> "This was first reported by Waypoint, which has since pulled its two articles on the subject without explanation. The articles' author, Ana Valens, has alleged that Vice's parent company, Savage Ventures, removed the articles due to concerns over their controversial content rather than any error in the reporting."
"Vice" shut down last year[0]; its brand was recently purchased and is now run by a hedge fund based in Nashville. I think this incident very clearly sums up the difference between what's news journalism, and what's a vapid content farm operated by financebros.
Ana Valens, also of "cis woman breeding farm" fame, is really not one who should be complaining about censorship. Far as she's concerned, when they go after her gooner games it's just a matter of the wrong people being censored. No bad tactics, only bad targets, amirite?
One would argue, are there any "news" organizations left? Or are they all operating from a content farm operated by financebros position? Can you name me one news organization that isn't owned by a parent company that has vested interests in specific stories and outcomes?
Christian Science Monitor (nonprofit run, the religion really is siloed to the "Christian Science Perspective" section and the reporting is good and as independent as it comes)
There are lots of news organisations not owned by parent companies with vested interests. RNZ in New Zealand, ABC in Australia, CBC in Canada and BBC in UK to name just a handful.
An interesting article I saw today in Portuguese language, is speculating that the real reason USA is threatening to tariff Brazil in 50% is because the invention of "Pix Parcelado" that is supposed to go online soon, will reduce the popularity of Mastercard and Visa, and thus remove an important tool of censorship from US government hands.
Lula also himself accused the USA of putting tariffs because of credit card companies.
Ironically, incidents like these further underscore the necessity of independence from Mastercard and Visa, as it seems anyone can influence these companies to serve their own interests.
It's not speculation, Mr. Trump started an investigation against Brazil and one of the items is the Pix system which he considers it's going against US interests.
given how the Brazilian state itself is notorious for censorship and turning into a judge-aucracy i guess not really about censorship bit rather who censors?
This is usually how it seems to go, the nations that are first and most interested in home-shoring (nationalizing? I don't recall what the right term here is) are those most interested in performing their own censorship activities.
Really, it kind-of is. Governments are supposed to answer to their electorate, while corporations answer to their shareholders. While I’d prefer no censorship, one of these is less likely to turn into a tyrant than the other.
Is there anything that can be done with the weaponization of the payment system? Cryptocurrency as obviously failed, but is there really no possible recourse when every traditional payment method seemingly colludes to not take the business for whatever reason?
I tend to be extremely critical of government regulation, but I think it really could be a tool here. It's important to preserve the ability of payment processors to block fraudulent purchases and they are legally required to block illegal purchases, but surely there is some way to write "you can't block purchases based on perceived reputational risks" into law, right?
It would be very easy to write a law that banned payment processors from refusing service without showing financial justification (e.g. high chargeback rate). But why would the government do that? They like to have power to lean on companies to hurt people where they can't do it directly due to the constitution.
Utilities and common carriers are examples. Porn and Cannabis businesses have no trouble getting electric, water, and telephone services.
In the USA at least, you can even steal electricity and be convicted of the crime and they still have to provide you with service, they just put your meter up on the pole.
Even this is sort of bullshit. Chargeback fees are paid by merchants and there are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements as a solution.
I think a 'purchase' ie a bank transfer like Zelle or even a paypal non-refundable 'gift' isn't likely to be blocked, it's just Visa and Mastercard that don't want to deal with offering fraud protection for vendors that see an extremely high number of chargebacks. So if you want to pay, pay by some method that doesn't offer money back in case of fraud.
I've also been prevented from sending money by e-check because my bank was concerned the form of payment was too suspicious, so I ETF'd money from another account instead. I don't think the law can force a 3rd party to facilitate a purchase.
The problem more so is capturing customers on the other end. Every time a site that relies on online payment tries to switch to crypto they say that the majority of potential customers are not willing to use it.
I think it's worse than that. I think they face a backlash for even deigning to support it. Usually the backlash comes from the same people who use the lack of utility of crypto as part of their argument to justify their behaviour.
It's like salting the earth of your garden because nothing will grow in it.
The biggest issue, for me, is that it is really annoying and hard work to use. The easiest way to use it is through something like MetaMask, but imagine trying to get grandma to buy something that way. It's tiring, and she'll probably get her wallet drained at some point.
It is responsible for the difficulty of buying and selling to make use of it, however, which I assumed is what he meant. As for BTC transaction time, well, there are many different, widely used cryptocoins (e.g. Ethereum) out there. Anyways, it can be pretty much instant, it depends on the fee you are willing to spend. The costs and the satoshis required are also not static. Today you may need only 1 sat / vB to have your transaction confirmed in 5-10 minutes, and 10 sat / vB a week from now. If you have issues with taking a long ass time to get it confirmed, increase the fee. You may have it confirmed instantly just for 0.5 EUR. Judging by the stats, BTC seems chill these days, so it shouldn't cost too much, and it should get confirmed relatively quickly.
>it can be pretty much instant, it depends on the fee you are willing to spend.
1. Not a problem with any other currency I've used.
2. I've never even been offered to have my transaction clear more quickly by paying a higher fee.
3. If I'm sitting at a store and they tell me I can either wait around for 5-10 minutes (and possibly more) for my transaction to clear or pay 50 cents for it to be instant, I'm just gonna pull out my credit card and use that. I don't suspect I'm in the minority.
Cryptocurrency is on the way being managed by govt. So it's correct to say cryptocurrency did not fail, but certainly the original libertarian vision behind it is dead.
The libertarian vision was not behind it. It was projected onto it by adopters who thought it was something that it never could be.
Any currency that has any political ideology would require some form coercion to be used by those who do not share that ideology. Fiat currencies carry that coercion implicitly, people who don't like the government generally still use their money because they have little choice.
The underlying principle of Bitcoin was consensus. Agreeing to operate on whatever principles the majority of miners are using. Forks are an integral part of that, people choosing a different path and those who agree with them going that way. The perceived value coming from those who accept whichever fork they chose and what they think it should be worth.
The only real "Stick it to the man" kind of philosophy that came with it was as a rejection of unilateral monetary control. That is the antithesis of consensus.
In an ideal crypto world governments would be the majority of the miners. They would negotiate amongst each other to decide on monetary policy by consensus. That's a long way from happening, with no clear path towards that end in sight.
In a sense that too, is an ideology, the distinction is that the ideology doesn't want to do the thing that it can't. It presents an option, instead of forcing people to use it.
Yes. There are tons of different proposals, but generally speaking the common thread is that the banks (possibly The Central Bank) will keep the keys for you. They will still be middlemen in all transactions so they can harvest data and make sure you aren't buying anything the government doesn't like. They can also do tax enforcement a lot better that way
A key is just a 256 bit number. You can literally create one with paper and dice rolls. They will no sooner figure out who is holding most of these than they will figure out who is holding cash, or the identities of the 25m+ people downloading pirated media right now.
At best they can ask the public to please turn over their private keys, which will go about as well as efforts to stop piracy.
> key is just a 256 bit number. You can literally create one with paper and dice rolls
Well sure, but if you want to actually use it you need the whole keypair. Unless you're really good with you elliptic curve abacus you're going to need a computer for that l.
They can prosecute transactions with unregistered keys as money laundering. They may not have the resources to get everybody but they can collect a few scalps pour encourager les autres.
Yep, they can also prosecute merchants who accept payments that don't go through "approved" middlemen (banks, etc), or even ban/regulate crypto that allows users to make their own keys.
At one point the US gov was building their own crypto currency, and I'm sure it wasn't because they felt the existing options weren't private enough from oversight.
How does the state prohibit illegal drugs? They will never be able to eradicate it, obviously, but the state can make it incredibly hard to acquire and use cryptocurrency.
* Legal changes. Web platforms have section 230 protection to host user content. For payment processing this might be something like the proposed Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) that requires banks to offer additional (non-Visa/Mastercard) payment providers. Or a more explicit payment neutrality law the requires credit card companies to be more even-handed in non-financial issues. Or anti-debanking laws that ensure everyone has some minimal access to sending and receiving payments.
* Lawsuit results. Part of the issue with Visa was that they got dragged into lawsuits against sites that were using them to process payments; the lawsuits and appeals around that are still unresolved but if Visa's lack of legal liability goes away then it will be harder for random outside groups to harass them, for good or ill.
* Introducing an independent payment processor. While JCB in Japan has had some similar pressure applied to them, when there were national sovereignty concerns over Visa being able to dictate that American laws and norms should apply to their country Japan had many other payment processors to fall back on. Similarly, PIX in Brazil makes it much harder for non-government private actors to dictate what people can and cannot buy.
Removing the middlemen is the most obvious solution, but they’re also amongst the most powerful players in the world, so it’s going to be challenging (to put it mildly).
In some places it’s already more than viable. In Europe it’s baked into the banking system, SCT (SEPA Credit Transfer) lets you move money between any two European accounts with only as much hassle as your bank wants in your way. And EPC QR lets you initiate transfers from QR codes.
The biggest annoyance with it is that uptake is quite variable from country to country.
In the Netherlands we have bank cards and IDeal for offline and online payments respectively. Those answer to local legislation, and do direct bank-to-bank transfers.
But if I want to buy online from Germany or some other EU country, I need to use American payment method. Also if I want to buy from China, I need to use an American payment method.
Part of the problem is that you have to make a clean break from these middlemen. Steam can't say "for these games, we only take this form of payment", it's either only sell games Visa and MasterCard say you can, or no one can pay with their credit cards.
In what way failed? Because it's like saying P2P failed because the big corps don't like it and try their best to stop it, while still existing for quite a while.
I use it to donate or pay for legal things online I wish to keep anonymous like I would use cash for in person. Most people in the US do not value privacy, but for those few of us that want to purchase online with privacy, or those in heavily censored countries, cryptocurrency is the only option.
Just because few people make use of their rights is not a valid argument for their removal.
Neglect that minority at your peril! I don't have any money in cryptocoins, I think the market is almost entirely scams and crime, but it's a big market and I see its influence everywhere nowadays.
which is about the same amount of people that would be interested in buying rape/people-farming games. seems like a match made in (some twisted version) of heaven.
You can say cryptocurrency is failed, but adult entertainers heavily rely on it because they have been censored by payment processors basically forever.
Censorship has a way of pushing people to learn inconvenient technology, just like how most Chinese citizens know how to use VPNs.
Why can't governments do it? Have a digital cash. Something that works like cash that the government runs. They already handle physical currency, so why not digital?
Add in some really heavy handed rules that government can't use it to spy and maybe it will work.
Also, these people really should be shamed for their censorship.
Because governments always follow rules and never change them?
Private spending and communication are the beating heart of a healthy democracy and must be run directly by the public and decentralized or aspiring tyrants will co-opt them.
The people will never actually be in charge until we stop letting currency be controlled by governments and corporations.
Yes its a very easy problem to solve, would take about 3 states to pass a law mandating "must-process" payments rather than the current framework of "may-process" (under threat of revocation of money transfer authority). Then the only method for them to not process a payment is those prohibited under existing law (ie: terrorist financing).
I could see CA and FL easily passing such a law given the right push from constituents.
Not really. You can insist on retail vendors accepting legal tender by law, but these things are online, and online it means every payment can and _will_ be tracked. As with everything you do in public, online payments can and _will_ be used against you (in the labor marketplace, in court, in... everything, to control you and your habits). More people will accept or insist on policing of your and their habits than people who will resist it.
One of the reasons that credit card companies have an incentive to keep this stuff off people's statements is that they sell your credit card histories on the data market, and would not want you to have a strong reason to want to stop them.
That's an interesting effect but I really don't think that's a significant driver here. It really seems to me like they're just being threatened by activists, journalists, and activist investors.
> That's an interesting effect but I really don't think that's a significant driver here. It really seems to me like they're just being threatened by activists, journalists, and activist investors.
Right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media (the groups behind the shutdown of Xtube, and the all-but-shutdown of Pornhub[0], as well as the short-lived ban of pornography on OnlyFans) are definitely the driving force behind these bans, but fundamentally the card networks are ambivalent at best when it comes to anything that could be remotely considered pornographic.
[0] Pornhub still operates, but they removed all "non-verified" content, so it mostly serves as an marketing outlet for studios and OnlyFans creators, and all of the older content that was never verified was removed entirely.
Visa/Mastercard are, like you said, ambivalent at best when it comes to pornography in general but there's more nuance to it. Content widely accepted to be immoral and/or illegal such as non-consensual pornography (that is explicit content posted without the consent of those filmed) and child sexual abuse material is forbidden. This is what the pornhub thing was about, allegedly, and why verified content is still allowed. Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice. Depending on the processor this can include "extreme pornography" that is not in any way illegal and is only distasteful to most. A good example is that many payment processors do not porn featuring blood which is a big problem for women who menstruate.
> Content widely accepted to be immoral and/or illegal such as non-consensual pornography (that is explicit content posted without the consent of those filmed) and child sexual abuse material is forbidden. This is what the pornhub thing was about, allegedly, and why verified content is still allowed.
"Allegedly" is a very operative word there. Pornhub was actually extremely aggressive about removing CSAM and nonconsensual content, to the point where Facebook was actually a far larger problem for those actually concerned with stopping CSAM[0], with three orders of magnitude more instances on Facebook than all Mindgeek websites (including Pornhub) combined.
However, groups like the ones I mentioned only targeted Pornhub, because they don't actually care about CSAM. Their goal is to eliminate pornography and all "immoral" content, where "immoral" is defined according to an explicitly religious, right-wing interpretation of the term. That's not a secret; that's how they advertise themselves, and that includes the group in question here, Collective Shout[1], although the latter is now trying to hide that tie via futher censorship[2].
Because going after Facebook doesn't fit into an agenda of banning pornography, you'll never hear them mention one word about CSAM or other horrendous abuse that happens on Facebook and is facilitated by the platform.
> Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice.
That's not quite true. Processors can set their own restrictions, but so can Visa/Mastercard/etc, and they absolutely do police perceived brand risk, which includes not just pornography, but also completely nonsexual content as well.,
You've explained it better than I have, thank you. The one nitpick I want to make is the last part, my understanding is that Visa/Mastercard police their perceived brand risk primarily through broad statements that are then interpreted by payment processors in detail. Visa aren't the ones saying "Women having sex on their period is an extreme sexual activity", they're just saying "no extreme sexual activity" and the payment processor has to figure out what that means leading to the former claim.
> my understanding is that Visa/Mastercard police their perceived brand risk primarily through broad statements that are then interpreted by payment processors in detail. Visa aren't the ones saying "Women having sex on their period is an extreme sexual activity", they're just saying "no extreme sexual activity" and the payment processor has to figure out what that means leading to the former claim.
You're not wrong but that's only part of the story. What you're describing happens, which leads to overly-conservative interpretations of the unwritten policies. But the card brands do also have explicit rules that they expect downstream players to adhere to.
Confusingly - and this is where your impression (which is common) likely comes from - the card brands themselves provide different rules to different downstream providers, so it's not like there's one single, consistent list of rules for Visa globally (for example). It's not law and they are not bound by precedent or even an expectation of consistency.
just kidding. this is the first i've heard of that, though.
i don't think it totally makes sense. your card transaction will still say "STEAMGAMES.COM 7264823" or similar, regardless of the content purchased.
on top of that, all sorts of shady porn & dating websites that you would NOT want leaked use the credit card companies.
Data enrichment brokers cross index purchase times with other data from legal factory installed spyware found in cash registers, analytics tools in proprietary software you already have on your computer, etc etc.
Every time you buy an over the counter medication at the pharmacy with a credit card, the data brokers know by combining information sources, and sell it to insurance companies.
But it still doesn't apply here. At most they could cross-reference it with a public Steam profile that has the game listed as owned after the purchase (actually, I doubt they would have the account ID to prove it for sure, but with enough purchases they could likely figure it out), but by then you've already sort of revealed to the world you bought whatever embarrassing title yourself.
And this is really bad, like I forgot the number of times I give in to get that pack of candy near the register at a shop then after a couple days exactly as the pack is empty I get shown a commercial of the same brand of the same pack/size etc.
Where are you? In the United States, there are displays of candy at every cash register, but they're individual servings that you're expected to eat in full immediately after leaving the store. A big bag with several days' worth of candy would have to come from the candy aisle.
And... are you really being served internet ads for candy?
They certainly say they don't sell any PII data, but definitely do, at a minimum, sell de-identified aggregate transaction data. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some data broker that can buy and deanonymize data from them.
Hey that's a pretty interesting thought actually. I hadn't considered that, but "follow the incentives and assume rationality" is generally (in my experience) the best way to try and understand why people do what they do. This theory definitely makes a lot of sense from that lens.
> This is likely far from over: Collective Shout is no doubt feeling emboldened by a second public success in its efforts to police content on Steam specifically. The games I saw removed from Steam in this wave all featured risible content and suspect quality, but Collective Shout has a broader anti-pornography, even anti-expression remit that it has demonstrated in the past.
Yes indeed, a huge success like this will give them a big boost in motivation and funding for many, many years to come. IMHO we need to regulate away the credit card processing companies ability to discriminate like this, and while we're at it we should stop letting them heavily tax the entire economy
How does these types of Australian anti-vice groups have so much global sway, and yet Australia leads the world in gambling addiction and accessibility? Presumably they'd be interested in both vices, but seem to only wield power over one. *edited for clarity of question
They don't. Valve got their profit from the incest/ageplay/noncon crowd and now they want to revert to their family-friendly image with that money drying up. This is just a convenient excuse to do so.
Valve was forced by credit card processors to do this, its not Valve that is trying to keep a family friendly image here, if they could they would keep those games they said so themselves.
It seems like we need two things. First, some type of universal standard to id the country of legal residence of a user. Second, some type of way to know what laws a company needs to comply with to operate in a jurisdiction.
There are too many laws across different jurisdictions that makes it really challenging for companies to offer goods and services.
We need exactly the opposite: it should be impossible to determine the location of an Internet user. The fact that a user's IP address generally reveals their country is a massive flaw in the design of the Internet.
The only way to circumvent jurisdiction-specific laws is to make them impossible to enforce.
I'm not sure if this solves it exactly? If MasterCard says they'll cut you off unless you adopt their requirements it doesn't really help to say you'll apply that policy in X country and keep selling the stuff in another country, they could still cut you off unless you do it globally.
How would that apply to this? It's not about a law. They aren't even demanding better age verification, they want to be able to force arbitrary things to be removed entirely (starting with more objectionable topics, but I'm sure it will expand).
Man, having “GTA 5” and “No Mercy” as targets in the same conversation is strange. GTA5 is IMO really mild for a game, while I do think No Mercy probably crossed the line.
But I haven’t played a GTA game in a decade so maybe I’m misremembering..
GTA was a lot more controversial in the past than it is today. It used to be the subject of moderate to heavy moral panic, since it's a game about committing crimes; stealing cars and running over cops / hookers. Hearing people whine about GTA today feels like a blast from the past.
Totally fair point, the first one I played was GTA III in the early 2000s, and I definitely remember some of these conversations. Similar to how DOOM and Mortal Kombat had a lot of controversy, but like you, I had assumed that this was mostly in the past.
It is normal and okay. Every 8-14 year old boy wants to play guns even in the absence of video games. The video games we're talking about are play violence. If they upped the realism to depict actual mature themes, like the German soldier begging for his life, then we're talking about content not appropriate for kids.
What's funny is that boys don't grow out of this, the entire genre of dad action movies is the same play violence. The only reason they might not be appropriate for kids is because they feature sex.
> @ted_bunny "In the past" is inevitabilist framing. I don't think it'll ever be normal or ok to let kids play mass murder simulators. Just because our culture has decided to accept it doesn't mean the matter is settled.
If there was any actual evidence to support the assumption that "mass murder simulators" have a negative long-term effect on humans, this wouldn't be nonsense. (I do know that it does have a slight short-term effect on violent tendencies.)
EDIT: I noticed that comment was removed but I didn't want to delete my reply to it!)
Similarly, if there was evidence to support that people engaging in "forbidden" sexual content in a fictional context, somehow influenced real human behavior in that space (does "cheating wife" porn encourage more actual cheating, or "incest porn" encourage more incest?), this group's righteous campaign might actually have substance instead of being devoid of it. Otherwise you're basically just doing baseless thought-policing based on Argumentum ad Nauseam fallacies. "I don't like the fictional content you're engaging with... Just because!"
People really have some major difficulty for some reason discussing these things rationally. For example, take a brother and sister, raised separately, who meet by chance and end up feeling intense GSA (genetic sexual attraction). It just so happens that the sister is infertile. They want to have a relationship. Who is actually harmed by that, again? Anyway.
GTA5 shows everything wrong with puritan morality. No problem with drugs, guns, shooting innocent people, etc, but have sex with a hooker and the camera pans away. At least under after when you then go and kill them and steal their money.
People like to give America shit for anti-porn activism and laws but it really seems like America is just trailing behind the rest of the anglosphere. This case for instance, of Australians imposing their prudish values on American companies that were content to tolerate these naughty games. And those porn ID laws that Texas/etc get flack for are just on the path already trail blazed by the UK.
I remember having to download the Australian version of Fahrenheit because the US release (renamed as Indigo Prophecy) was censored. In my experience the US loves violence while the rest of the world is more likely to censor it, but the US hates sex, alcohol, and anything else that might possibly offend Christians (including religious references and iconography like how Final Fantasy was censored to rename the spell "Holy" and the Tower of Prayers). Germans censor anything nazi related in the same way, banning swastikas like the US removes crosses. Japan seems the least likely to censor artistic works, and when they do it's often for violence.
I can say as an Australia our governments have always been very enthusiastic about controlling what we can read, see, and hear. It was true 60 years ago with our movie rating scheme ("not given a rating" was the newspeak for "banned"), 30 years ago with games, and lots of books.
The internet has more or less rendered these efforts moot in recent times. This was highlighted when they tried to impose a rating system on games a couple of decades ago. I asked a school kid about the effect on him. He said it didn't effect him, as he downloaded his games from the internet. It all fell apart about then. Consequently we had the opportunity to see seen the flood of porn would do to society, and noticed nothing of consequence. The flood of conspiracy theories for life hacks on the other hand was completely unanticipated and it's impact badly underestimated.
Collective Shout is an excellent illustration of the effect. It's effectively a one girl band, yet her shouting on the internet about her desire to force her Baptist pro-life maternal morals down everyones throats has now been heard across the world.
>The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who originated in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. They sought to purify the Church of England by removing Catholic practices and beliefs. Driven by their religious convictions and facing persecution, they eventually migrated to North America in the 17th century, establishing colonies in New England.
It's also an ideologically motivated misframing. It ignores any arguments about the actual harms of this sort of media and pretends it's all about pearl-clutching.
What are the harms of pornographic media? To me it seems pretty clear that they help reduce sexual violence (why risk jail if I can safely indulge in a fantasy), and I wouldn't be surprised that countries with pornographic bans are more misogynistic.
No, it's not the same thing. Legalizing prostitution still involves real people which can be harmed during the act; replaying depictions in media does not.
I don't understand what position you're arguing for. In case of prostitution, there has to be lot more consent given, unlike in media (where it might not be required at all, in case of drawn or generated content). More consent => more risk of it not being given properly.
In any case, my question and argument wasn't about consent at all, but harm. I can see a world with brothel on every corner being easily more harmful than a world with access to pornography, even if the consent is 100% in both worlds.
Should we? Idk. Escorts are quite available in the US, but I'd never use one. However if I could step into the back for a quickie while the tank was filling...
I don't think that's ignoring so much as most people do consider that pearl clutching censorship. You should at least cite some studies on the harms for discussion, but I've not been convinced by it in the past when I looked.
If only we had some kind of purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
How do you get that electronic cash in the first place without going through a financial institution?
Possibly by trading with someone who already has electronic cash, I guess – but how do I know I’m not laundering the other person’s money, and/or financing terrorism or CSAM with my fiat money?
If only there was a peer to peer electronic cash system that was instant and you didn't have to pay for fees for each transaction.
Jokes and cryptocurrencies aside. The digital euro is being built and will be deployed in the coming years, enabling offline digital money transfers. I'll have to see it to belive it.
>If only we had some kind of purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments
Unfortunately, all such systems are quickly co-opted for the purpose of speculative price schemery. Bitcoin will soon reach a point of no-return, when the smallest fractional has an exchange rate so high that it will be impossible to purchase small goods at all (except in bulk), though in reality that point was reached many years ago. The entire concept of cryptocurrencies might actually be irrevocably poisoned, because even a new system would have to deal with the public perception baggage of the last decade's many Ponzi-type scams and various joke/meme coins. If only Satoshi had been a social genius instead of a technical genius.
> All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight," Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted on July 18th.
Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?
>Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?
We are discussing blocking of legal content by the payment companies. If they do not like this games or GTA or metal music they should make laws.
But they are concerned by virtual incest while in USA cousin marriage is still legal in many states.
If i believe in this stupidity that music and games are harmful then I would use the big money to do some studies to prove this and then make laws, not force my ideology by abusing the payment monopoly this companies have to push my stupidity to the entire fucking world.
The US is actually an outlier in how taboo it considers first-cousin sexual relations. They’re certainly eyebrow-raising these days, but not considered incestuous in most of Europe or other parts of the world (with China and parts of India being two admittedly big exceptions).
I am not sure, but this companies will block content containing this legal relations, and I seen people in the sims community (not sure their nationality ) demanding EA blocks "step" relations , even if there is nothing illegal or medical wrong about that, just their fragile hearts that the game does not block this.
Yeah, nearly 80 years ago, and he married in Germany. First cousin marriages in the US today will certainly warrant some side eye as Sharlin mentioned.
According to wikipedia 24 states have it banned and then 7 more apply restrictions such as a minimum age or infertility
Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? Pornography and obscenity should not be protected speech. It’s violence against human dignity akin to hate speech.
I am absolutely sick and tired of people using the word violence willy nilly when discussing things they don't like. "Violence against human dignity" is not real, that is a nonsensical concept. You are not being stabbed in the human dignity. No one's human dignity is being blown to pieces. You are more than welcome to argue that pornography causes psychological damage, but calling it violence and lumping it in with hate speech is not compelling in the slightest.
We certainly sanction hate speech because of the psychological and physical damage it causes to its victims. Pornography is harmful to everyone involved, from producer to consumer. In the case of video games that don’t depict real people this is attenuated somewhat, but not in the way that counts. By consuming or producing pornography, you are blowing your own human dignity to bits.
If you would prefer, I’d say it’s an “affront” to human dignity.
My opinion is that sexuality is something that shouldn’t be commodified in any way, shape, or form. When we package it and promote it as a commodity or for entertainment, that practice as such is harmful. There’s simply no such thing as “healthy” pornography because the very preconditions for pornography to come into existence are rooted in an unhealthy and disordered understanding of human sexuality. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were absolutely right on this front.
I’m far more afraid of the world we currently live in, where we treat sex/sexuality as something that exists for entertainment value and can be commodified — than I am of this form of censorship. At least our overlords are making the ethical call here.
You think that a payment processor having arbitrary power to shut down any business they want anywhere in the world for any reason is a good thing because this time you agree with the reason?
Book burners don’t have any morals, they just want to burn books, and they’ll come for yours sooner or later.
They don’t have arbitrary power - power is never exercised unilaterally. I can’t imagine they would succeed for very long at say, shutting down all the grocery stores in the world. They wouldn’t even dare try from the hell they would have to pay.
And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business. They have no agenda or incentive to promote censorship as such.
The fact that you had to jump to such an extreme misinterpretation of my point to attempt to refute it shows just how right I am. I said ‘any business’, not ‘any number of businesses simultaneously’. Your counterpoint is as ridiculous as saying a man with a loaded gun in a crowded bar isn’t dangerous because he has fewer bullets in his magazine than there are people in the bar. Economic warfare always operates on defeat in detail.
Okay, since you stated it as a fact: Citation needed. Show me Visa’s statement to the effect that they have no agenda, because all of their actions suggest otherwise.
> And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business.
They're not book burners... they're just trying to eliminate certain media they find objectionable? They would consider it unacceptable for Steam to, for example, make these items only purchasable through crypto/bank transfer.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s violent and some pornography is good for most people. It’s not going to kill or murder or whatever people.
But what’s been happening lately with onlyfans and other things is a recipe for a disaster in my mind. We’ve made it hard for younger generations, made paths to success much less atrainable and instead have enabled black markets while the economy suffers because of it. I imagine we’re stuck with a deranged and broken society of people moonlighting to make ends meet by doing soft porno in far greater numbers than before. And yes of course that’s what strip clubs are for but that was way less of an issue than this.
> "This was first reported by Waypoint, which has since pulled its two articles on the subject without explanation. The articles' author, Ana Valens, has alleged that Vice's parent company, Savage Ventures, removed the articles due to concerns over their controversial content rather than any error in the reporting."
"Vice" shut down last year[0]; its brand was recently purchased and is now run by a hedge fund based in Nashville. I think this incident very clearly sums up the difference between what's news journalism, and what's a vapid content farm operated by financebros.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39476074 ("Vice website is shutting down (writing.exchange)"—459 comments)
Ana Valens, also of "cis woman breeding farm" fame, is really not one who should be complaining about censorship. Far as she's concerned, when they go after her gooner games it's just a matter of the wrong people being censored. No bad tactics, only bad targets, amirite?
One would argue, are there any "news" organizations left? Or are they all operating from a content farm operated by financebros position? Can you name me one news organization that isn't owned by a parent company that has vested interests in specific stories and outcomes?
Christian Science Monitor (nonprofit run, the religion really is siloed to the "Christian Science Perspective" section and the reporting is good and as independent as it comes)
The Guardian is owned by an independent trust: https://www.theguardian.com/about
Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan. Can't recommend it enough.
https://www.trustworthymedia.org/list-of-independent-media/
404 Media is owned by its reporters
Wondering the same for a while. And does paying for news provide any guarantees…?
ProPublica generally.
Al Jazeera?
There are lots of news organisations not owned by parent companies with vested interests. RNZ in New Zealand, ABC in Australia, CBC in Canada and BBC in UK to name just a handful.
*or state owned media organizations.
Why exclude them from real news orgs?
An interesting article I saw today in Portuguese language, is speculating that the real reason USA is threatening to tariff Brazil in 50% is because the invention of "Pix Parcelado" that is supposed to go online soon, will reduce the popularity of Mastercard and Visa, and thus remove an important tool of censorship from US government hands.
Lula also himself accused the USA of putting tariffs because of credit card companies.
Ironically, incidents like these further underscore the necessity of independence from Mastercard and Visa, as it seems anyone can influence these companies to serve their own interests.
It's not speculation, Mr. Trump started an investigation against Brazil and one of the items is the Pix system which he considers it's going against US interests.
given how the Brazilian state itself is notorious for censorship and turning into a judge-aucracy i guess not really about censorship bit rather who censors?
This is usually how it seems to go, the nations that are first and most interested in home-shoring (nationalizing? I don't recall what the right term here is) are those most interested in performing their own censorship activities.
Really, it kind-of is. Governments are supposed to answer to their electorate, while corporations answer to their shareholders. While I’d prefer no censorship, one of these is less likely to turn into a tyrant than the other.
Is there anything that can be done with the weaponization of the payment system? Cryptocurrency as obviously failed, but is there really no possible recourse when every traditional payment method seemingly colludes to not take the business for whatever reason?
I tend to be extremely critical of government regulation, but I think it really could be a tool here. It's important to preserve the ability of payment processors to block fraudulent purchases and they are legally required to block illegal purchases, but surely there is some way to write "you can't block purchases based on perceived reputational risks" into law, right?
It would be very easy to write a law that banned payment processors from refusing service without showing financial justification (e.g. high chargeback rate). But why would the government do that? They like to have power to lean on companies to hurt people where they can't do it directly due to the constitution.
In principle they absolutely could, but are they though? I don't know of any examples of this actually happening.
Utilities and common carriers are examples. Porn and Cannabis businesses have no trouble getting electric, water, and telephone services.
In the USA at least, you can even steal electricity and be convicted of the crime and they still have to provide you with service, they just put your meter up on the pole.
> e.g. high chargeback rate
Even this is sort of bullshit. Chargeback fees are paid by merchants and there are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements as a solution.
It goes beyond this though, at some point you need to go from "this account is high-risk" to "this account is probably running stolen credit cards".
I think a 'purchase' ie a bank transfer like Zelle or even a paypal non-refundable 'gift' isn't likely to be blocked, it's just Visa and Mastercard that don't want to deal with offering fraud protection for vendors that see an extremely high number of chargebacks. So if you want to pay, pay by some method that doesn't offer money back in case of fraud.
I've also been prevented from sending money by e-check because my bank was concerned the form of payment was too suspicious, so I ETF'd money from another account instead. I don't think the law can force a 3rd party to facilitate a purchase.
> Cryptocurrency as obviously failed
I don't think cryptocurrency has failed. Yesterday I successfully payed with crypto when the payment with multiple credit cards failed.
The problem more so is capturing customers on the other end. Every time a site that relies on online payment tries to switch to crypto they say that the majority of potential customers are not willing to use it.
I think it's worse than that. I think they face a backlash for even deigning to support it. Usually the backlash comes from the same people who use the lack of utility of crypto as part of their argument to justify their behaviour.
It's like salting the earth of your garden because nothing will grow in it.
The biggest issue, for me, is that it is really annoying and hard work to use. The easiest way to use it is through something like MetaMask, but imagine trying to get grandma to buy something that way. It's tiring, and she'll probably get her wallet drained at some point.
You can blame the Government for that.
The government isn't responsibly for a Bitcoin transaction taking a long ass time to complete.
It is responsible for the difficulty of buying and selling to make use of it, however, which I assumed is what he meant. As for BTC transaction time, well, there are many different, widely used cryptocoins (e.g. Ethereum) out there. Anyways, it can be pretty much instant, it depends on the fee you are willing to spend. The costs and the satoshis required are also not static. Today you may need only 1 sat / vB to have your transaction confirmed in 5-10 minutes, and 10 sat / vB a week from now. If you have issues with taking a long ass time to get it confirmed, increase the fee. You may have it confirmed instantly just for 0.5 EUR. Judging by the stats, BTC seems chill these days, so it shouldn't cost too much, and it should get confirmed relatively quickly.
>it can be pretty much instant, it depends on the fee you are willing to spend.
1. Not a problem with any other currency I've used. 2. I've never even been offered to have my transaction clear more quickly by paying a higher fee. 3. If I'm sitting at a store and they tell me I can either wait around for 5-10 minutes (and possibly more) for my transaction to clear or pay 50 cents for it to be instant, I'm just gonna pull out my credit card and use that. I don't suspect I'm in the minority.
Cryptocurrency is on the way being managed by govt. So it's correct to say cryptocurrency did not fail, but certainly the original libertarian vision behind it is dead.
The libertarian vision was not behind it. It was projected onto it by adopters who thought it was something that it never could be.
Any currency that has any political ideology would require some form coercion to be used by those who do not share that ideology. Fiat currencies carry that coercion implicitly, people who don't like the government generally still use their money because they have little choice.
The underlying principle of Bitcoin was consensus. Agreeing to operate on whatever principles the majority of miners are using. Forks are an integral part of that, people choosing a different path and those who agree with them going that way. The perceived value coming from those who accept whichever fork they chose and what they think it should be worth.
The only real "Stick it to the man" kind of philosophy that came with it was as a rejection of unilateral monetary control. That is the antithesis of consensus.
In an ideal crypto world governments would be the majority of the miners. They would negotiate amongst each other to decide on monetary policy by consensus. That's a long way from happening, with no clear path towards that end in sight.
In a sense that too, is an ideology, the distinction is that the ideology doesn't want to do the thing that it can't. It presents an option, instead of forcing people to use it.
Is the govt going to manage your private keys any time soon? How would that work?
Yes. There are tons of different proposals, but generally speaking the common thread is that the banks (possibly The Central Bank) will keep the keys for you. They will still be middlemen in all transactions so they can harvest data and make sure you aren't buying anything the government doesn't like. They can also do tax enforcement a lot better that way
A key is just a 256 bit number. You can literally create one with paper and dice rolls. They will no sooner figure out who is holding most of these than they will figure out who is holding cash, or the identities of the 25m+ people downloading pirated media right now.
At best they can ask the public to please turn over their private keys, which will go about as well as efforts to stop piracy.
> key is just a 256 bit number. You can literally create one with paper and dice rolls
Well sure, but if you want to actually use it you need the whole keypair. Unless you're really good with you elliptic curve abacus you're going to need a computer for that l.
They can prosecute transactions with unregistered keys as money laundering. They may not have the resources to get everybody but they can collect a few scalps pour encourager les autres.
They tried making examples of a few people for piracy too and adoption only went up.
Stopping cryptocurrency is as hard as stopping end to end encrypted messaging or banning porn.
You either allow access to the open internet or you do not.
Yep, they can also prosecute merchants who accept payments that don't go through "approved" middlemen (banks, etc), or even ban/regulate crypto that allows users to make their own keys.
At one point the US gov was building their own crypto currency, and I'm sure it wasn't because they felt the existing options weren't private enough from oversight.
How does the state prohibit illegal drugs? They will never be able to eradicate it, obviously, but the state can make it incredibly hard to acquire and use cryptocurrency.
In the USA, some things that come to mind:
* Legal changes. Web platforms have section 230 protection to host user content. For payment processing this might be something like the proposed Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) that requires banks to offer additional (non-Visa/Mastercard) payment providers. Or a more explicit payment neutrality law the requires credit card companies to be more even-handed in non-financial issues. Or anti-debanking laws that ensure everyone has some minimal access to sending and receiving payments.
* Lawsuit results. Part of the issue with Visa was that they got dragged into lawsuits against sites that were using them to process payments; the lawsuits and appeals around that are still unresolved but if Visa's lack of legal liability goes away then it will be harder for random outside groups to harass them, for good or ill.
* Introducing an independent payment processor. While JCB in Japan has had some similar pressure applied to them, when there were national sovereignty concerns over Visa being able to dictate that American laws and norms should apply to their country Japan had many other payment processors to fall back on. Similarly, PIX in Brazil makes it much harder for non-government private actors to dictate what people can and cannot buy.
Need some hard evidence of "cryptocurrency failed". Two counterexamples that I can think of, as someone who doesn't even pay close attention to it:
* PornHub has been only taking cryptocurrency for payment for a while, and they seem to be doing ok
* The US just passed GENIUS Act with somewhat bipartisan support -- probably not even imaginable one year ago
Removing the middlemen is the most obvious solution, but they’re also amongst the most powerful players in the world, so it’s going to be challenging (to put it mildly).
See: https://www.taler.net/en/index.html
In some places it’s already more than viable. In Europe it’s baked into the banking system, SCT (SEPA Credit Transfer) lets you move money between any two European accounts with only as much hassle as your bank wants in your way. And EPC QR lets you initiate transfers from QR codes.
The biggest annoyance with it is that uptake is quite variable from country to country.
In the Netherlands we have bank cards and IDeal for offline and online payments respectively. Those answer to local legislation, and do direct bank-to-bank transfers.
But if I want to buy online from Germany or some other EU country, I need to use American payment method. Also if I want to buy from China, I need to use an American payment method.
Part of the problem is that you have to make a clean break from these middlemen. Steam can't say "for these games, we only take this form of payment", it's either only sell games Visa and MasterCard say you can, or no one can pay with their credit cards.
-removing middleman
-also introduce new middleman
I don't think that works honestly, its just move a new money into new player everyone want to take a cut
In what way failed? Because it's like saying P2P failed because the big corps don't like it and try their best to stop it, while still existing for quite a while.
In the sense that people don’t really use it to buy things with.
Some people definitely do :D
Some extreme minority may. The vast, vast majority do not.
I use it to donate or pay for legal things online I wish to keep anonymous like I would use cash for in person. Most people in the US do not value privacy, but for those few of us that want to purchase online with privacy, or those in heavily censored countries, cryptocurrency is the only option.
Just because few people make use of their rights is not a valid argument for their removal.
Using a currency with a permanent, irrevocable public ledger of every transaction for anonymous payments?
(I assume you mean BTC here, since very few places actually take privacy coins like Monero.)
>Some people
*a negligible minority
Neglect that minority at your peril! I don't have any money in cryptocoins, I think the market is almost entirely scams and crime, but it's a big market and I see its influence everywhere nowadays.
>*a negligible minority
which is about the same amount of people that would be interested in buying rape/people-farming games. seems like a match made in (some twisted version) of heaven.
You mean like The Sims?
You can say cryptocurrency is failed, but adult entertainers heavily rely on it because they have been censored by payment processors basically forever.
Censorship has a way of pushing people to learn inconvenient technology, just like how most Chinese citizens know how to use VPNs.
Why can't governments do it? Have a digital cash. Something that works like cash that the government runs. They already handle physical currency, so why not digital?
Add in some really heavy handed rules that government can't use it to spy and maybe it will work.
Also, these people really should be shamed for their censorship.
Because governments always follow rules and never change them?
Private spending and communication are the beating heart of a healthy democracy and must be run directly by the public and decentralized or aspiring tyrants will co-opt them.
The people will never actually be in charge until we stop letting currency be controlled by governments and corporations.
congrats you just invented CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency)
Yes its a very easy problem to solve, would take about 3 states to pass a law mandating "must-process" payments rather than the current framework of "may-process" (under threat of revocation of money transfer authority). Then the only method for them to not process a payment is those prohibited under existing law (ie: terrorist financing).
I could see CA and FL easily passing such a law given the right push from constituents.
Not really. You can insist on retail vendors accepting legal tender by law, but these things are online, and online it means every payment can and _will_ be tracked. As with everything you do in public, online payments can and _will_ be used against you (in the labor marketplace, in court, in... everything, to control you and your habits). More people will accept or insist on policing of your and their habits than people who will resist it.
>You can insist on retail vendors accepting legal tender by law
That's a common misconception. In most jurisdictions retailers can set their own payment policies.
The point is to demand that they be legally required to accept legal tender.
It's a tremendous pain for retailers to accept cash, which is why they're willing to accept high transaction fees from online points of sale.
There is an interesting parallel to the code of Hammurabi, which specifies that certain vendors must accept payment in grain as well as silver.
"Legal tender" only applies to debt payments, not to retail transactions. A retailer can refuse cash.
One of the reasons that credit card companies have an incentive to keep this stuff off people's statements is that they sell your credit card histories on the data market, and would not want you to have a strong reason to want to stop them.
That's an interesting effect but I really don't think that's a significant driver here. It really seems to me like they're just being threatened by activists, journalists, and activist investors.
> That's an interesting effect but I really don't think that's a significant driver here. It really seems to me like they're just being threatened by activists, journalists, and activist investors.
Right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media (the groups behind the shutdown of Xtube, and the all-but-shutdown of Pornhub[0], as well as the short-lived ban of pornography on OnlyFans) are definitely the driving force behind these bans, but fundamentally the card networks are ambivalent at best when it comes to anything that could be remotely considered pornographic.
[0] Pornhub still operates, but they removed all "non-verified" content, so it mostly serves as an marketing outlet for studios and OnlyFans creators, and all of the older content that was never verified was removed entirely.
Visa/Mastercard are, like you said, ambivalent at best when it comes to pornography in general but there's more nuance to it. Content widely accepted to be immoral and/or illegal such as non-consensual pornography (that is explicit content posted without the consent of those filmed) and child sexual abuse material is forbidden. This is what the pornhub thing was about, allegedly, and why verified content is still allowed. Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice. Depending on the processor this can include "extreme pornography" that is not in any way illegal and is only distasteful to most. A good example is that many payment processors do not porn featuring blood which is a big problem for women who menstruate.
> Content widely accepted to be immoral and/or illegal such as non-consensual pornography (that is explicit content posted without the consent of those filmed) and child sexual abuse material is forbidden. This is what the pornhub thing was about, allegedly, and why verified content is still allowed.
"Allegedly" is a very operative word there. Pornhub was actually extremely aggressive about removing CSAM and nonconsensual content, to the point where Facebook was actually a far larger problem for those actually concerned with stopping CSAM[0], with three orders of magnitude more instances on Facebook than all Mindgeek websites (including Pornhub) combined.
However, groups like the ones I mentioned only targeted Pornhub, because they don't actually care about CSAM. Their goal is to eliminate pornography and all "immoral" content, where "immoral" is defined according to an explicitly religious, right-wing interpretation of the term. That's not a secret; that's how they advertise themselves, and that includes the group in question here, Collective Shout[1], although the latter is now trying to hide that tie via futher censorship[2].
Because going after Facebook doesn't fit into an agenda of banning pornography, you'll never hear them mention one word about CSAM or other horrendous abuse that happens on Facebook and is facilitated by the platform.
> Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice.
That's not quite true. Processors can set their own restrictions, but so can Visa/Mastercard/etc, and they absolutely do police perceived brand risk, which includes not just pornography, but also completely nonsexual content as well.,
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-a-hotbed-of-child-sex...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/After-payment-processors-promp...
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/acvalens.net/post/3lufjdqmhxs2v
You've explained it better than I have, thank you. The one nitpick I want to make is the last part, my understanding is that Visa/Mastercard police their perceived brand risk primarily through broad statements that are then interpreted by payment processors in detail. Visa aren't the ones saying "Women having sex on their period is an extreme sexual activity", they're just saying "no extreme sexual activity" and the payment processor has to figure out what that means leading to the former claim.
> my understanding is that Visa/Mastercard police their perceived brand risk primarily through broad statements that are then interpreted by payment processors in detail. Visa aren't the ones saying "Women having sex on their period is an extreme sexual activity", they're just saying "no extreme sexual activity" and the payment processor has to figure out what that means leading to the former claim.
You're not wrong but that's only part of the story. What you're describing happens, which leads to overly-conservative interpretations of the unwritten policies. But the card brands do also have explicit rules that they expect downstream players to adhere to.
Confusingly - and this is where your impression (which is common) likely comes from - the card brands themselves provide different rules to different downstream providers, so it's not like there's one single, consistent list of rules for Visa globally (for example). It's not law and they are not bound by precedent or even an expectation of consistency.
I just checked and my statement says 'Steam', not what specific game was purchased
@grok is this true?
just kidding. this is the first i've heard of that, though.
i don't think it totally makes sense. your card transaction will still say "STEAMGAMES.COM 7264823" or similar, regardless of the content purchased. on top of that, all sorts of shady porn & dating websites that you would NOT want leaked use the credit card companies.
Data enrichment brokers cross index purchase times with other data from legal factory installed spyware found in cash registers, analytics tools in proprietary software you already have on your computer, etc etc.
Every time you buy an over the counter medication at the pharmacy with a credit card, the data brokers know by combining information sources, and sell it to insurance companies.
But it still doesn't apply here. At most they could cross-reference it with a public Steam profile that has the game listed as owned after the purchase (actually, I doubt they would have the account ID to prove it for sure, but with enough purchases they could likely figure it out), but by then you've already sort of revealed to the world you bought whatever embarrassing title yourself.
is there somewhere i can read more about this? this is very troubling information depending on the depth and scale of implementation.
And this is really bad, like I forgot the number of times I give in to get that pack of candy near the register at a shop then after a couple days exactly as the pack is empty I get shown a commercial of the same brand of the same pack/size etc.
Where are you? In the United States, there are displays of candy at every cash register, but they're individual servings that you're expected to eat in full immediately after leaving the store. A big bag with several days' worth of candy would have to come from the candy aisle.
And... are you really being served internet ads for candy?
Nonsense. The title of the game you purchased on Steam does not end up on your statement.
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They certainly say they don't sell any PII data, but definitely do, at a minimum, sell de-identified aggregate transaction data. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some data broker that can buy and deanonymize data from them.
Hey that's a pretty interesting thought actually. I hadn't considered that, but "follow the incentives and assume rationality" is generally (in my experience) the best way to try and understand why people do what they do. This theory definitely makes a lot of sense from that lens.
> This is likely far from over: Collective Shout is no doubt feeling emboldened by a second public success in its efforts to police content on Steam specifically. The games I saw removed from Steam in this wave all featured risible content and suspect quality, but Collective Shout has a broader anti-pornography, even anti-expression remit that it has demonstrated in the past.
Yes indeed, a huge success like this will give them a big boost in motivation and funding for many, many years to come. IMHO we need to regulate away the credit card processing companies ability to discriminate like this, and while we're at it we should stop letting them heavily tax the entire economy
How does these types of Australian anti-vice groups have so much global sway, and yet Australia leads the world in gambling addiction and accessibility? Presumably they'd be interested in both vices, but seem to only wield power over one. *edited for clarity of question
They don't. Valve got their profit from the incest/ageplay/noncon crowd and now they want to revert to their family-friendly image with that money drying up. This is just a convenient excuse to do so.
Valve was forced by credit card processors to do this, its not Valve that is trying to keep a family friendly image here, if they could they would keep those games they said so themselves.
It seems like we need two things. First, some type of universal standard to id the country of legal residence of a user. Second, some type of way to know what laws a company needs to comply with to operate in a jurisdiction.
There are too many laws across different jurisdictions that makes it really challenging for companies to offer goods and services.
We need exactly the opposite: it should be impossible to determine the location of an Internet user. The fact that a user's IP address generally reveals their country is a massive flaw in the design of the Internet.
The only way to circumvent jurisdiction-specific laws is to make them impossible to enforce.
I'm not sure if this solves it exactly? If MasterCard says they'll cut you off unless you adopt their requirements it doesn't really help to say you'll apply that policy in X country and keep selling the stuff in another country, they could still cut you off unless you do it globally.
The entire point is that this has nothing about complying with laws. It’s an entirely arbitrary, extrajudicial power.
How would that apply to this? It's not about a law. They aren't even demanding better age verification, they want to be able to force arbitrary things to be removed entirely (starting with more objectionable topics, but I'm sure it will expand).
Are you sure you want an internet where it's not possible to go escape legal censorship? Because that's what you're proposing with an id standard.
Man, having “GTA 5” and “No Mercy” as targets in the same conversation is strange. GTA5 is IMO really mild for a game, while I do think No Mercy probably crossed the line.
But I haven’t played a GTA game in a decade so maybe I’m misremembering..
GTA was a lot more controversial in the past than it is today. It used to be the subject of moderate to heavy moral panic, since it's a game about committing crimes; stealing cars and running over cops / hookers. Hearing people whine about GTA today feels like a blast from the past.
There's actually a statue of Hillary Clinton in GTA IV (2008), in commemoration of her many battles against the series.
[0] https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Statue_of_Happiness
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Totally fair point, the first one I played was GTA III in the early 2000s, and I definitely remember some of these conversations. Similar to how DOOM and Mortal Kombat had a lot of controversy, but like you, I had assumed that this was mostly in the past.
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It is normal and okay. Every 8-14 year old boy wants to play guns even in the absence of video games. The video games we're talking about are play violence. If they upped the realism to depict actual mature themes, like the German soldier begging for his life, then we're talking about content not appropriate for kids.
What's funny is that boys don't grow out of this, the entire genre of dad action movies is the same play violence. The only reason they might not be appropriate for kids is because they feature sex.
> @ted_bunny "In the past" is inevitabilist framing. I don't think it'll ever be normal or ok to let kids play mass murder simulators. Just because our culture has decided to accept it doesn't mean the matter is settled.
If there was any actual evidence to support the assumption that "mass murder simulators" have a negative long-term effect on humans, this wouldn't be nonsense. (I do know that it does have a slight short-term effect on violent tendencies.) EDIT: I noticed that comment was removed but I didn't want to delete my reply to it!)
Similarly, if there was evidence to support that people engaging in "forbidden" sexual content in a fictional context, somehow influenced real human behavior in that space (does "cheating wife" porn encourage more actual cheating, or "incest porn" encourage more incest?), this group's righteous campaign might actually have substance instead of being devoid of it. Otherwise you're basically just doing baseless thought-policing based on Argumentum ad Nauseam fallacies. "I don't like the fictional content you're engaging with... Just because!"
People really have some major difficulty for some reason discussing these things rationally. For example, take a brother and sister, raised separately, who meet by chance and end up feeling intense GSA (genetic sexual attraction). It just so happens that the sister is infertile. They want to have a relationship. Who is actually harmed by that, again? Anyway.
Also related, my previous comment on this story which was posted yesterday, pointing out the hypocrisy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614427
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Kids these days probably never heard of Jack Thompson's crusades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)
"Today" being 10 years ago. Collective Shout's campaign was in 2015.
GTA5 shows everything wrong with puritan morality. No problem with drugs, guns, shooting innocent people, etc, but have sex with a hooker and the camera pans away. At least under after when you then go and kill them and steal their money.
People like to give America shit for anti-porn activism and laws but it really seems like America is just trailing behind the rest of the anglosphere. This case for instance, of Australians imposing their prudish values on American companies that were content to tolerate these naughty games. And those porn ID laws that Texas/etc get flack for are just on the path already trail blazed by the UK.
I remember having to download the Australian version of Fahrenheit because the US release (renamed as Indigo Prophecy) was censored. In my experience the US loves violence while the rest of the world is more likely to censor it, but the US hates sex, alcohol, and anything else that might possibly offend Christians (including religious references and iconography like how Final Fantasy was censored to rename the spell "Holy" and the Tower of Prayers). Germans censor anything nazi related in the same way, banning swastikas like the US removes crosses. Japan seems the least likely to censor artistic works, and when they do it's often for violence.
I can say as an Australia our governments have always been very enthusiastic about controlling what we can read, see, and hear. It was true 60 years ago with our movie rating scheme ("not given a rating" was the newspeak for "banned"), 30 years ago with games, and lots of books.
The internet has more or less rendered these efforts moot in recent times. This was highlighted when they tried to impose a rating system on games a couple of decades ago. I asked a school kid about the effect on him. He said it didn't effect him, as he downloaded his games from the internet. It all fell apart about then. Consequently we had the opportunity to see seen the flood of porn would do to society, and noticed nothing of consequence. The flood of conspiracy theories for life hacks on the other hand was completely unanticipated and it's impact badly underestimated.
Collective Shout is an excellent illustration of the effect. It's effectively a one girl band, yet her shouting on the internet about her desire to force her Baptist pro-life maternal morals down everyones throats has now been heard across the world.
Not surprising, that’s where they came from!
>The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who originated in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. They sought to purify the Church of England by removing Catholic practices and beliefs. Driven by their religious convictions and facing persecution, they eventually migrated to North America in the 17th century, establishing colonies in New England.
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It's also an ideologically motivated misframing. It ignores any arguments about the actual harms of this sort of media and pretends it's all about pearl-clutching.
What are the harms of pornographic media? To me it seems pretty clear that they help reduce sexual violence (why risk jail if I can safely indulge in a fantasy), and I wouldn't be surprised that countries with pornographic bans are more misogynistic.
This is like arguing legalizing prostitution prevents rape; and actually, it should be mandatory to allow it for that purpose.
If we had a brothel in every city and in the back of every gas station, surely this would work out better for everyone.
No, it's not the same thing. Legalizing prostitution still involves real people which can be harmed during the act; replaying depictions in media does not.
If they consented and signed up for the job, you’re now disinterested in their consent? You’re now saying they can’t consent to this?
And besides, it’s not like OF stalkers exist.
I don't understand what position you're arguing for. In case of prostitution, there has to be lot more consent given, unlike in media (where it might not be required at all, in case of drawn or generated content). More consent => more risk of it not being given properly.
In any case, my question and argument wasn't about consent at all, but harm. I can see a world with brothel on every corner being easily more harmful than a world with access to pornography, even if the consent is 100% in both worlds.
Should we? Idk. Escorts are quite available in the US, but I'd never use one. However if I could step into the back for a quickie while the tank was filling...
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I don't think that's ignoring so much as most people do consider that pearl clutching censorship. You should at least cite some studies on the harms for discussion, but I've not been convinced by it in the past when I looked.
Without reading anything I feel empowered to say: "If you don't want to see something don't look at it"
At least you're practicing what you preach.
If only we had some kind of purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
How do you get that electronic cash in the first place without going through a financial institution?
Possibly by trading with someone who already has electronic cash, I guess – but how do I know I’m not laundering the other person’s money, and/or financing terrorism or CSAM with my fiat money?
Ideally your employer would support paying your salary using electronic cash. Or you can offer goods and services in exchange for electronic cash.
If only there was a peer to peer electronic cash system that was instant and you didn't have to pay for fees for each transaction.
Jokes and cryptocurrencies aside. The digital euro is being built and will be deployed in the coming years, enabling offline digital money transfers. I'll have to see it to belive it.
it really depends if you sincerely believe that some no name "anti-porn" group or payment processors have anything to do with any of this whatsoever
>If only we had some kind of purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments
Unfortunately, all such systems are quickly co-opted for the purpose of speculative price schemery. Bitcoin will soon reach a point of no-return, when the smallest fractional has an exchange rate so high that it will be impossible to purchase small goods at all (except in bulk), though in reality that point was reached many years ago. The entire concept of cryptocurrencies might actually be irrevocably poisoned, because even a new system would have to deal with the public perception baggage of the last decade's many Ponzi-type scams and various joke/meme coins. If only Satoshi had been a social genius instead of a technical genius.
Earlier:
Group Behind Steam Censorship Policies Have Powerful Allies
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625681
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> All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight," Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted on July 18th.
Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?
You can type “wanking” on this website. This isn’t a special space for children.
>Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?
We are discussing blocking of legal content by the payment companies. If they do not like this games or GTA or metal music they should make laws.
But they are concerned by virtual incest while in USA cousin marriage is still legal in many states.
If i believe in this stupidity that music and games are harmful then I would use the big money to do some studies to prove this and then make laws, not force my ideology by abusing the payment monopoly this companies have to push my stupidity to the entire fucking world.
The US is actually an outlier in how taboo it considers first-cousin sexual relations. They’re certainly eyebrow-raising these days, but not considered incestuous in most of Europe or other parts of the world (with China and parts of India being two admittedly big exceptions).
I am not sure, but this companies will block content containing this legal relations, and I seen people in the sims community (not sure their nationality ) demanding EA blocks "step" relations , even if there is nothing illegal or medical wrong about that, just their fragile hearts that the game does not block this.
> The US is actually an outlier in how taboo it considers first-cousin sexual relations
Not true at all. Just because it is legal doesn’t mean it is considered socially acceptable [1].
> but not considered incestuous in most of Europe
Not according to the catholic church [2].
[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_prevalence_...
[2] https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume... (see CIC 1091)
The fact that it's uncommon or "weird" doesn't yet mean it's taboo.
Werner von Braun married his cousin. Granted, that was after he came to America, but she was still in Germany then.
Yeah, nearly 80 years ago, and he married in Germany. First cousin marriages in the US today will certainly warrant some side eye as Sharlin mentioned.
According to wikipedia 24 states have it banned and then 7 more apply restrictions such as a minimum age or infertility
Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? Pornography and obscenity should not be protected speech. It’s violence against human dignity akin to hate speech.
I am absolutely sick and tired of people using the word violence willy nilly when discussing things they don't like. "Violence against human dignity" is not real, that is a nonsensical concept. You are not being stabbed in the human dignity. No one's human dignity is being blown to pieces. You are more than welcome to argue that pornography causes psychological damage, but calling it violence and lumping it in with hate speech is not compelling in the slightest.
We certainly sanction hate speech because of the psychological and physical damage it causes to its victims. Pornography is harmful to everyone involved, from producer to consumer. In the case of video games that don’t depict real people this is attenuated somewhat, but not in the way that counts. By consuming or producing pornography, you are blowing your own human dignity to bits.
If you would prefer, I’d say it’s an “affront” to human dignity.
My opinion is that sexuality is something that shouldn’t be commodified in any way, shape, or form. When we package it and promote it as a commodity or for entertainment, that practice as such is harmful. There’s simply no such thing as “healthy” pornography because the very preconditions for pornography to come into existence are rooted in an unhealthy and disordered understanding of human sexuality. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were absolutely right on this front.
I’m far more afraid of the world we currently live in, where we treat sex/sexuality as something that exists for entertainment value and can be commodified — than I am of this form of censorship. At least our overlords are making the ethical call here.
You think that a payment processor having arbitrary power to shut down any business they want anywhere in the world for any reason is a good thing because this time you agree with the reason?
Book burners don’t have any morals, they just want to burn books, and they’ll come for yours sooner or later.
They don’t have arbitrary power - power is never exercised unilaterally. I can’t imagine they would succeed for very long at say, shutting down all the grocery stores in the world. They wouldn’t even dare try from the hell they would have to pay.
And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business. They have no agenda or incentive to promote censorship as such.
The fact that you had to jump to such an extreme misinterpretation of my point to attempt to refute it shows just how right I am. I said ‘any business’, not ‘any number of businesses simultaneously’. Your counterpoint is as ridiculous as saying a man with a loaded gun in a crowded bar isn’t dangerous because he has fewer bullets in his magazine than there are people in the bar. Economic warfare always operates on defeat in detail.
Okay, since you stated it as a fact: Citation needed. Show me Visa’s statement to the effect that they have no agenda, because all of their actions suggest otherwise.
> And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business.
They're not book burners... they're just trying to eliminate certain media they find objectionable? They would consider it unacceptable for Steam to, for example, make these items only purchasable through crypto/bank transfer.
> It’s violence against human dignity
You can't just call things violence. We need to stop doing this. If nobody is getting physically harmed, it's not violence.
And no, your stupid bullshit about harming one's soul doesn't count. I mean leg chopped off type of thing. Then, you can call it violent.
Otherwise, you're just dishonest and manipulative.
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I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s violent and some pornography is good for most people. It’s not going to kill or murder or whatever people.
But what’s been happening lately with onlyfans and other things is a recipe for a disaster in my mind. We’ve made it hard for younger generations, made paths to success much less atrainable and instead have enabled black markets while the economy suffers because of it. I imagine we’re stuck with a deranged and broken society of people moonlighting to make ends meet by doing soft porno in far greater numbers than before. And yes of course that’s what strip clubs are for but that was way less of an issue than this.