I am curious what people think about the most recent decision of payment processors to dictate morality of literally any and all content purchased

@SinlessOnslaught Basically Steam the largest gaming platform probably in the world got bullied into allowing payment providers to censor mature content on their platform. Pay Pal even briefly pulled their service from the platform briefly to make the point.

Now you might think "who cares about racy video games" , So what? Well it has already had unintended consequences of having anything that might even possibly offend Visa or Mastercard yanked from the platform,

Now the fact that it is the payment processors and not Valve dictating the censorship and it is forcing compliance with their policies means this also applies to literally anything you buy with a credit card.

I mean shit, based on their own new guidelines you should not be allowed to by a bible with a Mastercard credit card based on it's content.

It renders the ability of nations to decide on free speech and artistic expression irrelevant and gives that to these monopolies to decide.

I can't see this going anywhere good.

@SinlessOnslaught Apparently even on Steam we are already seeing unintended consequences of many games being delisted that are skewed more towards south east Asian content simply because well to be blunt the physique and body type of your typical adult Asian woman and your typical woman of European descent are decidedly different.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Wow that's really fked right there. I feel like something is illegal there when they're messing with freedom of expression.

I wonder if steam can get around that by making a service active that bypasses that. Like a payment service where users can upload their cards and it disguises their purchases so the credit card companies can't tell what games they purchased.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow I'm unfamiliar with crypto but wondered about ghost currency and the like. A way to make it accessible to people

@SatanBurger I have done a bit more digging and it also seems the "feminist" organization that kicked all this off is actually run by a right wing evangelical who happens to be female. Explains why this is all around 30 year old conservative moral outrage talking points from the 90s.


The thing is according to Visa they don't actually see what the purchase is and rely on reporting from banks and the public which is what was exploited here.

Beyond that though Visa has gone even farther and now includes anything that might be "brand damaging" with the same treatment as straight up illegal activity.

The problem is there are not really any viable alternatives. I mean crypto enthusiasts love to claim that crypto is ideal for this situation but the simple truth is that crypto currency in implementation is not really currency it is a security. So it is about as effective as trying to pay for a video game with Nvidia or Microsoft stocks. Than you also have the volatility which is not helpful either.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow I wonder if steam can get their own credit card? That would be great like steam card or something. Like maybe only for debit purchases only rather than credit. So they can bypass it but that sounds like a big endeavor

@SatanBurger Yeah. The person behind Collective Shout is a Baptist extremist and their other cause is "pro life".

The other group that apparently joined in on this was previously an extremist Catholic outfit that seems to have also figured out that cosplaying as SJWs is a more effective way to ram through their agenda.

They are about as feminist as Libs of Tiktok.

Some of their previous campaigns involved harassing minimum wage retail workers over ads in stores they found offensive.

The whole outfit is a joke. Unfortunately they managed to figure out an approach that maximized the chaos they could create.

@SatanBurger As for an alternative payment processor I honestly don't know what the logistics of that would be. But Valve is a company that at least has the kind of money that would be required.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow It should be illegal to play politics with credit card companies it just sounds wrong but I recognize that our govt is morally bankrupt