draw something erotic and write a good story and/or program some gameplay attached to it. And once I stop engaging with the videogame, I also do not have any desire to recreate anything in real life. The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
And that’s exactly what worries me - the people pushing this narrative, genuinely think I would want to start reenacting something I’ve seen in a videogame happen. That is complete nonsense.
The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
Right. That’s fair and I’ll believe it.
Do you generally think there is any limit at all, in any type of media that crosses lines and shouldn’t exist? Think “liveleak” stuff from when that was around.
Or do you consider this game topic just not crossing that line?
The idea that what you see online has an effect on what you do offline, is not that far fetched is it? I mean, I don’t know if it’s true and I guess you could argue it could work in both directions too. Do people blow off steam online so they don’t have to enact their darkest fantasties IRL. Or does the online material encourage or normalize these things? It could also be so that this works different for different people. It let’s one person blow of steam, while it pushes someone else over the edge to do something horrendous. And if that is the case, is it fair to take it away from those who are not negatively influenced by it, to prevent those in whom it inspires bad actions from seeing it. I guess we’d need research on the matter, I don’t know if it exist or how reliable it is. But I don’t think it’s a nonsensical question to ask what the effects are.
Jesus Christ we can’t be back to this old chestnut.
We cannot, and do not, standardize society’s guard rails around the most extreme edge cases.
Leave it back with Jack Thompson in the late 90s-early 00s where it belongs. The horse has already been jellied by repeated blunt force trauma more than a decade ago. You’re just punching a horse shaped divot into the dirt at this point.
The question is if it’s edge cases. People suffer sexual trauma in very large numbers and working in psychiatry has taught me how incredibly harmful it can be. If this kind of material could help prevent sexual trauma, we should definitely allow it. If research shows that it makes problems far worse, we should consider limiting access to it. I am not saying either is the case, I am saying I don’t understand what is wrong with the question itself.
This restated question is not the problem directly.
The problem is the entire discussion/concept of “exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality” when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.
If there was even one iota of connection between “exposure to horrible things in media” (or even “pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context”) and “doing horrible things in real life”, the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as “exposure therapy” for soldiers. We’d be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.
And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I’m tired of having it.
Please stop letting the vague idea of “but it might help” override the logic of “but there’s no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling”.
Okay, Jack Thompson
My line is: any kind of fictional content is ok. If nobodies hurt, then there is no crime. And in practice being maniac in games doesn’t translate to being maniac irl. There might be some exceptions of crazy people being inspired by games to do crimes, but they should be dealt with on case-by-case basis using just regular law and law enforcement.
Moral judgement or suppression of fiction/artistic expression is deeply and profoundly unethical. How you or I or anyone else feels about something that isn’t “real” is inconsequential. If you allow any line to be crossed in this, then every line can and will be crossed.
I’m pretty sure I can find fictional things immoral? Why would it be unethical to have an opinion on fictional things?
Factually, all the lines that you allow to be crossed are crossed and all lines that are collectively defended are usually not crossed. That’s culture. It’s arbitrary and not absolute.
I wonder who major porn sites use as payment processors? (I don’t know the answer, I’m just saying…)
Most of the large ones only take bank transfers and cryptocurrency now.
ACLU petition concerning the payment processors: https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy
Fucking signed.
