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Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

• timedude 5mo ago
  Monero fixes this.
• functionmouse 5mo ago
  VISA is the government
  • advisedwang 5mo ago
    What does this even mean? VISA is literally a publicly traded company. Compared to banks it barely even regulated.
    • tavavex 5mo ago
      Really? I thought the subtext is as obvious as it could've been. The point they're making is that a duopoly that controls the flow of money itself deciding to ban a whole market segment for ideological or profit reasons is no different from a government making that thing actually illegal, in terms of the effect it has on businesses and people.
  • Frieren 5mo ago
    When inequality is high capital is the government.
  • micromacrofoot 5mo ago
    actually if they were it would be easier to argue it's a violation of free speech, but since they're not they can censor with much less restriction tbh there's a case to be made that the government should run a payment processor as critical infrastructure
    • coldacid 5mo ago
      The way governments these days use corporations and NGOs to work around constitutional restrictions, I'm sure they're pretty happy leaving the payment processors as-is.
      • iamnothere 5mo ago
        They actually just got slapped for doing this. This was in the area of speech but hopefully it’s the start of a larger trend. https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/us-government-concedes-first-amendment-violation-in-berenson-settlement/ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/us-government-concede...
        • bcrosby95 5mo ago
          Lol, let me know when a federal administration admits wrongdoing against speech it dislikes. In the meantime this is no different than one side saying "we tax the rich too much" and the other side saying "we don't tax the rich enough."
    • marcosdumay 5mo ago
      If they can make laws and people are subject to those laws, then they are government. I only disagree with the "the" on the GP, they are para-governamental.
      • micromacrofoot 5mo ago
        it's not a law though, it's a choice of who to do business with
        • marcosdumay 5mo ago
          Eh... Go read the article again, or just the title.
          • micromacrofoot 5mo ago
• schnebbau 5mo ago
  So who is pressuring the processors?
  • theyeenzbeanz 5mo ago
    Lots of anti porn groups out there that complain to them.
  • mountainriver 5mo ago
    I’ve heard this is apparently less about morality and more about payments getting contested by men getting caught by their spouses
    • presbyterian 5mo ago
      I don't have any data on this, so don't quote me on it at all, but this feels more like an excuse made up by paypros than an actual good explanation.
      • saltyoldman 5mo ago
        No one would have data on something like that! Wife finds out, husband says, someone stole my card! You expect them to own up later?
        • dec0dedab0de 5mo ago
          The reason doesn't matter, the data would be on the amount of chargebacks being made.
    • amelius 5mo ago
      Those people should have used cryptocurrencies.
      • prmoustache 5mo ago
        You mean using currencies where all the transactions are public?
• jacknews 5mo ago
  "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."
• bobro 5mo ago
  I feel like if you’re going to write an article like this, you should at least engage with why it’s happening. Maybe deep down for some of the participants it’s a kind of moral thing, but mostly this is because payments for NSFW/porn stuff are dramatically more expensive. All of the “stuff” payment processors are doing is harder for NSFW/porn content, so that’s the main reason the processors want these companies to separate/cutoff that type of content. EDIT: I’m kind of sensitive to getting downvotes on a comment. Do the downvoters think this is a high quality article giving a good amount of context for the upstream policy choices? Do the downvoters take me for supporting some kind of decision like this? Do you think I’m just wrong on my understanding of why these policies are made? I’d really encourage you to look into it. Google or chat something like “why do payment processors ban adult content”.
  • pavel_lishin 5mo ago
    If it was more expensive to process, why wouldn't they pass those costs on?
    • Pay08 5mo ago
      The increased costs are from the increased rate of chargebacks.
      • iamnothere 5mo ago
        This is no longer as common as it used to be, and besides chargebacks (plus fees) get passed to the merchant.
      • mrguyorama 5mo ago
        Chargebacks don't cost a payment network anything. They keep the payment fee, and they charge you a large chargeback fee. They don't lose or spend any money out of their own pocket on it. If you have high fraud rates, they charge you a higher per payment fee. Our company is both a payment network and a merchant, depending on specific product lines and such. We spend a lot of time preventing credit card fraud on our merchant lines of business, and very little on our payment line of business, because chargebacks cost us nothing there. As designed. I can't believe people keep perpetuating this lie, that they very obviously haven't thought critically about. It's so frustrating. It's like everyone just repeating gormlessly that the sky is actually purple when they can just look at it.
• amiga386 5mo ago
  Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies?
  • stalfosknight 5mo ago
    That's what I want to know.
  • SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
    Nothing prevents them, and some companies that want to support both adult and non-adult content do. But it's also reasonable for Kickstarter to decide that adult content is not so important to them that they want to jump through hoops to dodge Stripe's rules.
  • Pay08 5mo ago
    The fact that if they don't ban it, Visa and Mastercard will blacklist them and they have 99% of the market share.
    • criddell 5mo ago
      Is that really a fact?
  • chimeracoder 5mo ago
    > Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies? The way the policies work, they would either have to use the latter processor for all transactions (which would be prohibitively expensive) or relegate all "adult" content to a completely separate company and domain, which would be a huge pain and expense to operate for something that constitutes a relatively small fraction of their business.
  • stanac 5mo ago
    I worked for a payment processor in Europe, we provided SEPA and some other payments, but not card payments (so there could be some difference). Difference is in fees and licenses. Payment processors that process high risk payments (adult industry, gambling, etc...) have higher fees and need license from governing body (usually a national bank in country where the payment processor is registered). So if you process high risk payments as low risk you will get a fine from governing body and you risk to lose your license. And if you don't have a license for high risk payments you cannot process them. I don't work there anymore, but I heard they lost SEPA license a couple of years ago because of risky transactions. Now I am not sure if Visa and Master are forcing payment providers to give up high risk transactions or if they are forcing them to classify all transactions as low/high risk.
• Aspos 5mo ago
  There should be a national payment processing operator as an alternative to VISA/MC. Just like they do it in many other countries.
  • lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    Then government leaders would be less able to circumvent civil rights and transparency measures (where those exist). That is why the government farms out infrastructure to non government entities. This way, there is always a threat of businesses deciding not to do business with you by unaccountable forces.
    • cucumber3732842 5mo ago
      >This way, there is always a threat of businesses deciding not to do business with you by unaccountable forces. Visa/Mastercard vs the government itself is bordering on a distinction without a difference. From the perspective of the average business or person they're both wholly unaccountable. If you're Kickstarter or some Megacorp, well then it probably just depends which you have more friends in high places.
  • grishka 5mo ago
    We have one in Russia, called Mir (world/peace, somewhat ironically). While, yes, there was literally zero downtime on card payments when Visa and MC left the country, they are still irreplaceable for international payments. As a result, everyone who needs to make them or travels a lot has a foreign bank account now, with, you guessed it, a Visa or MC card. Edit: forgot to say, Mir cards used to work in a few other countries, for example, Turkey and Armenia. But eventually the US government pressured the banks in those countries to stop accepting Mir, because apparently that would somehow help defeat Putin or something.
    • danso 5mo ago
      Has Mir in the past ever implemented any kind of bans or restrictions for specific vendors or use cases?
• lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
  You shall not receive money in "easy" ways.
• codedokode 5mo ago
  Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups? Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions. Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Aurornis 5mo ago
    Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories. There's no actual evidence in the article that payment processors made them do it. They actually banned pornography long before this. They just updated the terms to clarify what counted as pornography. > Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it. > Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby? They're not? They would have the same high risk accounts and include the higher fees into their business model.
    • eggbrain 5mo ago
      > Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories. Stripe _says_ they will handle these type of payments, but more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform, no matter how vigilant you were, or even if the things you were selling were more rated R than rated X. Source: my own insider knowledge along with colleagues in the space.
      • echelon 5mo ago
• Aurornis 5mo ago
  Headline is misleading on multiple levels. Kickstarter already banned pornographic content before this. They expanded the rules to include more specifics. That's it. That's the story. Everything else is speculation and anger-mongering. > While the previous version of the page simply prohibited “Pornographic content,” it now contains some oddly specific restrictions, including, but not limited to, “implied sex acts,” “MILF/DILF” content, “implied nudity,” and anything featuring “female nipples/areolas, genitalia,” and “anuses.” Good heavens, they’ve even banned “buttocks.” The article quotes some speculation from some other blog that is trying to link this to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel for maximum anger points: > Why? According to a report by The Daily Cartoonist, Kickstarter may be under pressure from its payment processor, Stripe, which Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel and X proprietor Elon Musk partially own. Kickstarter and Stripe did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However Stripe actually does service adult content sites. It just falls into a category of high-risk merchants that also includes travel sites, cryptocurrency, gambling, tobacco, and other categories where the chargeback rates are statistically much higher. They will service those sites, but you might have higher fees to compensate for the higher chargeback rates that come with those categories Source https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-accounts-explained https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-acco...
  • CryptoWick 5mo ago
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• behringer 5mo ago
  Kickstarter should allow ACH transfer and checks for such projects. @#$% the man.
• schoen 5mo ago
  My friend Rainey Reitman's new book about this phenomenon came out last month: https://raineyreitman.com/2024/06/11/transaction-denied-my-upcoming-book-exploring-how-financial-companies-censor-speech/ https://raineyreitman.com/2024/06/11/transaction-denied-my-u...
• cromulent 5mo ago
  The FT podcast series “Hot Money” season one explained a lot about this. Basically the payment card industry shapes what adult content is produced by governing the money flow. https://www.ft.com/hot-money https://www.ft.com/hot-money
• surgical_fire 5mo ago
  I despise crypto and its shills, but damn if this is not some excellent use case for cryptocurrency. Circumventing payment processors bending the knee to puritanical pressure is why God must have created bitcoin.
  • Cider9986 5mo ago
    Check out Monero. I also think that the vast majority of cryptos are a scam, but Monero has a really good usecase. This thread has some good talk about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841149)
• fleroviumna 5mo ago
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• brnaftr361 5mo ago
  It feels like there's been a significant cinching of personal rights recently. I wonder if it has anything to do with crypto's relatively recent adoption by institutional movers. NordVPN offers crypto payments, I expect virtually every other operator would too. Seems like a good way to get adoption rolling. Tunnel to somewhere that providers will service without an ID check and stay more anonymous by the dint of the crypto exchange. Maybe I'm trippin.
• laweijfmvo 5mo ago
  This is the least of my concerns with Kickstarter. It’s so trivial to completely scam an entirely fake campaign, with zero repercussions, that no one should take this site seriously at all. I say this as someone who has backed a campaign that posted updates and even claimed that shipments were out while all the comments were the same: I received nothing.
  • Aeolun 5mo ago
    I think nobody is concerned about this because most campaigns just deliver what they promised.
    • mc3301 5mo ago
      Etsy used to be awesome, now it isn't. Lots of mass-produced junk played off as quality made-with-care-and-attention kinda stuff. It's even easier with AI images, videos, description and communications. I think kickstarter is gonna have (or maybe already has?) a scam problem due to the rise of AI. I've contributed to about 7 campaigns; only one didn't work out. But the person running it actually refunded me fully (about 200$) after 3 or 4 years of very occasional updates.
• turlockmike 5mo ago
  FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention. Mastercard/Visa/Banks don't want legal liability.
  • chimeracoder 5mo ago
    > FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention. You're right that these are connected to FOSTA/SESTA, but you're missing the actual connection. FOSTA/SESTA were not "well-intentioned". They were the product of lobbying from explicitly religious, anti-sex, anti-pornography groups. Those same groups are behind recent campaigns to require providing government ID to access pornography, to allow attorneys general to prosecute LGBTQ content, and to ban pornography from platforms like Steam and Itch.io. FOSTA/SESTA have worked exactly as they were intended to! The intention was to make it harder to conduct sex work legally and safely, and they accomplished that goal! These policies have little to do with FOSTA/SESTA themselves, in that the text of those laws has no bearing here. But those bills were the first big, national victory of these campaigns, and they used that momentum to raise absurd amounts of money to lobby for the other laws mentioned above, and to target financial infrastructure as an easy point of leverage to accomplish their goal of banning pornography across the Internet.
    • turlockmike 5mo ago
      Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable.
      • chimeracoder 5mo ago
        > Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable. You are either misreading those bills or confusing them with other similar bills which did target banking infrastructure (and which thankfully did not pass). FOSTA/SESTA did increase liability for platforms, but the applicability of those laws to this specific case is minimal to nonexistent.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• Havoc 5mo ago
  Similar parallels to trying to force dns provides to police piracy
• snap4sale 5mo ago
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• IFC_LLC 5mo ago
  As a person who has been working in payment processing for the past 5 years, I can definitely say: a total norm. I'm impressed they allowed that in the first place. The adult category is a very touchy one. When one get's an OK to connect to the credit card network he has to go a very arduous procedure of being approved by a CC provider. Because the worst thing that can happen from a viewpoint of a payment provider is a return. At the exact moment when someone asks for a return on a credit card, the provider is the one who is responsible and has to revert the transaction instantly. (That's why Banks are sooooo lengthy and pushy about you filing those claims. They don't want you to initiate the return.) Now, if you sell weed, do gambling, sell crypto, do porn or anything else of that sort, you have to pay extra for your card processing, to offset all potential problems for the payment provider. Problems? What problems? Well, a LOT of transactions for adult content and toys happen on stolen cards. And those cards are not stolen per say. It's just a kid taking parent's CC card, or your SO is using it without your knowledge. Once found, this results in a lot of scandals and quarreling. Followed by a return request. And those returns are very annoying to that. The service "technically" was delivered. But now you are loosing it. And the payments provider does not want to be hit by that. In fact, this is not a news in the first place. When Kickstarter sign their agreement with the card provider, they specifically stated categories of services they will be responsible for. And I guess porn was not one of them. So what? Now the provider saw a chargeback because of the adult content and did the most standard thing: Went back to the documents, noted the fact that Kickstarter not suppose to be doing adult content, and went back to Kickstarter to tell them to stop. I handle 2-3 of such cases per month. It's called routine. But now, enter the world of entertainment. A quick search shows one that Kotaku is a subsidiary of a larger conglamerate G/O Media (Gizmodo - Onion). A private equity company that bought out a bunch of entertainment websites like Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Kotaku. It started in 2019, and went basically bankrupt by 2023. They have been selling their websites to different holdings. In 2025 Kotaku was sold to a Swiss conclamerate that put it into a line of similar useless media resources. And if you check the author - you'll find out that he is a well-established gaming reporter. With little knowledge of the money business. And then this article makes it to HN.
• hitekker 5mo ago
  The left-right coalition against porn makes relief for Kickstarter or Stripe unlikely. FOSTA-SESTA, the law that increased liability for platforms facilitating porn, passed 388-25 in the House and 97-2 in the Senate back in 2018. Every senate Progressive except one voted yes, including Sanders, Warren, Kamala Harris (AG against Backpage), Booker, etc. Anti-trafficking feminist groups like NOW backed that legislation, or were silent on it. Similarly, media outlets were either quiet or in vocal support, i.e., the NYTimes 2020 attack on Pornhub.
  • sciencejerk 5mo ago
    Thanks for this comment. This is a bipartisan movement
• SuaveSteve 5mo ago
  I think it's real BS how two organizations control international payments.
• jadar 5mo ago
  Good. The less smut on the internet, the better. It’s a net negative to society.
  • mystraline 5mo ago
    Simple idea for a simple mind: quit going to porn sites. See how that works? If you dont like a behavior, dont do the behavior. Dont you tell US what you want us to do. This is called freedom.
    • jadar 5mo ago
      I don’t go there. And I advocate others do the same.
  • episode404 5mo ago
    100% agree. The porn industry's harms to society cannot be overstated.
• seany 5mo ago
  Seems like there has to be a tipping point coming soon where stuff like monero will start to make sense for "normal" people.
• josefritzishere 5mo ago
  I dont have much respect for pornmongers but Payment Processors ganging up like this restraint of trade. It might even add up to racketeering. It's not the business of one business to render moral judgements on a customer. That's just anti-capitalist.
• myko 5mo ago
  Such bullshit. Puritans are ruining everything.
• chromacity 5mo ago
  The usual explanation in these threads are "chargebacks", but come on. Payment processors could deal with chargebacks and disputes just fine. They suck for the seller, not the credit card company. What US companies are afraid of more is PR and regulatory risk. Zelle has no chargeback process, but still bans the sale of automatic knives, fireworks, ammo, and firearm parts. Venmo bans a nebulous category of "products that present a risk to consumer safety". You better not be buying any vintage lawn darts for your collection. The chargeback rate on knives or firearm optics is probably not any higher than on anything else. What's higher is the likelihood of a headline along the lines of "kid dead / injured because of Paypal". And so, we end up with digital payment processors as the arbiters of morality.
• thegrim33 5mo ago
  "Forced to ban adult content by payment processors" If you go through and click all the links and hunt down the source, the final source underlying it all is a comic author who says, without quoting anything, or any proof, that that's the reason why. Just a random guy saying that Stripe made them ban it, without any evidence. I'm the King of England. There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true.
  • 9x39 5mo ago
    The details sure are light, but it tracks with how banks and processors work. There's lots of indirect language and polite pressure involved, and famously, opaqueness behind decisions. Consider this excellent article on debanking by an author who works at Stripe: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki... The machine grinds on regardless if we agree with it or not.
  • shantnutiwari 5mo ago
    >>There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true. Sir/Ma'am, this is HN, we dont actually read the articles here. WE just look at the title and get outraged
    • nyantaro1 5mo ago
      His(?) Majesty. You are addressing the King of England himself
• iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
  If only there was a group of individuals, who understood computers, communications ecosystems and payments and create some sort of protocol to make this a non-issue.
• WhereIsTheTruth 5mo ago
  Good old democracy
• QBitFlow 5mo ago
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• QBitFlow 5mo ago
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