Over 20K games, book, and other content have been removed with no warning to customers and creators. All because of pressure from Visa and Mastercard, a duopoly propped up by puritans and authoritarians.
Any corporation whose business is financial in nature and focused on facilitating commerce- banks, payment processors, and everything else- should be required to function as a common carrier. They should be allowed to alter prices to adjust for provable differences in risk, for example if transactions involving a particular seller or a particular class of product have a much larger than average dispute rate- but they should not be allowed to deplatform any customer for any reason not directly related to fraudulent or illegal behavior.
This is a deeply concerning development, though not an entirely surprising one. While I sympathize with itch.io's position - being caught between their creators and their payment processors - the broader implications here are alarming.
Payment processors have effectively become unelected censorship boards with the power to strangle entire categories of legal content by threatening to cut off the economic infrastructure that platforms depend on. The fact that a single advocacy campaign can pressure Visa/Mastercard/PayPal into forcing platforms to remove legal adult content should concern anyone who values free expression online.
The fundamental issue isn't whether you personally approve of adult games or specific content - it's that a handful of payment companies now wield veto power over what legal content can exist in the digital economy. This represents a massive concentration of censorial authority in the hands of unaccountable corporate entities that face no meaningful democratic oversight.
We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign. Each time, legal content gets effectively banned not through legislation or courts, but through corporate policy decisions made behind closed doors.
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation. When payment infrastructure becomes as essential as electricity or telephone service for participating in the digital economy, treating these companies as neutral utilities rather than editorial boards becomes not just reasonable but necessary.
While this is effectively what is happening, and I agree with everything you said, I would like to add the primary reason why I've always heard that payment processors don't want to deal with adult content.
The primary reason is because adult content has a very high percentage of disputed charges.
Typically, it's because some person's partner notices some kind of porn on the credit card statement, and the purchaser claims they were "hacked" or something and then disputes the charge. This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins.
There is also some skittishness about local laws regarding morality. Credit card payments cross a lot of boundaries and various localities have wildly differing laws about adult content and so the payment processors simply don't want to risk it.
I guess what I'm saying is: the payment processors seem like the symptom of a larger problem, not the root cause.
Source: I've never worked in payment processing, but I used to run an online business with spicy content, and had to navigate this to an extent.
I'm very puzzled as to how these "advocacy campaigns" are able to control all of the payment processors like this. That Collective Shout "open letter" must be the tip of the iceberg.
The thing about them being moral arbiters isn't even imagined. They have had plenty of time to figure out a business model that serves these specific markets without cutting them off altogether. Instead, the payment processors are always threatening to cut off all access even to content that does not infringe upon their terms if there is even a single violation by mistake that gets remediated quickly or the payment method is disabled for the high risk content to begin with.
How did OnlyFans overcome this issue? They were pressured by a payment processor to stop allowing NSFW content, but reverse their decision. How did that pan out?
OnlyFans has an insane amount of rules about what's allowed or not. And suspends and bans performers left and right for the slightest BS complaint (apparently usually from a competitor to that performer). That's how it panned out.
That must not be comfortable for OF because this is the kind of insanity that will make every performer keep looking for plausible alternate intermediaries so as to ditch OF. OF makes it because they are by far the largest source of traffic for performers.
This isn't new, payment processors have exercised this kind of control over online content as long as people have been charging for content on the Internet.
What I am surprised about the most is why do these payment processors care about these moral issues this much? They are a profit-making entity and money is money -- the more money you process, the more profit you get. What is the downside for allowing NSFW content be bought using their processor? Are the boards/CEOs of these companies puritans? Aren't they handing more credibility to these alternatives like Bitcoin Lightning or Monero with actions like these?
The new code Hayes is exported to the world already, games are just another medium caught.
To be clear: i do think part of the complaint from the collective should be heard (CSAM have no place anywhere, and rape roleplaying should stay in bedrooms), but including incest or any non-violent fetish in the complaint seems weird and seems equating it to rape and child abuse, which it is not (it's a disturbing fetish to me, but _a lot_ of fetishes are disturbing to me, and i don't think anybody should ban them). My issue with it is that it is again a show of force by payment processors and i heavily dislike it.
For those of you in the US (I'm Canadian), there is a bill in congress right now that would make it illegal for any financial service provider to directly or indirectly prohibit or inhibit any legal transaction. It's called the Fair Access to Banking Act, H.R.987 in the House, S.401 in the Senate. Call your representatives. Get it passed.
Edit: Oh yeah and feel free to copy, paste, share this around, make people AWARE of this, because nobody is! Of course, change if you're not Canadian, but like... Make it happen.
This also happened to steam a few days ago. They even changed their game policy stating that their payment processors determine the content allowed on steam.
It's remarkable that these censors are hiding behind "feminism", as a framing to make their censoriousness seem more palatable, or progressive, or enlightened. Anyone familiar with literature (reading–not burning) might know the OG feminists defied laws and criminal arrests to publish obscene books.
Here's Margaret C. Anderson of "The Little Review", fined $100 and fingerprinted for flouting morality laws publishing Joyce's Ulysses in serialized form,
Sadly that ban also hit three of our our games that help victims cope with trauma. :(
Please write to your representative:
Dear [Representative's Name],
I am writing to formally request an investigation into the activities of Collective Shout, an organization whose censorship-driven campaigns have caused measurable harm to artists, survivors, and vulnerable communities. Under the guise of protecting women and children, they have erased trauma narratives, suppressed creative expression, and bullied platforms into enacting broad, opaque bans. Their actions disproportionately affect marginalized voices and bypass democratic discourse in favor of ideological policing. There is growing concern that their influence is rooted more in religious moralism than evidence-based advocacy. I urge your office to examine their funding, methods, and societal impact with urgency and transparency.
Sincerely,
[Your Full Name]
[Your Address / Constituency]
This is useless. You can't stop Collective Shout (their campaign almost surely falls under First Amendment rights), and even if you could, 30 minutes later a new group pops up. Plus your message would fall completely on deaf ears for anyone who agrees with Collective Shout.
Bring attention to the fact that payment processors are acting as active censorship of legal content, rather than neutral infrastructure. Emphasize that if they can censor legal content, anything could be next, including but not limited to political donations of a specific party.
Uh, Visa/Mastercard chose to do that. We're talking about payment processors who process trillions of dollars every year. They won't just bend Steam over backwards to make an Australian NGO happy.
It's either that Visa/Mastercard always want to censor porn, or they're pressured by government(s) to do so.
It really highlights how bad crypto is as a solution to what it claims that it can't be a solution here.
It is impractically slow, the user experience is too high a bar, it lacks meaningful consumer protections and it would not be able to handle the transaction volume. That it hasn't been able to address those problems in the last fifteen years calls the whole enterprise into question.
In early 2000s it was IMPOSIBLE for websites to handle millions of visits, except big ones like google and yahoo.
UX for websites was weak, mobile barely existed, https was not used, online payments were limited to certain websites, fraud was common and anyone with CC number could steal from your card.
Internet was not early and Crypto is now at that level. So think bigger and think about process.
Reading the comments it seems to me that people focus on disallowing visa to censor. I think the bigger issue is that nobody can create an alternative payment processor and do business with Steam/Itch, because visa will pressure Steam/Itch. So to me it’s a problem of monopoly not censorship.
That was precisely Bitcoin's goal as stated in its whitepaper [0]
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.
I'm tired of few jerks trying to police everyone and this "toleration of intolerance".
We can fight back. Any legal and nonviolent response against the "collective shout" people is acceptable. Share your ideas.
If you run a platform and see any of them as users get rid of them. Delete their account, wipe their data, ban them. Don't deliver them pizza. Don't accept restaurant reservations in their name. They think they can police others, it goes both ways.
Realistic? At this point, no. But we should normalize this sort of response. Wannabe bullies should be scared of personal consequences.
When I was young there was a lot of fear that first-person shooter video games were leading to a rampant increase in youth violence.
This concern is virtually unheard of today, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they actually had a slight effect in the opposite direction: some of those youth getting trouble outside are now indoors playing harmless video games.
60 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 85.1 ms ] threadWhat's actually happening is any content disliked by certain billionaires is being flagged by payment providers under their influence.
When they see something they disagree with, they'll send an email to the CEO of Visa or MasterCard and action gets taken.
Payment processors have effectively become unelected censorship boards with the power to strangle entire categories of legal content by threatening to cut off the economic infrastructure that platforms depend on. The fact that a single advocacy campaign can pressure Visa/Mastercard/PayPal into forcing platforms to remove legal adult content should concern anyone who values free expression online.
The fundamental issue isn't whether you personally approve of adult games or specific content - it's that a handful of payment companies now wield veto power over what legal content can exist in the digital economy. This represents a massive concentration of censorial authority in the hands of unaccountable corporate entities that face no meaningful democratic oversight.
We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign. Each time, legal content gets effectively banned not through legislation or courts, but through corporate policy decisions made behind closed doors.
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation. When payment infrastructure becomes as essential as electricity or telephone service for participating in the digital economy, treating these companies as neutral utilities rather than editorial boards becomes not just reasonable but necessary.
The primary reason is because adult content has a very high percentage of disputed charges.
Typically, it's because some person's partner notices some kind of porn on the credit card statement, and the purchaser claims they were "hacked" or something and then disputes the charge. This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins.
There is also some skittishness about local laws regarding morality. Credit card payments cross a lot of boundaries and various localities have wildly differing laws about adult content and so the payment processors simply don't want to risk it.
I guess what I'm saying is: the payment processors seem like the symptom of a larger problem, not the root cause.
Source: I've never worked in payment processing, but I used to run an online business with spicy content, and had to navigate this to an extent.
OnlyFans has an insane amount of rules about what's allowed or not. And suspends and bans performers left and right for the slightest BS complaint (apparently usually from a competitor to that performer). That's how it panned out.
That must not be comfortable for OF because this is the kind of insanity that will make every performer keep looking for plausible alternate intermediaries so as to ditch OF. OF makes it because they are by far the largest source of traffic for performers.
To be clear: i do think part of the complaint from the collective should be heard (CSAM have no place anywhere, and rape roleplaying should stay in bedrooms), but including incest or any non-violent fetish in the complaint seems weird and seems equating it to rape and child abuse, which it is not (it's a disturbing fetish to me, but _a lot_ of fetishes are disturbing to me, and i don't think anybody should ban them). My issue with it is that it is again a show of force by payment processors and i heavily dislike it.
The fact that a drawing can be "CSAM" is ridiculous, frankly. Why shouldn't taboo be explored in fiction? (Manga, Visual Novels, etc.)
Edit: Oh yeah and feel free to copy, paste, share this around, make people AWARE of this, because nobody is! Of course, change if you're not Canadian, but like... Make it happen.
I wonder if (when?) we reach a tipping point when people massively start using it. Censoring porn like this looks like a very strong incentive.
Here's Margaret C. Anderson of "The Little Review", fined $100 and fingerprinted for flouting morality laws publishing Joyce's Ulysses in serialized form,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_C._Anderson
(Did you know the US Post Office used to burn books?)
I suspect there is far more church backing behind this organisation than feminist.
Please write to your representative:
Dear [Representative's Name],
I am writing to formally request an investigation into the activities of Collective Shout, an organization whose censorship-driven campaigns have caused measurable harm to artists, survivors, and vulnerable communities. Under the guise of protecting women and children, they have erased trauma narratives, suppressed creative expression, and bullied platforms into enacting broad, opaque bans. Their actions disproportionately affect marginalized voices and bypass democratic discourse in favor of ideological policing. There is growing concern that their influence is rooted more in religious moralism than evidence-based advocacy. I urge your office to examine their funding, methods, and societal impact with urgency and transparency.
Sincerely, [Your Full Name] [Your Address / Constituency]
Bring attention to the fact that payment processors are acting as active censorship of legal content, rather than neutral infrastructure. Emphasize that if they can censor legal content, anything could be next, including but not limited to political donations of a specific party.
It's either that Visa/Mastercard always want to censor porn, or they're pressured by government(s) to do so.
It is impractically slow, the user experience is too high a bar, it lacks meaningful consumer protections and it would not be able to handle the transaction volume. That it hasn't been able to address those problems in the last fifteen years calls the whole enterprise into question.
UX for websites was weak, mobile barely existed, https was not used, online payments were limited to certain websites, fraud was common and anyone with CC number could steal from your card.
Internet was not early and Crypto is now at that level. So think bigger and think about process.
It is both. The monopoly (or duopoly) is what enables the demands for censorship.
This is getting really old. We shouldn't be bound by the moral compass of payment processors on what we can use our own money for.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.
[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
We can fight back. Any legal and nonviolent response against the "collective shout" people is acceptable. Share your ideas.
If you run a platform and see any of them as users get rid of them. Delete their account, wipe their data, ban them. Don't deliver them pizza. Don't accept restaurant reservations in their name. They think they can police others, it goes both ways.
Realistic? At this point, no. But we should normalize this sort of response. Wannabe bullies should be scared of personal consequences.
This concern is virtually unheard of today, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they actually had a slight effect in the opposite direction: some of those youth getting trouble outside are now indoors playing harmless video games.