Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies

This isn't a dupe. It's important that this is getting reported in the news, because the last news outlet to report on this caved to pressure themselves and took the story down.

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Fuck no. I get enough of that "YOU MUST DONATE IMMEDIATELY OR THE WORLD WILL EXPLODE" shit 24/7 already.

> If they don't want people making money off of this stuff on their platform

They don't care if people make money off anything as long as they get a slice. This is strictly about cutting costs. As said elsewhere, adult content has much higher rates of "fraud" (both actual fraud, and what people lie saying is fraud when the Mrs. sees it on the statement) especially charge-backs. The companies don't want to deal with the charge-backs so they're pressuring platforms to remove the content from sale.

None of this is about morality, sex workers, sex work or any of the other THINK OF THE CHILDWEN nonsense. It's just cheap fuck corpos trying to weasel out of as many of the expenses of their businesses as they can fucking manage, because fuck knows VISA is really hurting for money these days.

This shit is exhausting.

It isn't getting side-tracked, the schemes are the main point. If memory serves well, a recent study showed that roughly 85% of all shitcoins that shot up showed clear signs of manipulation. That said, I agree with you, private companies should have no business saying who I can transact with.

My best guess on this is that it's as simple as 1) most people are not Apple users (harder to reach critical mass online), 2) and most Apple users are aware of other ways to access things if that's what they want, while the ones who don't want that buy Apple in part because of the more walled garden aspects. This is purely speculative though, so it would be interesting to see surveys or other perspectives.

The difference here is that itch.io and steam's hands were forced by their payment processors. This isn't like Apple deciding what Apple will and won't sell. This is Mastercard decided what Steam and Itch.io will and won't sell.

I think it's a fair question.

While I disagree with Apple's stance, I think there's a valid argument that Apple is running a platform that you can choose to utilize or engage with or not - similar to how Apple could refuse to serve or trespass someone from one of their physical stores, the platform is self contained and clearly owned by a single entity.

The fundamental difference with a payment processor is that they control financial transactions between entities that have no relation to Visa/MC. They facilitate money being moved quickly and efficiently between accounts for goods or services, and they have no business inserting themselves into the content of the transaction.

I think it's also worth pointing out that the main reason I think that it's inappropriate for payment processors to decide on what content can be paid for with their systems is that it's a closed ecosystem - you can't just set up your own payment processor (though some governments are attempting to do so already), so there's a real risk of a small number of companies controlling what can and can't be bought digitally - that includes not just content related to sex, but also potentially content that is violent, or political.

If we're going to have a very limited group of payment processors, then they need to be completely neutral - or we need to make it possible (or at least easier) for alternative payment processors to spin up operations and work within the global financial network. Considering the technical and regulatory difficulty of that second option I think the former is the better path.

Not sure if this is part of their reasoning but I can think of a few scenarios that seem plausible to me at least:

- being blamed for facilitating, and/or having to monitor for, illegal content like reverge porn and CSAM

- reputation damage from being associated with content they (and others) morally object to

- history of increased risk of chargebacks and fraud from adult sites

- adult actors have explicitly petitioned sites and processors to ban unverified content uploads, and they would rather ban everything than play police

It's a lot more disruptive, and psychologically much more annoying, to lose something, than to never have it at all.

I do think it's a shame that Apple controls the App Store so tightly -- it's not just NSFW stuff that's banned, it's all kinds of stuff for all sorts of reasons, e.g.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/30/apple-blo...

If the web were invented today, it'd be strangled in the crib, since Apple would never approve the browser app.

> why is censorship of sexual content by Apple largely ignored,

It shouldn't be ignored, and perhaps Apple should revise this position in light of all the attacks already on the Apple app store. Except that perhaps instead this is actually earning them some points among some of these attackers, who knows?

I would say the reason is Apple app store was irrelevant initially - from a market share point of view. And they had this policy from the start. Now Apple is very relevant in market share and should change that policy to reflect that.

The same reason they make it difficult to use credit cards for gambling.

Merchants that sell porn, gambling, and other vice have higher rates of fraud. If they allow them to accept credit cards at all, they charge them much higher merchant’s fees to do so.

There's an unwritten compact between American politicians and American payment providers.

The payment providers get to charge a 2% fee on all transactions, without any pesky questions about antitrust law.

In exchange, when politicians ask nicely, the payment provider cuts folks Wikileaks, out of the financial system without any pesky questions about the first amendment.

I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.

So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.

Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.

I suspect they really couldn't give a shit either way but porn is not a remotely significant proportion of their profit and it's just easier to cave to the "think of the children" busy bodies. They'd like to keep their sweet gig out of the news as much as possible and standing up to that noise attracts attention for little gain.