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themachinestops @lemmy.dbzer0.com

3d ago

Itch.io deindexes NSFW games after becoming the latest target of skittish credit card companies and anti-porn group Collective Shout, catching an award-winning indie and more in the crossfire

www.pcgamer.com

Itch.io deindexes NSFW games after becoming the latest target of skittish credit card companies and anti-porn group Collective Shout, catching an award-winning indie and more in the crossfire

Few days ago: https://www.thegamer.com/steam-removes-adult-games-because-of-collective-shout-feminist-anti-abortion-group/

60 comments

O dunno... Why does itch just switch to other payment options?
Meanwhile known pedo and rapist Donald Trump is President of USA. Make it make sense.
- This wasn't America this time. Blame the Aussies.
  
  The payment companies which gave way were American.
  
  Lol Lemmy can’t go one comment thread without mentioning the U.S.
- Make America Make Sense Again
The problem with leaving it in the hands of corporations... Is that some are run by pieces of shit with very warped ideas
What they allow might be worse than what they ban
Payment processors shouldn't have this kind of power, it's insane.
- It's not the first time this has happened. That first time set the precedent that the payment processors have a vast amount of power over the transactions that can occur on the internet. There wasn't a realistic way to push back on it and so they will continue to expand this for... whatever reason they are actually giving. IDK - I would have thought that legitimate adult content payments would be quite lucrative for these processors to handle, it's not like they're beholden to advertising like YouTube is and their insane content policies.
  I mean, I cannot find a valid reasoning for it apart from the vague term "high risk" which explains nothing. This is the best I've found so far:
  The adult industry is no stranger to regulation and stigma. But in recent years, payment processor censorship has emerged as a subtler, more insidious threat. Companies like Mastercard, Visa, and their underlying bank networks often issue sweeping mandates, particularly regarding “high-risk” content. These decisions typically happen behind closed doors, without public accountability or stakeholder input from the communities affected.
  (bold emphasis mine)
  To reduce perceived brand risk or avoid legal ambiguity, even when the content is legal.
  TBH they are making themselves look pretty shitty as a brand by moving sex work and other adult content back to the darker deeper recesses where it becomes less accessible and harder to regulate properly in terms of safety and legality.
a reminder that collective karens bragged about doing all of this based on just 1000 phone calls.
- I'm gonna do 2000 calls demanding more boobies in video games
- Nobody wants to pick up the phone
Ahh, yes
A collective against the objectification of women, which somehow has no Problem with the current system in america, pornography itself, and dosent advocate for anything except banning Video games.
- A collective that defends Cuties...
  
  What's wrong with liking cuties?
  Sometimes you don't feel like eating a large orange.
- I would imagine they're more concerned with Australia than America, since that's where they live.
- Oh I'm sure they have lots of problems with the system in America. They're going after anything they think they've even got a chance of affecting. Their website also says they're trying to ban porn on X.
  
  wait, a few australians can ban porn games to the entire world?
Fuck that. They can collectively shout into this asshole. All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.
- I say that we must take a revenge... I am very angry for the freedom of expression and respect to individual rights. It is simply a nazi organization disguised in Christian clothes.
  
  You're making it sound like this isn't straight up Christianity.
  For this one Christianity is to blame, not Nazis.
  
  Each sect of the insane Yahweh-cult has a way bigger body count than the Nazis ever accomplished.
- All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.
  My guess --- and I haven't seen anything where payment processors have released any details of what Collective Shout did -- is that Collective Shout didn't just call Visa and say "we don't like this". They probably found some sort of law, maybe in Australia, that processing payments for these violates, and had their lawyer send a nastygram to payment processors about it. The payment processors sent their own warning letters to the merchants.
  Like, the reason payment processors are useful as leverage for countries is because countries can put pressure on them, because payment processors do business all over and are gonna be skittish about violating laws in a bunch of countries, can get cut off from doing business there. And any one retailer just isn't big enough for them to be worried about cutting off compared to getting cut off from a country.
  If you want to put pressure on payment processors, I'd guess that you're probably going to have to have some kind of law to threaten payment processor with on the grounds that processing payments to Steam and itch.io and other retailers and so forth when they are deindexing games results in some kind of legal violation. I'm not saying that that's impossible, but it's probably harder to do than it is for Collective Shout is to pull their shennanigans.
  I'd also note that it is not at all clear that the present situation is the final state of affairs. That is, what my guess is that Valve and itch.io and so forth did is that they got their nastygram from the payment processors, then went to talk to their own lawyers. It's entirely possible that after those lawyers have a look at it, they're going to say "you can't sell Game X in Country Z", and Valve will just restrict the regions where they sell those games. That is, I would not be surprised if the scope on this restriction narrows, and Valve and itch.io are just playing it safe until they're confident as of their legal position.
  There are also quite likely legal workarounds of varying efficacy that publishers can do in various jurisdictions, and they're probably going to be looking for some kind of consensus on what can be done where. Some jurisdictions have restrictions on incest pornography, for example. There are games --- Sexbot on Steam comes to mind --- that were clearly written with the intent of being incest pornography, have invisible-to-the-user variables that reference interfamily relationships. However, what the user sees is that they simply permit the user to specify the relationship between game characters. If the user specifies an incestual one, then that'll be how the game plays --- but it's the user providing that input; there's no user-visible incest content provided by the publisher.
  Other games on Steam require patches to add content that are provided by the publisher via a non-Steam route but not provided by Steam or similar --- just useless unless someone has a copy of the game from Steam or similar --- to add content that may be legally questionable; that cuts Steam out of the loop, so Steam won't care. My guess is that the situation is going to be somewhat in flux as various countries hammer out the fine points of what they restrict and publishers figure out how to adapt to the situation.
  And then there are games, like Skyrim, which have third-party mods providing pornographic content to add to games that I am very sure is not legal in many jurisdictions, which are provided by non-Steam sites that don't do business in the jurisdiction in question and thus don't care about legal nastygrams from that jurisdiction. The US legal system will not enforce foreign rulings against an American website that doesn't meet a number of criteria for being considered to be doing business abroad, for example, because it doesn't consider that website to be doing business in that country and thus the foreign country to have jurisdiction. The foreign country can block its users from having access to that website in the hosting country if it wants, but thus far, Australia is not doing that...and if we go down the "blocking internationally" route, then the next step for people who want to distribute content is probably going to be things like VPNs, Tor, and Hyphanet.
  
  Also, relevant:
  https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/
  The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
  --- John Gilmore, founding member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
  In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn’t like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don’t redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
  --- also Gilmore
  Gilmore also stated that the denotation of the saying has broadened over time:
  The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
  I am generally bearish on the future of Internet censorship. The Internet helps facilitate some things that one might not like, extensive profiling. But it also is very good at distributing information, and I think that in general, the availability of information in the future will be greater than in the past. I do not think it likely that our future will, on the balance, be more-censorious than our past.
- We do have this petition for now link
  
  That's fine, but what if they say
- Lol what are you people ever going to do.
  You can't just wait until you're mad to do something. It takes years building networks and getting everyone on board.
  Totally doable if people had a bit of common sense but the reason why the right are kicking ass and doing this stuff is because people now are pretty brain washed and can't figure out how most of the stuff that they fight for are also the things they need to stop in order to prevent this stuff. But because they will never figure that out, you'll never get anywhere.
  Just an example, we should have recognized the same tools that let content creators get paid was going to be the same tools that politicians would use to manipulate and lie to people popularising fascism again. Thanks PewDiePie
  
  Tbh, I didnt know this group exists until this happened. So sometimes an event happens, you get mad, and you do something about it. Thats usually how most people come to action.
I mean, getting rid of anything that even acknowledges the existence of queer folk is absolutely on brand for Christofascists.
- Christian fanatics hate anything sex-related regardless of gays.
  
  They do love them some pedophilia, don’t forget.
  
  It's okay if their pastors touch little boys though! /s
Reports on Twitter that they are deleting previously purchased games from users’ libraries as well.
- That sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Great great so what's the bloody point in itch now then?
Christ card companies are evil. We need alternatives
- Christ card
  Ironically, yes, at this point
Always is the same thing. Why USA decides in other countries? Is Itchio international, right?
- Collective Shout is Australian
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collective_Shout
- This is actually an example of the opposite. Here, it's a Christian activist group in a non-US country impacting customers in --- among other places --- the US.
  
  Oh thank you and excuse me, my bad
- Collective Shout is Australian.
  And banks are bigger than nations at this point, what they say goes.
Hm? From a sample size of 10, 10 are still online on itch.io.
- Deindexed/delisted, not removed.
  Try putting the names into the search field on the site, or browsing for them in the categories they are in.
  
  Did that ever work anyway? For the last few years i only find porn games via duckduckgo and "You might also be interested in".
  edit: right, respective tags list no porn games anymore.

60 comments