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It's crazy that we live in a world where maybe a few dozen people's weird ideas about what shouldn't be allowed can cause payment processors to pressure the sto

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• littlestymaar 1y ago
  Freedom of speech goes both ways, even people we disagree with are free to express their opinions. The real problem is how can it be legal for payment provider to forbid stuff that isn't illegal, no matter what it is. Had Steam decided to deplatform some content, it's up to them (although centralization through steam of other platform causes an unwarranted concentration of power) but that third parties can intervene an have a say in what is allowed and what isn't anywhere on the internet is a very serious trouble.
  • arcfour 1y ago
    The payment provider has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, being forced to do business with someone is the same thing as compelling someone to speak (or not speak). Two wrongs don't make a right.
    • littlestymaar 1y ago
      There are two parts in this argument I disagree with: - that doing business is akin to speech. - that corporations are entitled human rights (freedom of speech). Also, freedom of speech means nothing for humans if corporations can force their customers not to discuss certain topics in the name of “I don't want to do business with someone who says that”.
      • arcfour 1y ago
        Freedom of speech is freedom from being arrested for your speech. It is not the freedom to force others to give your speech a platform. Just like how it's not freedom to force other people to listen to your speech. If it is, then I exercise my freedom of speech to place bumper stickers on YOUR car that say things that you find distateful. "But that's my property!" Yes, and Steam's servers and software are Valve's property. Mastercard and Visa's platforms are theirs. If you ran a bookstore, and I could force you to carry a bunch of books that glorified Nazism, you would probably find this objectionable. Why? Because if you walked into a bookstore and there's a bunch of books there full of Nazi propaganda, you would probably wonder if the owner of the store was a Nazi. You don't want to be associated with or seen as promoting it. This is why it's akin to speech.
        • throwawaysoxjje 1y ago
          > Freedom of speech is freedom from being arrested for your speech. It is not the freedom to force others to give your speech a platform. Yeah and when that was written the act of paying with a credit card would have looked like magic Maybe things have changed a bit
        • littlestymaar 1y ago
          > If it is, then I exercise my freedom of speech to place bumper stickers on YOUR car that say things that you find distateful. "But that's my property!" And in fact, you cannot stop me from putting leaflets on your car, no matter how distasteful you find the content, just because it's your property. In fact, in many jurisdictions, putting stickers is allowed too, the line being drawn at damaging the property of someone else. (I can write stuff on your car with easy to wash water paint, but I can't carve a message on it). > If you ran a bookstore, and I could force you to carry a bunch of books that glorified Nazism Welcome to the life of every bookstore clerks in the world. And it turns out they aren't allowed to remove books they disagree with, nor add their own favorite book in the store. If the owner of the store can force that on its clerks I see no reason why the legislator couldn't do the same on the owner. In fact, in countries that aren't hypocritical about freedom of speech, you cannot get fired by your boss if they dislike what you say, but you can definitely be fired if you refuse a customer, which shows doing business has nothing to do with freedom of speech. So at the end of the day, having refuted your two arguments, my point still stand: Doing business isn't akin to speech, and corporations aren't human beings in the first place so they shouldn't be entitled human rights anyway. Also, property right isn't some special kind of right that trumps everything else, it's one basic right like any other and have no precedence/superiority over the others.
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Okay. That isn't their argument, though. >We do not make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers. Visa does not moderate content sold by merchants, nor do we have visibility into the specific goods or services sold when we process a transaction. So they are trying to outright lie or they are so disconnected they are ignorant of what other parts of their company are doing. Neither are a good luck.
      • jfyi 1y ago
        It's a good indication that it came from their processors and not from Visa.
        • johnnyanmac 1y ago
          Maybe for Itch, but I believe Valve is more than large enough to need to work directly with Visa to for payment processes. They likely tried to do as much processing in house before that point as well.
          • jfyi 1y ago
            It looks like they both use paysafe and paypal for processing.
    • taurath 1y ago
      The payment provider does not have that right, in fact.
      • arcfour 1y ago
        Yes, they do, and if they dont, they should.
        • 8note 1y ago
          they however ahould also be broken up grom a duopoly into maybe 500k different payment providers, each with their own bent on who to do business with
          • danaris 1y ago
            And how will that work for the rest of us? Everyone has to carry around half a million credit cards? Every merchant has to make half a million separate payment processing agreements, each with its own card machine? No; this is a natural monopoly situation, and just needs to be regulated hard.
            • littlestymaar 1y ago
              There are two providers (more in fact, if you count country-specific providers), and they are interoperable. Yes regulation are necessary, including for interoperability, but I don't really buy the natural monopoly argument (at least not more than any tech companies).
            • phatskat 1y ago
              Eh sounds more like we need payment processing to be a public utility
              • danaris 1y ago
                I don't object to that idea at all. It sounds like Brazil has been having success with that recently. ...Of course, we do need some more safeguards first to make sure that such an entity wouldn't be massively abused by tyrannical executives cheerfully twisting the law into bizarre pretzel shapes in order to attack anyone who disagrees with them.
• politelemon 1y ago
  To me this is also a stark warning over silicon valley companies instilling their morals and assumptions on other parts of the world. It's not a popular take because it's got many touch points into our spheres of working.
• x0x0 1y ago
  I read a long interview about porn regulation and the star-chamber-esque process whereby visa and mastercard determine what porn is allowed. Fundamentally, it's a failure of government. The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules. But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.
  • fidotron 1y ago
    This is the payment people making excuses. If something isn't illegal it is legal, and therefore they should be allowing payment for it.
    • jvanderbot 1y ago
      This right here is the law that congress would have to pass to make that a reality. A sort of "common carrier" law for money. Otherwise, they are under no obligation (or protection!).
      • dv_dt 1y ago
        Legislators are more often chipping away common carrier protections on communications with various age and id laws than they are extending common carrier type protections into other areas. The fact that it seems to be happening around the globe makes me think its a coordinated campaign.
        • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
          it's definitely the result of lobbying; i've experienced it firsthand in a former job. a private dark fiber provider successfully sued the county to prevent expansion of a previously-laid tax-funded municipal fiber project on anticompetitive grounds - he used every trick in the book including lobbying and it worked. and that was just one asshole who didn't want to compete with a small public project. scale that up to ILEC levels with billions in revenue and a revolving door economy and... yeah, i don't see this sort of thing playing out in the peoples' favor any time soon.
• catigula 1y ago
  "People" isn't really the right concept. Most of these groups buckle to well-funded lobby groups.
  • nitwit005 1y ago
    It's still people. There's a small group of decision makers that matter. They're absolutely ignoring a bunch of other well funded lobby groups. This idea just appealed to them, for whatever reason.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > well-funded lobby groups Collective Shout isn't this. They're closer to outrage entrepreneurs. They identified a non-issue that one could generate outrage around, fundraised on that manufactured outrage, and then launched an attack nobody was defending against because the issue was made up.
    • LtWorf 1y ago
      Sounds like the debian community team asking for immediate removal of offensive fortunes after they had been there for several decades, without of course even understanding the language the fortunes are written in.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • catigula 1y ago
      I'm less concerned about them and more concerned about groups that are known and bill themselves as credible resources for "extremists" but have extensive ties to foreign states.
• xtracto 1y ago
  If only there was some kind of decentralized technology that allowed us to move value between two independent entities in a trustless manner, at very low cost and very very fast. No, I'm not talking about the POC that the pseudonimus guy proposed. Maybe something later that actually scales... a man can only wish that such technology will be invented sometime in the future.
  • KetoManx64 1y ago
    I imagine this currently would be deflationary and be a superb store of value to keep inflation from eating away your life savings and possibly become the best performing asset of this generation. Magical thinking of course.
    • Dylan16807 1y ago
      You're suggesting things that make it a worse currency.
      • KetoManx64 1y ago
        Guess we'll see in the next 10 years.
        • Dylan16807 1y ago
          We'll see what? Other factors are more important so I don't think the success or failure of cryptocurrencies will be a good way to prove or disprove what I'm saying.
          • KetoManx64 1y ago
            If it's a worse currency then it would be idiotic for the world to switch to it instead of their local government's paper money or some other asset in order to conduct transactions, save money, invest, etc.
• s17n 1y ago
  Bro it's not a "weird art game about trauma" its a rape simulator. Should payment processors be involved here? Probably not. But the game is definitely a bad thing that should not exist and whoever made it is 100% a bad person.
  • voxl 1y ago
    I've got some bad news for you about the kind of media millions of men and women, some of whom being victims of sexual assault, consume. But hey they're all bad people I guess, victims included.
  • miniBill 1y ago
    No one is defending the game. Everyone is just saying that payment processors should not be judge, jury and executioner
    • s17n 1y ago
      A lot of people are in fact defending the game, just look at the replies to my post. I'm a staunch free speech proponent but defending this game is like defending the Nazis' right to march - we should defend the right to create it on principle, but also we should be clear that like the nazis, the creators of this game are despicable, the game has no value, and the world would be better off if the game didn't exist. I think its obvious that making the game should be legal, and also obvious that platforms like Steam should ban it. Payment processors are a weird middle ground, I'll leave it to smarter people than me to figure out the ethics there.
  • Kapura 1y ago
    brother i don't even know what specific thing you're talking about. hundreds, thousands? of games have been delisted on storefronts for the sin of including themes that the lobbiers found objectionable.
  • nitwit005 1y ago
    Should we ban the bible? It certainly has rape and extreme violence. Clearly written by a bad person. Make a list of the most popular films and games. You'll find a lot of violence and sexual assault. You'd have to ban _most_ media to get rid of it.
• poszlem 1y ago
  Allow me to recommend “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” (https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...) to help explain why.
  • amelius 1y ago
    Funny when at the same time people call democracy "the tyranny of the majority".
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      If we had a fair popular vote, perhaps. As is, National US elections is disproportionately focused on appealing to 6-7 purple states opposed to who has the best platform for the country.
    • gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
      both can be true at the same time: when the majority are voting for the same policies they have always been, and the parties move their positions such that they divide the votes between themselves as evenly as possible, the outcome does depend on a minority of swing voters Taleb's examples are a variant of this, where the majority is passive instead of static
      • xscott 1y ago
        > the parties move their positions such that they divide the votes between themselves as evenly as possible That's something I'd like to understand better... Why would they TRY to divide evenly? Where's the party that takes the majority position for each topic? It seems foolish to play for a draw or tie, so something else must be happening. From what I've seen in my life, people are more likely conform to their party than vice versa. But I've got a very small sample size.
        • gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
• JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > a few dozen people's weird ideas about what shouldn't be allowed I want to underline the absurdity of a foreign feminist organisation [1], in this political environment, dictating what Americans can and cannot see. [1] https://www.collectiveshout.org https://www.collectiveshout.org
  • rodgerd 1y ago
    No more absurd than US card schemes dictating what I can and can't buy in another country.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > No more absurd than US card schemes dictating what I can and can't buy in another country Philosophically, sure. Practically, no. America is an economic and military superpower. Washington having influence over its trading partners and military allies isn't unusual. To the extent I can think of something that mirrors the absurdity of this situation, it's American evangelicals running off to Uganda to stone gays.
      • fivestones 1y ago
        > it’s American evangelicals running off to Uganda to stone gays. Is that something that happened? That sounds horrible. Do you have any more info?
        • camtarn 1y ago
          https://globalaffairs.org/commentary-and-analysis/blogs/unholy-relationship-between-ugandas-anti-lgbtq-law-and-us https://globalaffairs.org/commentary-and-analysis/blogs/unho... "...many extreme evangelical groups started to recognize that the fight against LGBTQ+ rights in the United States was a losing battle. These groups then shifted focus to Uganda, which was seen as fertile ground for this anti-gay ideology..."
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• burnt-resistor 1y ago
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  • ecshafer 1y ago
    This censorship was done because of a feminist organization, not a christian organization.
• makeitdouble 1y ago
  Visa/Mastercard banning porn has been a consistent and steady policy for years now. Maybe this time it was triggered by this specific group, but it comes in a line of events that all went into that direction for years and years. American puritanism is neither a flash in the pan nor a fringe movement of people that just need to be told how it is, IMHO.
  • Yeul 1y ago
    I will say one thing for Puritanism they would have exiled Trump not vote him mayor.
    • sojournerc 1y ago
      Despite the down votes I think this is right. The reason the "conservative" side has voted for Trump is more voting against the other side. With maybe a Mitt Romney type and an actual primary, the religious right would go that way. Many conservatives do not like trump, but consider him better than the alternative. I'm grateful my parents, who were life long conservatives, haven't lived to see the tragedy of what passes for Republicans these days.
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      You're not wrong, in a vacuum. Proper puritanism would have been disgusted by trump for a good 20 years before his presidency. . It's too bad that puritanism is often co-opted by the largest hypocrites. SO perhaps they would vote him in in practice.
    • makeitdouble 1y ago
      Trump is in favor of giving more power to US corporations and letting money speak ("deals", or bribery depending on your POV). He's a very good defense against politicians with stronger ideologies, especially those more aligned with international values which tend to smooth out specific cultural gripes.
  • kurthr 1y ago
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• throitallaway 1y ago
  The founding fathers knew what they were doing vis a vis separation of church and state.
• leoqa 1y ago
  I really disagree. I think hentai is a flimsy wrapper around child fetishization and needs to be heavily regulated. I think having rape or torture simulators are extremely harmful in multiple ways. Really would prefer the government outlaw these things but I don’t mind companies protecting themselves from liability.
  • const_cast 1y ago
    We can't go banning things just because they can, potentially, be used for "child fetishization". Movies can be used for that purpose, and certainly Hollywood knows that. Books. TV. Any form of media. Not to mention, rape and torture "simulators" (do you by change mean media?) are integral to our understanding of those things. What if rape survivors could not speak it, for it is too shameful? And, the elephant in the room, sex is alone on this pedestal. Sex, alone, is uniquely stigmatized to a degree that nothing even comes close. Violence, no matter how gruesome and vile, does not reach even 1/1000th the scorn of even modest sex. This is a purity game, plain and simple. The shame around sex and the extreme desire to control it comes from the patriarchy and religious ideals. These should not be humored.
    • wkat4242 1y ago
      > Violence, no matter how gruesome and vile, does not reach even 1/1000th the scorn of even modest sex. Ehh in the US yes. In most of Europe not so much (the UK and maybe Hungary as the most notable exceptions)
  • fruitworks 1y ago
    I don't think it's a good idea to deputize payment processors. They are practicially natural monopolies due to network effects. If it's illegal then the government should pursue it directly. It's better tested in court than behind closed doors.
  • Spivak 1y ago
    Well, at least in the US, it's legal to draw, sell, and purchase those drawings—no wrapper needed it can be explicitly cp. And while I have negative infinity desire to consume or encounter this kind of content I nonetheless think it should exist as a 'methadone' for folks whose sexual frustration might otherwise drive them to do something horrible. And if we allow it at all I don't think it makes sense to pick and choose what artistic mediums it's allowed to take no matter how abhorrent I might personally find it.