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Comment by misterbishop | Hacker News Reader

It is alarming for credit card companies to take on a politically censorious role that supersedes legal activity. This really kicked off in 2021 when MasterCard started imposing restrictive rules on sex sites like OnlyFans. The ACLU has a campaign against it: https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercards-new-p...

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I strongly disagree about this being a recent thing, this has been happening for decades at this point.

2015 article that starts "For nearly a decade, PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa/MasterCard, and now Square, have systematically denied or closed accounts of small businesses, artists and independent contractors whose business happens to be about sex."

https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-02-paypal-square-and-big-ba...

From 2017 .. (Fetlife, a fetish Platform)

Last Tuesday we got a notice that one of our merchant accounts was shutting us down. One of the card companies contacted them directly and told the bank to stop processing for us. The bank asked for more information, but the only thing they could get from the card company was that part of it had to do with "blood, needles, and vampirism."

https://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9

https://mascherari.press/financial-censorship-when-banks-dec...

Yeah, it's a problem because there aren't really realistic alternatives, and starting an alternative payment processor would be impractically difficult.

Feels like we really need something like India's UPI that doesn't have a central company imposing beyond-the-law level rules.

OnlyFans did manage to figure it out though. Maybe this is an opportunity for them to start a gaming division.

Or a credit card processor.

The thing they figured out was "people can fight back and the credit cards will back down". Onlyfans is a lot of people's income, so they will naturally fight harder than a consumer market like games to keep the lights on.

They found another processor, CCBill. That's what they figured out.

Even before that, after Charlottesville, these payment processors were banning far-right wing people such as Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes. Same thing, really. Pressure from outside groups.

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