A couple years ago a bunch of credit card companies suddenly decided they wanted to dictate how people are allowed to spend their money. They issued warnings to game stores to delist all nsfw games or else. The credit card companies have an amazing racket going on and I struggle to believe they suddenly care about some morality over profit. Generally all they care about is that people spend as much money as possible. I also seem to recall them being notably silent on the much larger revenue streams coming from adult videos. So what was their actual purpose in these seemingly random strikes?

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[–] 41 points 1 day ago (7 children)

In a nutshell, an Australian anti-porn group put pressure on the credit card networks Visa and MasterCard, which process the grand majority of card payments worldwide, for both credit and debit cards.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/04/visa-mastercard-adult-purchases/

What remains unclear to me is why a somewhat obscure lobbying group was able to bring two American multinationals to heel. But in any case, I am of the opinion that this group sits well within the range of right wing reactionary, in spite of dressing itself up in the cloak of feminism. The group's Wikipedia page lists the founder as a conservative and anti-abortion activist.

As usual, Wilhoit's Law is instructive: this despicable group seeks to denigrate sex work, depictions of sex, and the legal market for sex art and anything arbitrarily similar, by denying this group of people from the financial system and from earning an income, and then leave them without any support or even a suggestion as to what these people should do instead. This is the "bind but does not protect" part of Wilhoit's Law. No different than American conservatives and TERFs that try to drive a wedge to isolate trans people, this group targets sex workers and they cannot be allowed to continue unabated.

The legal solutions are as straightforward as they seem: require that interstate financial services can only charge a fee if transactions are routed and processed neutrally. The economic solution would be the expansion of existing national payment clearing networks (ie ACH in the USA) to also process card payments as an alternative to the duopoly.

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    I know that these groups exist. What I don't understand is, how do they get such successful companies to shoot themselves in the foot like this? Did they offer more money than the providers expected to make from the game revenue? What about the value of all the bad will they bought themselves for overstepping like that?

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  • Money. It's always money.

    Right wing nuts tend to yell quite loudly, and convinced executives (also right wing nuts) that their bottom line will take a hit if they don't comply.

    And Bad will from who? Dirty poors who have no choice but to use one of three options? They don't give a shit if the poors like them or not.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    They're very connected and joined up.

    The fascists are much more interconnected: there's only a Thailand based crypto billionaire link to travel between the Deputy President of the USA and TRADITIONAL VALUES organised crime in Spain and North Africa.

    Misogynistic far right groups in Australia get funding and guest appearances from nutters from Sweden and The Netherlands.

    We don't realise how much of a literal conspiracy to tear down our society is currently taking place.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    there’s only a Thailand based crypto billionaire link to travel between the Deputy President of the USA and TRADITIONAL VALUES organised crime in Spain and North Africa.

    sentence doesn't really make sense to me, is "TRADITIONAL VALUES" an organised crime group in the mediterranean?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    When examining why corporations toe the line for conservative endeavors, it's less useful to examine the financial aspect and more useful to look at the power dynamic. Oligopolies are like dictators, in that they need to occasionally perform a tour de force, as a way to suppress the exercise of soft power. That is to say, scare the opposition to fragment them and to disorganize them, so they don't get any bright ideas. Inspirational Skeletor warns precisely of this: https://mas.to/@skeletor/117191580571928662

    What soft power would Visa and MasterCard have been afraid of? For context, in the USA, debit card transactions are capped at a fixed rate per transaction, whereas credit card transactions can have both a per-transaction and a percentage. Accordingly, the card networks would very much like to be processing more credit transactions than debit. But this revenue comes off the backs of consumers, in the form of higher prices because Visa's fee is rolled in, even for people paying with cash. Enough clamoring about cost of living could easily put the card processors front-and-center before a Congressional committee, a spotlight they don't really want.

    Such furore would have to be driven from both consumers and businesses complaining about the extortionate practices by the card processors. Which is why the card networks hide in one domain and attack in another: deflect to greedy banks that are charging high interest directly to consumers (thus ignoring the cut that Visa/MasterCard take), and then clamp down on one segment of businesses, as a sign that they can be vicious if any other businesses start blabbing to the feds.

    The card networks assume (unfortunately correctly) that small and medium businesses will not band together to overcome these monopolistic moves. And the largest businesses that process the most card transactions (eg Amazon, Walmart) are so entrenched in accepting card payments that they already negotiate deals directly with Visa and MasterCard, so they're not a risk.

    In the end, this could be viewed as a conservative cause that happens to overlap with a need for a naked show of force. And in that endeavor, they've succeeded: every platform that takes cards is on heightened alert, and that's a real chilling effect on the marketplace. What Visa and MasterCard can do to one business segment, they can do to any other. But I guess for now, most businesses are just pricing that in as yet another "cost of doing business".

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    How did they have enough money to make multiple credit card agencies comply? This seems like the most colossal waste of cash for a pressure group, ever, since it didn't amount to anything. Did the CC companies refund them when they failed to get it done?

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