SV is just going with where the $$$ are at and complying with the law. They don't give a shit about anything else as long as stonkz go up.
Eroticism being a core component of art going all the way back to literal cave paintings, I am sometimes frustrated at the prudishness of the platforms we use in the contemporary age.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34059662-Uncensor-Pat...
Brands don’t want ads next to porn. That seems like the core of the issue here.
There are actually strong, non-"puritanical" reasons for this. An oft-cited anecdote is the spouse or parent that finds mysterious porn charges on the credit card. Sex-related services carry an extremely high rate of charge backs. The transaction risks are much, much higher than other categories of goods and services.
So while Visa could simply charge more, there are numerous other headwinds that make this tricky. Political will, payments risks, brand risk, and deep rooted family/social stigmas that fuel the rest. They kind of all have to be dealt with at once for this to start making economic and business sense.
For proponents, it's going to take generational change to shake all of these network effects out. The first step of which is consumers (Gen Z?) publicly admitting that they see no harm in sex-related commerce and to begin showing this in their purchasing behaviors.
John Oliver recently covered this as it relates to sex work. Stigmas and dispositions are changing, but it's slow. A lot of signalling has to happen to a lot of people.
Bitcoin solves this.
That's why you see platforms like Patreon crack down on adult content. The banking industry notices, the payment processors and merchant banks sit up and threaten to close the service's accounts, and the service instead capitulates and cranks up their rules around adult content.
They'll bray about fraud rates being high for adult content, but if high fraud rates were a concern, you'd think they wouldn't give the gym industry (for example) free license in credit card processing and ECH transfers...they're prolific scam artists. Ditto for all the as-seen-on-tv crap with outrageous shipping and "handling" fees and so on.
If the banking industry figures out that you're an adult media actor, you stand a good chance of getting banned from the entire system. What possible argument for fraud is there in that case? None. "Fraud" is just a cover for Christian moral code enforcement.
Edit: okay, maybe it's not the Christian Right influencing US banks rejecting porn stars for accounts for "moral" reasons. Must be the sentient Big Mouth Billy Bass units.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Ex...
It’s clear for all that opening the floodgates of porn into social media and platforms that both adults and _children_ use will cause this particular category of content to dominate the entire space. It’ll also lock out any children from most social media whose parents refuse (and rightfully so) to let them see porn. Not that this effort will always be successful, because children who don’t know any better will cave in to peer pressure from friends. This dystopia where what’s essentially filmed prostitution finds its way into almost all spaces in society, including children’s lives, is what the very powerful liberal wants.
Shouldn’t you be more concerned about the increase in women and girls forced to sell their dignity to survive? Is the suffering of people not more important to you than your cummies?
That’s why I said “opening the floodgates”. Yes of course there is porn in social media already. It’s still a fact today that you wont see porn on Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/etc. unless you look for it. If you remove restrictions and push porn just like any other content, then all these platforms will essentially degrade into hybrid porn sites because this particular type of content will dominate the entire space. Some people here are upset that it’s even kept in check at all. SV are being called puritans for having some common sense and not letting this filth dominate their sites.
> or "unsafe for children."
Some people would argue that though.
Put down the persecution complex.
[1]: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/01/04/faith-on-the-hill-2021/
Try it with “outspoken Muslim” or “outspoke Jew” and see if it has the same ring.
I'm genuinely uncertain what point you're trying to make.
You should try and see how many political leaders are Jewish and then compare that to the % of the population that are Jewish. Comes across as kinda shitty behavior no?
Plenty of government leaders are religious but that doesn't mean they rule according to those beliefs. To make the assumption they do is just a weak attempt to smear people based on their personal beliefs.
Feel free to provide some actual substantive backing of that (correlation v causation is so much fun), otherwise you sound like another Xtian carnie with a very dull ax to grind.
Even the admittedly anti-Christian Wikipedia can help you out here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce
Yep, 12 years of Jesuit / Marianist education taught me exactly that your kind of religiosity...is trash.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vhxVIKmKmlo
It’s disturbing.
What’s the end game of sexual liberation? Who knows.
What they are doing is not being held hostage to same said Christians from force-feeding it to everyone else. If you like it, fine. Have a biblically awesome life.
"This dystopia where what’s essentially filmed prostitution finds its way into almost all spaces in society, including children’s lives, is what the very powerful liberal wants." As opposed to the Handsmaid Tale/Stepford/Leviathan-like dystopia every Abrahamic hardliner wants.
Yeah, Hard pass on evangelical claptrap.
The amount of pure porn games that clutters some lists makes me doubt this very much.
It's been a long time since they blocked any other legal porn.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-mastercards-new-porn-rules...
CESTA/FOSTA definitely plays a part, but why would mastercard wait until 2021 to make these new rules?
Here's a deeper journal article exploring the same territory from 2014 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5305/amerjintelaw.108.4.0609...
Until that changes, we will constantly have to defend our industries and personal lives from the intrusion of the church.
It's really curious.
That describes most Christians, honestly. Trump identifies as a "non-denominational" Christian (as opposed to atheist or any other religion), employs Christian symbols in his politics (likely not in good faith, but again that isn't unusual) and has strong support within the Evangelical Christian community, who clearly find something within him that resonates with their faith.
In your experience, perhaps, but it's exceptionally dishonest, and frankly hateful, to say that describes "most Christians." I know more Christians than non-Christians and the behavior discussed here describes maybe 4 of them (out of about a thousand).
That'd be like someone saying "most LGBTQ are pedophiles." I'm sure it's true in some cases, but is highly unlikely to be true for "most".
Honestly, I get tired of everyone using hyperbole so flippantly. It gives your opponents easy targets to completely discredit the point you were making. So, just...stop.
It isn't hate, it is experience, and it's something a lot of Christians would admit about themselves. Even the Bible says most followers of God are hypocrites who fall short of their own principles.
I'm not getting into a religious argument here, but you shouldn't talk about giving your opponents an easy target. Christianity is one hell of a glass house to live in. Maybe instead of attacking me, you should consider why so many Christians believe so deeply and fervently in a man of such excremental moral character like Donald Trump. You can't simply dismiss the question by claiming none of them are real Christians. Take the plank out of your own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's, as the man said.
That's not remotely close to being true. The US has among the strongest separation of church and state laws of any nations and they're well protected decade after decade. If the US were actually a light theocracy, the conservative majority Supreme Court would wreck the US promptly with crazy theocratic changes that would make Iran blush. It was the first nation in history to explicitly codify such a strict separation in its constitution as well. Those separation lines have, on average, been made stronger over time.
You can dislike the Christian culture that exists in the US, certainly. It hasn't made any consequential inroads into state in two centuries, in fact the opposite is the case: Christianity (and religion more broadly) has been pushed back out of US life in numerous significant ways (and properly so; eg: gay marriage, abortion rights, making it illegal to discriminate based on religion, acceptance and ease of divorce, sunday alcohol sales & business activity, drug legalization laws, press dominance and positioning (the press is ~95% left-leaning now and very much not religious in nature)). That there have been occasional set-backs in things such as abortion rights, doesn't nullify the overall point. Religion has been losing political and cultural ground in the US for a long time and that's likely to continue. Religion used to dominate US life and heavily factor into US politics, as recently as the post war 1950s-1980s era, and that is no longer the case (the left for example is drastically less religious than it was just 40-50 years ago).
The fact that the vast majority of politicians that get elected talk about doing what they do in the name of God more than shows that.
Or try growing up in a small country town as one of the only families that don't attend church service. Until you've been suspended public school for "spreading Satanism" because you said church sounds boring, you haven't experienced the same America as the rest of us.
The Religious Right? Nicholas Kristof of the NYT, is probably the most powerful individual sex censor - the guy singlehandedly got Pornhub financially de-platformed!
I'm not denying that being a porn company made it easier, but let's not compare what was going on there to what goes on in the private messages of nearly any website large enough.
Not seeing that there is a difference between content intended for public distribution and content that is not is arguably part of the problem here. (Or, even worse, considering someone having sex and someone being raped to be morally equivalent.)
Meta/FB/Insta/Whatsapp/Messenger were & are responsible for facilitating significantly more of all of the above terrible things. Of course the problem was sex and that they are a vice company, it made them an easy moral outrage target.
Even before FOSTA/SESTA companies like Facebook, CloudFlare, and PayPal have fought far, far harder for the rights of far-right groups than they even have for sex workers.
The universe of people who “dislike sexual imagery” is a lot broader than the (evangelical Christian) “religious right.” Left-leaning Black and Hispanic Christians, non-Christian socially conservative groups (Muslims, Hindus), non-religious socially conservative groups (many East Asians), and also sex-negative feminists have similar attitudes toward sex and sex work.
That’s why these laws have broad bipartisan support. “Sex work is work” is an area where (generally sex-positive) progressives and libertarians agree, but those two groups combined are still a pretty small constituency.
Is that even a bad thing though? Who’s to say the Scandinavians aren’t messing their kids up with all the nudity? Who’s to say the Americans aren’t messing their kids up with their Puritanical approach to sex? I feel that nobody knows the answer right now and we’re most comfortable not changing anything until we do.
But at least our kids are safe from nipples.
The main culprit appears to be the prudishness and conservatism of large companies, somewhat big tech companies but especially credit card companies and payment processors.
Yak about sex worker empowerment, but companies like Craigslist made themselves unwitting business partners with pimps and other low rent types.