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Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

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Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#41

Post by Aurornis »

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-acco...

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#42

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

voxic11 wrote: post #19
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks

But who is pressuring the banks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Banks frequently refuse to do business with, or heavily restrict, businesses that they deem risky from a financial perspective. Adult content, pharmaceuticals and travel are all industries that experience significantly higher occurrence of fraud and chargebacks than others. For example, your spouse sees a weird item on your credit card for a porn site. "Wasn't me! Must be stolen I'll report it." Sometimes it's the other direction. Travel businesses often get by on very thin margins with any significant balances due to deposits. If something happens, customers might get deposits back, or they might get chargebacks, and the business can rapidly end up deep in the red.

Often times to bank successfully you need large stagnant balances that are semi-frozen, or meaningful collateral.

This becomes problematic through payment provider platforms which other platforms build upon: it's not straightforward to manage these relationships through so many layers of abstractions. It's easier just to ban the industry.

I don't know the specifics of Kickstarter, but I've seen this happen countless times, so it's not difficult to connect the dots.

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#43

Post by whynotmaybe »

bobro wrote: post #16

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 s…

How is it more expensive?

Because it cost more to check that my CC wasn't stolen when I buy NSFW?

Or because there are more chargeback?

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#45

Post by tt24 »

andtheboat wrote: post #36
btown wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual answer: hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bswuu1nfc040h... & https://finance.yahoo.com/news/visa-suspends-payments-for-ad... > But he was friendly with Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Ackman texted Banga, providing a link to Kristof’s story with his tweet: “Amex, VISA and MasterCard should immediately withhold payments…

[flagged]

What’s the implication here? Jews are forcing payment processors to ban adult content?

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#46

Post by prmoustache »

amelius wrote: post #11
mountainriver wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard this is apparently less about morality and more about payments getting contested by men getting caught by their spouses

Those people should have used cryptocurrencies.

You mean using currencies where all the transactions are public?

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#47

Post by stanac »

amiga386 wrote: post #17

Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies?

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.

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#48

Post by chimeracoder »

jerf wrote: post #37
pfisch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the pressure is just coming from behind the scenes. The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country. The religious right really has their claws into this administration, and the far r…

October 2021, Mastercard unilaterally imposes additional constraints on adult sites: https://www.commercegate.com/mastercard-issued-an-updated-se... August 2021: OnlyFans CEO Blames Porn Ban on 'Unfair Actions' of Banks, Media: https://www.pcmag.com/news/onlyfans-ceo-blames-porn-ban-on-u... April 2024: Japanese Adult content platform DLsite disables Visa/Mastercard payment after attempt to outsmart credit card compan…

> It's not a sudden new thing. The financial theory seems to explain all the facts.

Literally all three of the examples you list were the direct result of lobbying from groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media. These campaigns had been in the works for years, and were well-known to people in the industry, who had been sounding the alarm for years.

It's maddening that people not only refuse to listen before the actions come down, but also still refuse to connect the dots even after they happen.

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#49

Post by Aurornis »

schnebbau wrote: post #3

So who is pressuring the processors?

Stripe (their payment process) will service adult content sites. It's not actually banned, but if your business is involved in categories with high chargeback rates (travel, gambling, cryptocurrency, vaping, adult content) you have to pay higher fees to account for the higher fraud rate in those categories

https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-acco...

Re: Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

#50

Post by grishka »

Aspos wrote: post #25

There should be a national payment processing operator as an alternative to VISA/MC. Just like they do it in many other countries.

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.

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