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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 religi

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?

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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
    Why is this no longer on the front page of HN? This should be the top article. It's only an hour old and has hundreds up upvotes. The payments industry is strong arming free speech to promote religious fundamentalism. There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic. Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives. We don't need the religious oligarchy dictating how you can live. Edit: it's back. Halfway down the page. A few minutes ago it was not on the home page at all and I had to search for it.
    - slumberlust 5mo ago
      Are you viewing by the default page or active? Several of these articles were discussed last year when the processors were pressuring Valve. Maybe a little topic fatigue?
    - infecto 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - mcphage 5mo ago
        > This is not free speech. Adult content is not a protected class. Why does adult content not count as speech?
        infecto 5mo ago
        US civics 101. The first amendment mostly restricts government action. This is not a free speech issue unless you want to legislate that adult content is a protected class or want to make a special clause for payment processing. This is a perfect use case for crypto imo. If you are making an argument that new legislation needs to made, great but unfortunately people jump to the idea that this is immediately a free speech issue.
        Fargren 5mo ago
        Freedom of speech is not defined by the US constitution. Free speech is an ideological stance, not a legal definition. US laws protects some forms of free speech and not others.
- iamnothere 5mo ago
  This may have been true at some point and is the conventional wisdom now, but it’s no longer accurate as pointed out by others in the discussion here. There’s a lot of pressure coming from anti-porn activists who seem to have zeroed in on smaller companies as the most vulnerable. OnlyFans and the PornHub parent company have faced many different attacks as well, including lawsuits and campaigns for age verification laws, but for whatever reason they seem to be immune to financial pressure. Probably because all they do is adult content, so they are willing to fight it no matter the cost! (Note that OnlyFans did get attacked in this same way before and briefly attempted to pivot to non-adult content before rapidly backpedaling after a user and creator uproar.)
- PretzelPirate 5mo ago
  > because it doesn't allow chargebacks You can have chargebacks in crypto if the payment is scripted to allow chargebacks. It would be up to the merchant and the buyer on whether or not to allow that, and who would mediate the dispute.
  - epolanski 5mo ago
    How do you script a chargeback with Bitcoin payments?
    - vova_hn2 5mo ago
      One of the options: money go to a 2/3 multisig address, 1 key is controlled by the customer, 1 key is controlled by the service provider, 1 key is controlled by an escrow service.
  - miki123211 5mo ago
    And unlike in trad fi, you can have the dispute mediator / escrow manager / trustee be physically limited in what they can do with the money. Visa can run away with your unclaimed payouts (if forced to do so by law enforcement for example). This doesn't have to be true in crypto; you can set things up so that the third party can either release the money to the payee or send it back to the payer, without giving them the capability to send it to some arbitrary address of their choosing.
  - akerl_ 5mo ago
    That's not a chargeback, that's an escrow service.
    - PretzelPirate 5mo ago
      That is charge back. Even with a credit card, your bank is the mediator between you and the merchant.
- Scaled 5mo ago
  Just FYI, the high rate of fraud is FUD. I am in the field, have a very good chargeback rate, and still cannot secure card processing at fair terms. The processors I have spoken to know chargeback rates are low, but it's a rigged system designed to extract maximal revenue by middlemen.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
    A country with sane policy would consider payment processing to be infrastructure every bit as much as bridges or airports or an electrical grid. Any country even dabbling with the idea of becoming cashless should have to consider it that.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    That's like a 16 year old saying the auto insurance game is rigged because they are a very good driver but can't get cheap insurance. Maybe your rates are high because of the risk pool you are in.
    - Hackbraten 5mo ago
      But what kind of risk would that be? For adolescents and auto insurance, it makes sense to me (higher testosterone levels, less driving experience, not yet fully developed sense of risks/consequences, fewer spouses/children who depend on their livelihood etc. etc.) But why would fraud be more prevalent specifically in the adult content industry than the average over all the industries? Do criminals prefer working in porn than elsewhere? Why? Or do chargebacks simply occur more often due to spouses disputing a charge in an attempt to save face in front of their partner?
      - dhosek 5mo ago
        There’s going to be a lot of the spouse saving face chargebacks, people using stolen card numbers to download porn to avoid exposing their use to anyone else, active use of porn sites as a means of laundering funds from stolen card numbers—if you’re in an organization that does prostitution and card theft, you can use a third-party porn site to turn stolen card numbers into cash, etc.
- NoahZuniga 5mo ago
  pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.
  - chimeracoder 5mo ago
    > pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM. There are orders of magnitude more CSAM on other platforms, such as Facebook. As explained elsewhere in the comments, Pornhub was targeted by evangelical, anti-pornography groups which weaponized claims of CSAM against Pornhub for their own political purposes, despite the fact that Pornhub had vanishingly few instances even compared to other pornography platforms, let alone non-pornography platforms (like Facebook).
  - subscribed 5mo ago
    And yet X can still accept payments even though it officially allows paid CSAM generation. I am not sure if CSAM is the only reason for this group - notice they specifically listed MILF/DILF, that doesn't involve or imply CSAM in any way.
    - Manuel_D 5mo ago
      "CSAM generation" is an oxymoron. The justification behind criminalizing mere possession of CSAM is that it requires the abuse of a child to produce. This is not the case with fictional content. If the media does not depict an actual child being abused, is is by definition not CSAM.
      - subscribed 5mo ago
        I'm partially with you on that one ("computer generated") but the laws converge to the position that if the computer-generated pixels are arranged in such a way that it's a young human, it's CSAM. Also we're not arguing the language here or its adherence to the specific reality, but the blunt tool the laws are. Putting other countries laws aside, I believe that digitally manipulating the image of the real child in that way results in the production of the actual CSAM and as such is a federal crime. And back to my previous comment - actual children are involved, so the abuse actually happens. If you doubt it, feel free to read up about women who experienced their own AI-manipulated pictures to make them appear naked - I don't think you deny the actual harm here. In terms of generation (harming pixels), I think the idea of the lawmakers is to criminalise similar ones as well ("indistinguishable from a real child") to offer some protections to real children.
- dhosek 5mo ago
  Some 15 years ago, I interviewed at a payment processor that specialized in NFSW customers and pretty much the fraud/chargeback rate is ridiculously high for porn sites and the like. Elsewhere in the thread someone commented about even vigilant customers getting kicked off stripe, but I’m guessing that even with vigilance, the fraud/chargeback rate will be much higher than an acceptable threshold. There’s a limit to what you can do. When I was taking credit cards in the 90s, I managed to have an almost perfect record (the advantage of selling print subscriptions where a stable delivery address is needed), but got burned by a purchase with a stolen card where they bought a number of back issues plus a 2-year subscription and had it all sent to Hungary.
- xingped 5mo ago
  > 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. I think the reasons consumers don't like cryptocurrency has more to do with its overwhelming use for and exposure to scams, fraud, money-laundering, etc. than with no chargeback support or having to foot the transaction fees...
advisedwang 5mo ago
The payment processors say the reason is high fraud and charge-back rates in those industries that make it unprofitable to service. I don't know if this is true or an excuse. Either way, its an excellent reason why this critical infrastructure shouldn't be under corporate control.
- codedokode 5mo ago
  Well that is fair point, but cannot they just increase the commission to cover them? Also I think it is weird that when someone steals a bank card, they use it to buy adult games instead of buying an iPhone or MacBook and shipping it to the third world country.
  - quux 5mo ago
    It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase
    - chimeracoder 5mo ago
      > It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase If this problem were as pervasive as people keep saying it is, it would put the merchants out of business long before it would have any noticeable impact on the card brands (Visa, Mastercard) who are typically the ones actually pushing bans like these[0]. Even if the merchant is successful in winning the chargeback, they are the ones who have to pay the fees for it, which means that any business with a predictable and consistently high enough chargeback rate will just stop collecting payments long before the upstream providers care. A lot of people here don't actually understand how payment processing, risk underwriting, and chargebacks work - which is fair, because it's an arcane area of knowledge that most people don't interact with! But it means that a lot of things which sound like simple and easy explanations are actually completely off base and nonsensical. [0] I do not have knowledge of the Kickstarter situation specifically, and the article is light on primary-source details, so I am explicitly not commenting on this specific case.
player1234 5mo ago
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chimeracoder 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? The driving force is mostly a group of nonprofits and lobbying groups that are backed by right-wing, mostly-but-not-exclusively evangelicals. Over the last decade, they have successfully laundered their views into the mainstream to the point where many people don't realize how influential they have been in writing all of these laws and policies and driving them across the finish line. None of this is hidden knowledge - they've been acting out in the open for years, but people have an aversion to acknowledging it, because it's an uncomfortable truth which triggers a great deal of cognitive dissonance.
- sciencejerk 5mo ago
  > Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? It's not easy money. It's reputationally risky money, that requires EXPENSIVE moderation, defensive litigation potentially fraught with fraud and chargebacks. Follow the money.
mrsilencedogood 5mo ago
For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases. High enough that it messes with the credit and counterparty risk modeling that processors use. You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases. Theoretically, they could just split out "explicit" vs "normal" risk categories, but there's two top problems there: 1) it's just fundamentally a smaller-yet-way-more-annoying category than the rest of their payments, and 2) tons of your partners (banks etc etc) have blanket-banned for all of the above reasons. So... here we are.
- qball 5mo ago
  >it's because chargebacks Sorry, but that's just bullshit. This is nothing more than your standard pseudogovernmental meddling in the "just build your own financial infrastructure" vein, and it's coming from foreign countries this time rather than the US itself (it currently has an administration less hostile to business).
- general1465 5mo ago
  Then why there are chargebacks in the first place? Allow merchants to have no chargeback policy.
  - gowld 5mo ago
    US federal laws mandate chargebacks as a consumer protection mechanism, primarily through the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) of 1974 and Regulation Z of the Truth in Lending Act (TILA)
    - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      Why does this not apply to payment methods like Zelle?
      - bell-cot 5mo ago
        Zelle is (in effect) a wire transfer - there is no "credit" (meaning "borrow now, pay later") for that law to apply.
wahnfrieden 5mo ago
Collective Shout is behind several major campaigns. Info on its conservative lobbyist leader, their extreme views and hypocrisies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/1FHaaaIs6T https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/1FHaaaIs6T As for why they do it? Because conservative Christian lobbying is a lucrative grift: https://youtu.be/ms26YefUNds?si=3KLCj1RALES3aKDT https://youtu.be/ms26YefUNds?si=3KLCj1RALES3aKDT The owner runs a for-profit speaking engagement business alongside the registered charity. Many such people get into right wing politics without necessarily holding real conviction for the causes because it’s an easy way to get lots of money. It’s kind of like the market for drill music - fans love the stories of gang violence and aura of lawlessness, so artists will exaggerate and pretend or even foment actual violence so the market buys the product they’re looking for regardless of authenticity. The fans form the artists because of what they finance. The result is a product of the fandom more than a reflection of the artists true selves, though it relies on preserving the deception of extreme authenticity. A similar American lobbyist group is Moms for Liberty. They’re funded by a billionaire and groups like the Heritage Foundation, the ones behind Project 2025.
- maxk42 5mo ago
  And they're Australian, not American.
  - chimeracoder 5mo ago
    Collective Shout is Australian, but there are plenty of similar groups in the US , UK, and Europe.
legitster 5mo ago
I don't think it's so much a religious lobbying thing as it is a consent and liability thing. If you're a processor (payment or otherwise), you have to be absolutely sure there's no CP or non-consensual content on there. The penalty for even one thing to slip through is damning, and they're under extreme pressure to be the gatekeeper on all of this. That means you have to manually review everything. That means paying someone to sit through and review all sorts of... questionable... media. A lot of work was shipping this off to overseas review farms. And we occasionally hear reports on how degrading and traumatizing this kind of work can be. So for Visa, Mastercard, et al I think they are more or less chomping at the bit to just be completely out of this genre of businesses.
- Scaled 5mo ago
  They're also attacking games and artwork -- gotta make sure those pixels consent, too. Sigh...
iknowstuff 5mo ago
Can’t they use some push payment methods where a qr gets scanned to send money, like venmo/cashspp?
bootsmann 5mo ago
I think Mastercard and Visa are deathly afraid of having their nice duopoly regulated more tightly (as is already done in the EU) and therefore they consequentially put in a lot of effort to steer clear of topics that would give politicians a good excuse to do so.
natbennett 5mo ago
Article and comments are underrating the impact of reputational risk on payment processors and on Kickstarter itself, for hosting/facilitating sexual content. Some amount of adult comment is CSAM, or otherwise broadly disfavored. Some companies (Pornhub, OnlyFans) are willing to specialize in discriminating between “regular” adult content and the objectionable stuff, and they have payment processors similarly willing to specialize. Some of that specialization involves being willing to take on political exposure. Mainstream payment processors are unusually exposed to risks like “being dragged in front of Congress” — there are a lot of reasons a politician might want to put pressure on a general financial infrastructure provider. So reducing obvious ways to get embarrassingly dragged in front of Congress is rational.
- iamnothere 5mo ago
  Thanks, this is a better summary of the situation than all the people claiming it’s chargebacks (no longer such an issue as it used to be). The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review. Rather than reporting it to the platform, activists then threaten the platform through intermediaries and force them to change their policies to drop adult content.
  - chimeracoder 5mo ago
    > The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review. This is why Pornhub is always targeted under the pretense of "fighting CSAM" when in reality Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in terms of the prevalence of CSAM and the distribution. Exodus Cry, et. al. don't target Facebook, because they don't actually care about fighting CSAM - they are simply weaponizing that rhetoric in order to attack the the thing they really want to end (pornography, and more broadly, anything "immoral" according to a right-wing, evangelical definition of that word).
Xeoncross 5mo ago
It's not religion, it's litigation and money. 1) non-consensual or illegal (CP) content could come with expensive lawsuits. 2) Adult content has higher abuse (charge-backs, fraud, etc..).
- wahnfrieden 5mo ago
  You forgot intense lobbying efforts funded by conservative groups and billionaires.
  - tt24 5mo ago
    Yeah I’m sure Jeff Bezos is kept awake at night by thoughts of payment processors processing adult related transactions
    - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
      So you are ignorant to what Moms for Liberty have done and who funds them. This is public info.
      - tt24 5mo ago
        So because a billionaire donated to this pac that means “billionaires” as a group are responsible for this? That’s like saying black people are responsible for electing Trump because >= 1 black person voted for him.
        wahnfrieden 5mo ago
        Your ignorance continues. Some of the billionaires fund it via intermediary organizations like Heritage Foundation. They are quite organized and not only acting as individuals.
        tt24 5mo ago
        How are they organized? Are you implying that all billionaires are in agreement to fund the heritage foundation? Lol
dfxm12 5mo ago
Practically, adult content has a lot of chargebacks. I can understand not wanting to deal with that out of the box, especially in the context of kickstarter.
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felooboolooomba 5mo ago
> why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune They're not. I highly recommend the podcast "Hot Money: who rules porn". It's about the internet "revolution" of porn, when it went from DVD to the Internet. It's very interesting and sometimes hilarious. 4 fingers are OK. 5 fingers are NOT. The payment card cartel has an unofficial list of what is and isn't OK to show. It becomes a different act when all fingers are involved and they don't want that. I kid you not. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/hot-money-who-rules-porn https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/hot-money-who-rule...
tinfoilhatter 5mo ago
[flagged]
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  I think this is where I'm supposed to say "username checks out".
  - tinfoilhatter 5mo ago
    Or you could do some research on the subject yourself.
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lenerdenator 5mo ago
> Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions. In order to increase circulation of cryptocurrencies, you must make it easy and secure to deal in them. The way you do that is through... political sanctions in the form of financial and banking regulations. Which are set by bodies vulnerable to religious pressures.
nitwit005 5mo ago
While the executives have their own biases, suing Visa/Mastercard, and damaging their reputation, became a strategy to attack pornography in-general: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/suing-visa-to-shut-down-pornhub/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/suing-visa-to-shut-down-por... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-for-ad-purchases-on-pornhub-and-mindgeek-amid-controversy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-... And yes, naturally this is backed by the Christian right. They've tried to spin/redefine the whole anti-porn thing as anti-child trafficking, as that has more support.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
  The last thing the Christian Right want is financial records of their spending.
lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
I don't know the specific cause. However, as such, it is a moral issue, not a religious one per se. Pornography is abusive and incredibly damaging to individuals and society and thus the common good. It is entirely reasonable even for governments to take measures to restrict or ban the production and sale of such content. Opposition to such measures often hinges on false notions of freedom and the purpose of law. One function of law is to teach men to be free in the genuine sense, not as being able to do what thou wilt, but to be able to do what you ought. There's a reason pornography has a history as an instrument of wartime psyops.
- akramachamarei 5mo ago
  > false notions of freedom Like freedom from want and freedom from fear, Mr. Roosevelt?
- bezier-curve 5mo ago
  I think grouping all porn as exploitative is a stretch.
Rekindle8090 5mo ago
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adamrezich 5mo ago
This religious lobby idea you have is hardly a real thing in the way you seem to imagine it being.
csa 5mo ago
> Why payment processors do it? Short answer — there are lots of chargebacks and (sometimes) fraud around this content. Vanilla payment processors don’t like high rates of chargebacks and fraud. > Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby? They use a high-risk payment processor that takes a much higher cut of each sale (basically as insurance).
ogurechny 5mo ago
You seem to suppose that those businesses are really independent, only focus on goals they advertise, and exist in a vacuum. I can't even imagine how many “services” they offer to governments to keep their market shares. The non-government organisations involved in those cases are either proxies that always support local politicians, or have been deliberately created to create opaque decision making source that is outside of legal or public scrutiny. As always, the ones who decide morals for the masses are the ones you can not even criticise. Unfortunately, even if you don't have such activist group, there is always a queue of well-intentioned citizens full of dreams of getting in bed with any politician, and having their 15 minutes of fame. So one thing is to show who is the boss. Just as a slave owner who randomly kills a couple of slaves just to make others tremble in fear, US reminds others who sets the rules of international trade. The pretext is not that important. Another is to keep public in check. A citizen who says “Sonic and Mario BDSM Chamber game? Wow, so unbelievable”, and shrugs it off is a bad citizen. Good citizens must react as prescribed to any real or imagined horror stories, be attracted to sexual content in media (or outraged by it, which is the same thing), and always fear the dangers that exist “outside”. The more they do that, the more they ignore the real world around them, and rely on imaginary protections the system and its members provide. As political entertainers are interested in keeping the status quo that benefits all of them, they always choose the lowest common denominator views on such topics. It does not matter what you really think about it, it matters that you do the trick when the command is given: gasp with others, murmur with others, shake your head with others, decide that it must be stopped by existing powers with others (and therefore let them decide for you). PornHub was famously not immune to the same thing. Porn industry attacked free streaming sites to remove everything that was not actively copyrighted, and directly provided by industry. It probably cost them a lot to organise that through politicians, journalists, activists — and payment processors. Ironically, the rhetoric you might call religious was used to help porn business.

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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
  Why is this no longer on the front page of HN? This should be the top article. It's only an hour old and has hundreds up upvotes. The payments industry is strong arming free speech to promote religious fundamentalism. There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic. Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives. We don't need the religious oligarchy dictating how you can live. Edit: it's back. Halfway down the page. A few minutes ago it was not on the home page at all and I had to search for it.
  - slumberlust 5mo ago
    Are you viewing by the default page or active? Several of these articles were discussed last year when the processors were pressuring Valve. Maybe a little topic fatigue?
  - infecto 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - mcphage 5mo ago
      > This is not free speech. Adult content is not a protected class. Why does adult content not count as speech?
      - infecto 5mo ago
        US civics 101. The first amendment mostly restricts government action. This is not a free speech issue unless you want to legislate that adult content is a protected class or want to make a special clause for payment processing. This is a perfect use case for crypto imo. If you are making an argument that new legislation needs to made, great but unfortunately people jump to the idea that this is immediately a free speech issue.
        Fargren 5mo ago
        Freedom of speech is not defined by the US constitution. Free speech is an ideological stance, not a legal definition. US laws protects some forms of free speech and not others.
iamnothere 5mo ago
This may have been true at some point and is the conventional wisdom now, but it’s no longer accurate as pointed out by others in the discussion here. There’s a lot of pressure coming from anti-porn activists who seem to have zeroed in on smaller companies as the most vulnerable. OnlyFans and the PornHub parent company have faced many different attacks as well, including lawsuits and campaigns for age verification laws, but for whatever reason they seem to be immune to financial pressure. Probably because all they do is adult content, so they are willing to fight it no matter the cost! (Note that OnlyFans did get attacked in this same way before and briefly attempted to pivot to non-adult content before rapidly backpedaling after a user and creator uproar.)
PretzelPirate 5mo ago
> because it doesn't allow chargebacks You can have chargebacks in crypto if the payment is scripted to allow chargebacks. It would be up to the merchant and the buyer on whether or not to allow that, and who would mediate the dispute.
- epolanski 5mo ago
  How do you script a chargeback with Bitcoin payments?
  - vova_hn2 5mo ago
    One of the options: money go to a 2/3 multisig address, 1 key is controlled by the customer, 1 key is controlled by the service provider, 1 key is controlled by an escrow service.
- miki123211 5mo ago
  And unlike in trad fi, you can have the dispute mediator / escrow manager / trustee be physically limited in what they can do with the money. Visa can run away with your unclaimed payouts (if forced to do so by law enforcement for example). This doesn't have to be true in crypto; you can set things up so that the third party can either release the money to the payee or send it back to the payer, without giving them the capability to send it to some arbitrary address of their choosing.
- akerl_ 5mo ago
  That's not a chargeback, that's an escrow service.
  - PretzelPirate 5mo ago
    That is charge back. Even with a credit card, your bank is the mediator between you and the merchant.
Scaled 5mo ago
Just FYI, the high rate of fraud is FUD. I am in the field, have a very good chargeback rate, and still cannot secure card processing at fair terms. The processors I have spoken to know chargeback rates are low, but it's a rigged system designed to extract maximal revenue by middlemen.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
  A country with sane policy would consider payment processing to be infrastructure every bit as much as bridges or airports or an electrical grid. Any country even dabbling with the idea of becoming cashless should have to consider it that.
- criddell 5mo ago
  That's like a 16 year old saying the auto insurance game is rigged because they are a very good driver but can't get cheap insurance. Maybe your rates are high because of the risk pool you are in.
  - Hackbraten 5mo ago
    But what kind of risk would that be? For adolescents and auto insurance, it makes sense to me (higher testosterone levels, less driving experience, not yet fully developed sense of risks/consequences, fewer spouses/children who depend on their livelihood etc. etc.) But why would fraud be more prevalent specifically in the adult content industry than the average over all the industries? Do criminals prefer working in porn than elsewhere? Why? Or do chargebacks simply occur more often due to spouses disputing a charge in an attempt to save face in front of their partner?
    - dhosek 5mo ago
      There’s going to be a lot of the spouse saving face chargebacks, people using stolen card numbers to download porn to avoid exposing their use to anyone else, active use of porn sites as a means of laundering funds from stolen card numbers—if you’re in an organization that does prostitution and card theft, you can use a third-party porn site to turn stolen card numbers into cash, etc.
NoahZuniga 5mo ago
pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.
- chimeracoder 5mo ago
  > pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM. There are orders of magnitude more CSAM on other platforms, such as Facebook. As explained elsewhere in the comments, Pornhub was targeted by evangelical, anti-pornography groups which weaponized claims of CSAM against Pornhub for their own political purposes, despite the fact that Pornhub had vanishingly few instances even compared to other pornography platforms, let alone non-pornography platforms (like Facebook).
- subscribed 5mo ago
  And yet X can still accept payments even though it officially allows paid CSAM generation. I am not sure if CSAM is the only reason for this group - notice they specifically listed MILF/DILF, that doesn't involve or imply CSAM in any way.
  - Manuel_D 5mo ago
    "CSAM generation" is an oxymoron. The justification behind criminalizing mere possession of CSAM is that it requires the abuse of a child to produce. This is not the case with fictional content. If the media does not depict an actual child being abused, is is by definition not CSAM.
    - subscribed 5mo ago
      I'm partially with you on that one ("computer generated") but the laws converge to the position that if the computer-generated pixels are arranged in such a way that it's a young human, it's CSAM. Also we're not arguing the language here or its adherence to the specific reality, but the blunt tool the laws are. Putting other countries laws aside, I believe that digitally manipulating the image of the real child in that way results in the production of the actual CSAM and as such is a federal crime. And back to my previous comment - actual children are involved, so the abuse actually happens. If you doubt it, feel free to read up about women who experienced their own AI-manipulated pictures to make them appear naked - I don't think you deny the actual harm here. In terms of generation (harming pixels), I think the idea of the lawmakers is to criminalise similar ones as well ("indistinguishable from a real child") to offer some protections to real children.
dhosek 5mo ago
Some 15 years ago, I interviewed at a payment processor that specialized in NFSW customers and pretty much the fraud/chargeback rate is ridiculously high for porn sites and the like. Elsewhere in the thread someone commented about even vigilant customers getting kicked off stripe, but I’m guessing that even with vigilance, the fraud/chargeback rate will be much higher than an acceptable threshold. There’s a limit to what you can do. When I was taking credit cards in the 90s, I managed to have an almost perfect record (the advantage of selling print subscriptions where a stable delivery address is needed), but got burned by a purchase with a stolen card where they bought a number of back issues plus a 2-year subscription and had it all sent to Hungary.
xingped 5mo ago
> 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. I think the reasons consumers don't like cryptocurrency has more to do with its overwhelming use for and exposure to scams, fraud, money-laundering, etc. than with no chargeback support or having to foot the transaction fees...

advisedwang 5mo ago

The payment processors say the reason is high fraud and charge-back rates in those industries that make it unprofitable to service. I don't know if this is true or an excuse. Either way, its an excellent reason why this critical infrastructure shouldn't be under corporate control.

codedokode 5mo ago
Well that is fair point, but cannot they just increase the commission to cover them? Also I think it is weird that when someone steals a bank card, they use it to buy adult games instead of buying an iPhone or MacBook and shipping it to the third world country.
- quux 5mo ago
  It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase
  - chimeracoder 5mo ago
    > It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase If this problem were as pervasive as people keep saying it is, it would put the merchants out of business long before it would have any noticeable impact on the card brands (Visa, Mastercard) who are typically the ones actually pushing bans like these[0]. Even if the merchant is successful in winning the chargeback, they are the ones who have to pay the fees for it, which means that any business with a predictable and consistently high enough chargeback rate will just stop collecting payments long before the upstream providers care. A lot of people here don't actually understand how payment processing, risk underwriting, and chargebacks work - which is fair, because it's an arcane area of knowledge that most people don't interact with! But it means that a lot of things which sound like simple and easy explanations are actually completely off base and nonsensical. [0] I do not have knowledge of the Kickstarter situation specifically, and the article is light on primary-source details, so I am explicitly not commenting on this specific case.

player1234 5mo ago

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chimeracoder 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? The driving force is mostly a group of nonprofits and lobbying groups that are backed by right-wing, mostly-but-not-exclusively evangelicals. Over the last decade, they have successfully laundered their views into the mainstream to the point where many people don't realize how influential they have been in writing all of these laws and policies and driving them across the finish line. None of this is hidden knowledge - they've been acting out in the open for years, but people have an aversion to acknowledging it, because it's an uncomfortable truth which triggers a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

sciencejerk 5mo ago
> Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? It's not easy money. It's reputationally risky money, that requires EXPENSIVE moderation, defensive litigation potentially fraught with fraud and chargebacks. Follow the money.

mrsilencedogood 5mo ago

For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases. High enough that it messes with the credit and counterparty risk modeling that processors use. You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases. Theoretically, they could just split out "explicit" vs "normal" risk categories, but there's two top problems there: 1) it's just fundamentally a smaller-yet-way-more-annoying category than the rest of their payments, and 2) tons of your partners (banks etc etc) have blanket-banned for all of the above reasons. So... here we are.

qball 5mo ago
>it's because chargebacks Sorry, but that's just bullshit. This is nothing more than your standard pseudogovernmental meddling in the "just build your own financial infrastructure" vein, and it's coming from foreign countries this time rather than the US itself (it currently has an administration less hostile to business).
general1465 5mo ago
Then why there are chargebacks in the first place? Allow merchants to have no chargeback policy.
- gowld 5mo ago
  US federal laws mandate chargebacks as a consumer protection mechanism, primarily through the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) of 1974 and Regulation Z of the Truth in Lending Act (TILA)
  - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    Why does this not apply to payment methods like Zelle?
    - bell-cot 5mo ago
      Zelle is (in effect) a wire transfer - there is no "credit" (meaning "borrow now, pay later") for that law to apply.

wahnfrieden 5mo ago

Collective Shout is behind several major campaigns. Info on its conservative lobbyist leader, their extreme views and hypocrisies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/1FHaaaIs6T https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/1FHaaaIs6T As for why they do it? Because conservative Christian lobbying is a lucrative grift: https://youtu.be/ms26YefUNds?si=3KLCj1RALES3aKDT https://youtu.be/ms26YefUNds?si=3KLCj1RALES3aKDT The owner runs a for-profit speaking engagement business alongside the registered charity. Many such people get into right wing politics without necessarily holding real conviction for the causes because it’s an easy way to get lots of money. It’s kind of like the market for drill music - fans love the stories of gang violence and aura of lawlessness, so artists will exaggerate and pretend or even foment actual violence so the market buys the product they’re looking for regardless of authenticity. The fans form the artists because of what they finance. The result is a product of the fandom more than a reflection of the artists true selves, though it relies on preserving the deception of extreme authenticity. A similar American lobbyist group is Moms for Liberty. They’re funded by a billionaire and groups like the Heritage Foundation, the ones behind Project 2025.

maxk42 5mo ago
And they're Australian, not American.
- chimeracoder 5mo ago
  Collective Shout is Australian, but there are plenty of similar groups in the US , UK, and Europe.

legitster 5mo ago

I don't think it's so much a religious lobbying thing as it is a consent and liability thing. If you're a processor (payment or otherwise), you have to be absolutely sure there's no CP or non-consensual content on there. The penalty for even one thing to slip through is damning, and they're under extreme pressure to be the gatekeeper on all of this. That means you have to manually review everything. That means paying someone to sit through and review all sorts of... questionable... media. A lot of work was shipping this off to overseas review farms. And we occasionally hear reports on how degrading and traumatizing this kind of work can be. So for Visa, Mastercard, et al I think they are more or less chomping at the bit to just be completely out of this genre of businesses.

Scaled 5mo ago
They're also attacking games and artwork -- gotta make sure those pixels consent, too. Sigh...

iknowstuff 5mo ago

Can’t they use some push payment methods where a qr gets scanned to send money, like venmo/cashspp?

bootsmann 5mo ago

I think Mastercard and Visa are deathly afraid of having their nice duopoly regulated more tightly (as is already done in the EU) and therefore they consequentially put in a lot of effort to steer clear of topics that would give politicians a good excuse to do so.

natbennett 5mo ago

Article and comments are underrating the impact of reputational risk on payment processors and on Kickstarter itself, for hosting/facilitating sexual content. Some amount of adult comment is CSAM, or otherwise broadly disfavored. Some companies (Pornhub, OnlyFans) are willing to specialize in discriminating between “regular” adult content and the objectionable stuff, and they have payment processors similarly willing to specialize. Some of that specialization involves being willing to take on political exposure. Mainstream payment processors are unusually exposed to risks like “being dragged in front of Congress” — there are a lot of reasons a politician might want to put pressure on a general financial infrastructure provider. So reducing obvious ways to get embarrassingly dragged in front of Congress is rational.

iamnothere 5mo ago
Thanks, this is a better summary of the situation than all the people claiming it’s chargebacks (no longer such an issue as it used to be). The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review. Rather than reporting it to the platform, activists then threaten the platform through intermediaries and force them to change their policies to drop adult content.
- chimeracoder 5mo ago
  > The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review. This is why Pornhub is always targeted under the pretense of "fighting CSAM" when in reality Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in terms of the prevalence of CSAM and the distribution. Exodus Cry, et. al. don't target Facebook, because they don't actually care about fighting CSAM - they are simply weaponizing that rhetoric in order to attack the the thing they really want to end (pornography, and more broadly, anything "immoral" according to a right-wing, evangelical definition of that word).

Xeoncross 5mo ago

It's not religion, it's litigation and money. 1) non-consensual or illegal (CP) content could come with expensive lawsuits. 2) Adult content has higher abuse (charge-backs, fraud, etc..).

wahnfrieden 5mo ago
You forgot intense lobbying efforts funded by conservative groups and billionaires.
- tt24 5mo ago
  Yeah I’m sure Jeff Bezos is kept awake at night by thoughts of payment processors processing adult related transactions
  - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    So you are ignorant to what Moms for Liberty have done and who funds them. This is public info.
    - tt24 5mo ago
      So because a billionaire donated to this pac that means “billionaires” as a group are responsible for this? That’s like saying black people are responsible for electing Trump because >= 1 black person voted for him.
      - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
        Your ignorance continues. Some of the billionaires fund it via intermediary organizations like Heritage Foundation. They are quite organized and not only acting as individuals.
        tt24 5mo ago
        How are they organized? Are you implying that all billionaires are in agreement to fund the heritage foundation? Lol

dfxm12 5mo ago

Practically, adult content has a lot of chargebacks. I can understand not wanting to deal with that out of the box, especially in the context of kickstarter.

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felooboolooomba 5mo ago

> why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune They're not. I highly recommend the podcast "Hot Money: who rules porn". It's about the internet "revolution" of porn, when it went from DVD to the Internet. It's very interesting and sometimes hilarious. 4 fingers are OK. 5 fingers are NOT. The payment card cartel has an unofficial list of what is and isn't OK to show. It becomes a different act when all fingers are involved and they don't want that. I kid you not. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/hot-money-who-rules-porn https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/hot-money-who-rule...

tinfoilhatter 5mo ago

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amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
I think this is where I'm supposed to say "username checks out".
- tinfoilhatter 5mo ago
  Or you could do some research on the subject yourself.

deleted 5mo ago

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lenerdenator 5mo ago

> Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions. In order to increase circulation of cryptocurrencies, you must make it easy and secure to deal in them. The way you do that is through... political sanctions in the form of financial and banking regulations. Which are set by bodies vulnerable to religious pressures.

nitwit005 5mo ago

While the executives have their own biases, suing Visa/Mastercard, and damaging their reputation, became a strategy to attack pornography in-general: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/suing-visa-to-shut-down-pornhub/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/suing-visa-to-shut-down-por... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-for-ad-purchases-on-pornhub-and-mindgeek-amid-controversy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-... And yes, naturally this is backed by the Christian right. They've tried to spin/redefine the whole anti-porn thing as anti-child trafficking, as that has more support.

TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
The last thing the Christian Right want is financial records of their spending.

lo_zamoyski 5mo ago

I don't know the specific cause. However, as such, it is a moral issue, not a religious one per se. Pornography is abusive and incredibly damaging to individuals and society and thus the common good. It is entirely reasonable even for governments to take measures to restrict or ban the production and sale of such content. Opposition to such measures often hinges on false notions of freedom and the purpose of law. One function of law is to teach men to be free in the genuine sense, not as being able to do what thou wilt, but to be able to do what you ought. There's a reason pornography has a history as an instrument of wartime psyops.

akramachamarei 5mo ago
> false notions of freedom Like freedom from want and freedom from fear, Mr. Roosevelt?
bezier-curve 5mo ago
I think grouping all porn as exploitative is a stretch.

Rekindle8090 5mo ago

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adamrezich 5mo ago

This religious lobby idea you have is hardly a real thing in the way you seem to imagine it being.

csa 5mo ago

> Why payment processors do it? Short answer — there are lots of chargebacks and (sometimes) fraud around this content. Vanilla payment processors don’t like high rates of chargebacks and fraud. > Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby? They use a high-risk payment processor that takes a much higher cut of each sale (basically as insurance).

ogurechny 5mo ago

You seem to suppose that those businesses are really independent, only focus on goals they advertise, and exist in a vacuum. I can't even imagine how many “services” they offer to governments to keep their market shares. The non-government organisations involved in those cases are either proxies that always support local politicians, or have been deliberately created to create opaque decision making source that is outside of legal or public scrutiny. As always, the ones who decide morals for the masses are the ones you can not even criticise. Unfortunately, even if you don't have such activist group, there is always a queue of well-intentioned citizens full of dreams of getting in bed with any politician, and having their 15 minutes of fame. So one thing is to show who is the boss. Just as a slave owner who randomly kills a couple of slaves just to make others tremble in fear, US reminds others who sets the rules of international trade. The pretext is not that important. Another is to keep public in check. A citizen who says “Sonic and Mario BDSM Chamber game? Wow, so unbelievable”, and shrugs it off is a bad citizen. Good citizens must react as prescribed to any real or imagined horror stories, be attracted to sexual content in media (or outraged by it, which is the same thing), and always fear the dangers that exist “outside”. The more they do that, the more they ignore the real world around them, and rely on imaginary protections the system and its members provide. As political entertainers are interested in keeping the status quo that benefits all of them, they always choose the lowest common denominator views on such topics. It does not matter what you really think about it, it matters that you do the trick when the command is given: gasp with others, murmur with others, shake your head with others, decide that it must be stopped by existing powers with others (and therefore let them decide for you). PornHub was famously not immune to the same thing. Porn industry attacked free streaming sites to remove everything that was not actively copyrighted, and directly provided by industry. It probably cost them a lot to organise that through politicians, journalists, activists — and payment processors. Ironically, the rhetoric you might call religious was used to help porn business.