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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ask the Canadian truckers how well government control of banking worked out ;) Seriously though, I think the fix here is not who controls it but legislation that codifies when this type of payment deplatforming can (or cannot) be done. Make some carve-outs for smaller processors (e.g. if your church group wants to set up a pr0n-free version of Stripe, go to town)

Crypto didn’t help the truckers either.. Trudeau banned it, which is ironic considering the whole point of it was being government resistant.

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

#262

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…

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. On…

I think grouping all porn as exploitative is a stretch.

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

#263
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are they organized? Are you implying that all billionaires are in agreement to fund the heritage foundation? Lol

Heritage Foundation is one of the ways that several of them organize. It's an organization

Where did I say all? Lol

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

#264
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they organized? Are you implying that all billionaires are in agreement to fund the heritage foundation? Lol

Heritage Foundation is one of the ways that several of them organize. It's an organization Where did I say all? Lol

Black people are responsible for electing trump because of the black conservative federation

See how your logic makes zero sense?

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

#265

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. 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 circul…

pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.

They were kicked off credit card processor because of conservative anti-porn advocates, not high rates of CSAM. It irony is that PornHub was one of the more tightly policed and more restrictive platforms, but they still got kicked off credit card processors

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.

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.

"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.

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If U.S. credit-card issuers were worried about fraud, they would have implemented the other half of "chip-&-PIN," which the rest of the world has been using for decades. U.S. customers pretty much JUST got chips in our cards... but issuers "forgot" to implement the PIN part. Zero sympathy for this scumbag monopoly.

In my country you usually need to confirm payments with SMS OTP, except for trusted merchants (but they take the risk of fraud by opting out from confirmation). So simply stealing a bank card doesn't get you far. And pretending that you did not pay is also more difficult. Is US different? Do banks and clients trust each other in US and do not require OTP?

Yep. If I take someone's credit card, I can use it all I want, until either 1) they notice and cancel the card, or 2) I trip the fraud protection with unusual spending patterns.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

Why are they casting such wide net? I’ve always wondered the same thing, my experience with adult content in the digital advertising world is that there’s a group dynamic that emerges and all but erases the “political will” that would cause certain businesses to make the first move in clearly defining what they carve out categories are, so it all backslides into fairly broad categories. It’s lot of heat in some scenarios and it paralyzes companies (motives varying depending on market position and situation of course)

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No it isn't. It's struggling on the front page because this is a very old story and it's the same conversation every time: payment processors hate this stuff because digital goods are fraud and chargeback magnets, and that's doubly true of adult content.

Those are valid facts, but this is missing an underlying point: HN’s community is not concerned about this form of discrimination, so each time it crosses the front page, we see lots of threads about deregulation but few about the spectre of ethics raised by these acts. Ethics aren’t typically in-scope for HN unless the party harmed is either a for-profit corporation or a tech worker; since HN doesn’t as a community tend to openly self-identify with the fields of sex work, the ethical issues here are effectively out of scope here. One can imagine a different HN that gave the ethical threats to Others as much airtime as it gives to ethical threats to Self. I remain hopeful.

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

#270

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…

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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