Mastercard, Visa Under Fire As Petition To 'Not Police' Legal Content Blows Up [petition on Change.org, currently 203K signatures]
Mastercard, Visa Under Fire As Petition To 'Not Police' Legal Content Blows Up
Good, fuck 'em.
Payment processors need to STAY IN THEIR OWN FUCKING LANE!
A petition is useless. There needs to be an opposing organization whose members do exactly what these other asshats to, and call and write letters to the payment processors threatening boycotts and publicity.
Crypto was supposed to do this but it's too fractured and volatile now.
It's also too awkward to actually use.
Rupay and UPI are good alternatives.
I hope interac uses this opening, I already primarily use them but they don't do credit.
Mastercard refused to allow people to donate to Julian Assange. Blatant political interference.
I cut up my Mastercard.
Update: After reading the Collective Shout website, I completely changed my mind on what they're doing. I donated to them. The stuff they are campaiging against, specifically the game No Mercy is disgusting, glorifying rape of your mother and sisters? Who the hell thinks thats a "game"? Sick.
FWIW for itch.io the main issue is specifically Stripe this time according to one of their employees.
So did did Visa and MasterCard ever stop payments to... like... Infowars? I know PayPal went after them but the credit card networks are a level even higher.
I can't sign it. It tell me my perfectly valid mail address is not valid
I was always a bit "Why would I bother with crypto instead of fiat?", I just got an answer. Hopefully Steam/big names affected by this adopt crypto payment processors.
Okay I'm stupid.
What's wrong with removing rape and incest games from Steam?
Edit: Thank you all for your answers, I was nervous to ask the question incase I would come off as a troll or ass hole or something and piss everyone off. They are very informative and have given me much to read and think about.
Porn bans are a wedge used by conservatives to widen the criteria once the ban is in place.
Interesting, thank you
The issue is payment processors unilaterally revoking access to content based on what they (or a conservative hate group with a telephone campaign) personally find morally impermissable.
Steam choosing what to host on their platform is fine. A random payment processor forcing their hand due to mild pressure from a fringe Christian group in Australia is not. Because those loonies will classify anything outside of a married couple having missionary sex as obscene and harmful.
First, they will remove rape and incest, then they will remove all LGBT games, then they will remove all nsfw, and then they will remove all violent games and so on until only the games deemed acceptable by the US evangelicals are left.
They already removed all NSFW from itch.io
Woah, so I know you're not saying rape and incest is part of LGBT, but that sentence kinda made the jump. How did we get from rape and incest to LGBT? Why can't just rape and incest be removed and stop there?
First question: Why is it okay for payment processors to conduct censorship of any kind? Why is it their place to decide what is and is not buyable?
Second question: What's the next thing some right-wing death cult is going to pressure them into censoring? Anything addressing minority rights? Any adult content at all? What about sex toys, birth control drugs, abortion drugs, hormone treatments? What else are they going to cull from society by saying "Get rid of this or we're not going to allow you to do any business in the world?"
It opens the door to removing any number of games for any other number of reasons.
Remember the war on violent video games? Maybe not, but there are tons of people who think that violent video games cause people to be violent which has been proven to not be the case, yet people still parrot it like it's true. It could easily escalate to that.
Also, they already went after ALL NSFW games on itch.io with all of those games being removed, so it's already getting worse right before our very eyes.
If you don't see how it can escalate from here then I don't really know what to say.
They only took 1000 calls from an Australian hate group to start censoring shit... and every single post on bluesky about calling/contacting them to stop doing this has over 20k notes. They're beyond cooked.
Does anywhere list numbers to call to do the same thing but about unnecessary censorship?
One-tap dial phone numbers:
Master card
(skips card number input)
Visa
PayPal
Say "make a complaint"
Stripe (unconfirmed)
Script:
Have one of them! There's dozens of posts about this on Bluesky, you could really pick if you wanted.
Not only 1000 calls. 1000 calls, plus a long standing and often previously acted upon stick-up-the-ass opposition to sex. This is far from the first incident. They were predisposed to the hate group's message, and perhaps chose to use them as scapegoats for their own decisions.