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Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

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131–140 of 315 posts

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

#131
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.

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

#132

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.

> 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 t…

Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sellin…

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…

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?

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

#135

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.

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)

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable.

> 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.

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

#137

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 immun…

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…

This is the common explanation I see when this topic comes up, but it always made zero sense to me. It frustrates me that people fail to realize the amount of purchaseable things that could qualify as 'explicit'. This is Kickstarter. Do we really think that someone crowdfunding a risque board game or comic is as likely to ask for a chargeback as some middle-aged man trying to hastily cancel a subscription on some porn site?

And there's just so many more things you can pay for. Physical stuff. Art prints and comics. Game mods. Art commissions. Services that aren't just video platforms (social media, hookup apps and so on). There's so much more stuff out there that's not child-friendly, and I bet that all of these categories have different amounts of financial risk atrached to them.

So why are all these different things grouped under the widest net, with the worst offenders being used as reason to deny processing to the entire market segment? Why did they ban all explicit content and not just porn site subscriptions or whatever else has the most chargebacks?

This comment thread is confidently trying to steer around this topic, but there is ideology mixed up in this, and probably to a way larger extent than you think.

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

#138
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why there are chargebacks in the first place? Allow merchants to have no chargeback policy.

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)

Why does this not apply to payment methods like Zelle?

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sellin…

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…

[flagged]

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

#140

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 immun…

[flagged]

I think this is where I'm supposed to say "username checks out".
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