If a special interest group is acting in bad faith, then it is still incorrect and confusing to frame it as "they just don't like that thing". We should just be saying they are acting in bad faith, weaponizing arguments, etc. Why they are against something also is explainable, so ideally we could also state their real motivations (they are racist, fascist, reactionary, etc.)

The root cause looks more like financial oligopolies abuse Steam, because it's easier for them.

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Ganging up to enforce your political will is only bad when it's "the woke mob" but totally cool when it's my mob.

And idiots eat that shit up thinking fighting the woke mind virus is the real censorship, jumping straight into the arms of moralistic fascists like this.

I wish I knew how we failed. (I am "woke" but I disagree with mob tactics, and think it's done more harm than good, and there are a lot of disingenuous abusers of said ideology to boost their personal cred, chasing online clout over any substance. And plenty of the right-wingers will notice this, and "fight it" but fail to notice the same thing in their own side; because to them it's not about a principle it's about "punishing the bad guys" who don't like what I like).

"Cancel culture is bad akshully unless I'm the one cancelling you (c.f. bud light, etc...)"

> that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.

Thank baby jebus that this sort of thing never happens. Can you imagine if our government were to, for instance, threaten to deport our own citizens, publicly, for disagreeing with the government. That would be a fucking shit show! Thank you, first amendment!

I think the issue would be more that people don't accept this is censorship - the surface level here looks like companies negotiating who they will and won't do business with which is actually encouraged. If companies have a moral objection to something then they don't have to be involved. In theory stopping a flow of money takes a lot more than some crazy from Australia getting upset.

The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation.

[0] Magic The Gathering Online eXchange

Some people think porn is worse than censorship. Some of those people even feel that censorship is good, not damaging at all, and should be mandatory. I’m not one of those, though it does seem like there’s a possibility that some of the things we’re doing a lot of in society today, like porn and also social media and AI, are changing society in ways we don’t understand yet and don’t have control over. I don’t think it’s wrong to have fears about that.

Anyway, some people wouldn’t even call it censorship if private businesses disagree and decide not to do business, for any reason, even if it’s public pressure. Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? If not, why not? Be really careful with your answer, because taking away their freedom to choose is a type of censorship, and possibly a worse one because it would be a public/government censorship and not a private transaction censorship. Steam and Itch.io do still have the right to ship all these games, they’re choosing not to. They also still have the right to use other payment processors, and/or create their own.

I’d be willing to bet the payment processors in question would rather not be forced to cut off business, and do not care whether people pay for porn. They are simply trying to avoid public backlash and avoid being blacklisted by a large number of people who happen to believe porn is damaging.

They may both be damaging, but currently we have a lot more porn than censorship, so it looks like it's causing more damage. If we flip to having a lot more censorship we'll feel that damage more clearly. Or we won't, depending how successful the censorship is.

You can’t have a free market without censorship. It’s one or the other.

In some ways, porn is more damaging, isn't it? For example, there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry.

I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.

Or guns. Or payday loans. Or credit card debt. Or credit score. Etc.

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Tbh I lost track of what people thought "censorship" is, especially as a pejorative, many years ago. Not only is censorship good, but information is more free than it has been at any point in history. Just pirate the games ffs.

One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.

You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy.

Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die.

It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.

People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.

The real debate is which is worse to society, its existence or attempting to ban it.

Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea and if anything they have some of the worst gender toxicity.

> if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.

Sounds great, where do I sign?

Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.

You then have to ask, "In what way is it damaging?" Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation?

If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.

> one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.

This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.

Except having virtual sex and threatening to kill/hurt someone in real life are two different things.

> they are optimizing but under differing constraints

Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals.

In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.

Not to mention Facebook and YouTube.

yeah but that network benefits the rich and powerful people who orchestrate our society

> Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts?

Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.

They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules.

The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems.

I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.

Australia was a prison colony, after all.

Shh don’t bring facts in here.

The irony is that many if not most of the porn ARTISTS I have know or known of are women, in a subculture that skews male *heavily*.

And video games are just art.

So, women, drawing and writing stuff they like, being banned and losing an income stream.

I don’t think drawing or writing porn is exploitative at all.

"Protecting women" is an incoherent excuse for pressuring websites to pull romantic games that feature consensual, loving, respectful homosexual male-male relationships, with no women even present in the game.

The real motivations seemingly have nothing to do with protecting women, which appears to simply be a palatable facade for the true intention to suppress all depictions of sexuality, including the depictions that offer good-faith representation of historically marginalized groups.

> laims to be an Australian feminist organization

I'm genuinely curious to see how this plays out in the American partisan landscape.

They are however influenced by the American discourse soup of lies and talking points, in the same way that the NZ mosque shooter was.

Conservatives around the world talk to each other.

All this makes me think of war on drugs and other similar failed attempts at regulation, and of the article "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". The stronger the zeal to prevent porn the more expensive it gets to do so, and the more they cause legit companies like yours to close, the more profitable it gets to do it illegally. Just cranking on the symptoms without looking at the cause often has the opposite effect to the one desired, not that the people pushing for this probably care.

I'd suggest that foreign investors dictating domestic policy is a huge problem. For a core institution like banking there ought to be a law forbidding them from discriminating against otherwise legal activities except in the case that a different law permits or requires them to do so. That would also absolve them of any PR concerns because "everyone has to; legally speaking we don't have any choice".

What aggravates me the most about stories like yours is that banks are effectively public utilities. They are regulated as such, are broadly considered too big to fail (especially in Canada - believe it or not at a domestic scale, their banks are far more important than any US bank is to the American economy) and thus receive an implicit tax payer underwriting, yet are able to act like this when you're not doing any illegal activities.

I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.

Thank you for your story. I like to try to imagine what conversations happened behind the scenes. The fact that the suddenly hauled you into the branch, and still decided that you were too "risky" (clearly a made-up excuse) says a lot. Whatever force is behind this is powerful and it's not even remotely explained by a coalition of angry activists.

> we fell outside of their "risk appetite."

If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)

And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.

Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?

And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to

1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and

2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?

While I'm not big on crypto. This is, in part, why Bitcoin exists and why it was created.

I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the right answer due to the 51% attack vulnerability. And a network of miners where everyone can join in principle sounds pretty yolo, but it seems the be the one of the few organizations that exist outside of government? At least, it does in principle, the fact that the whole crypto industry is a mix of scams and recreation of the actual finance industry isn't helping that case, but a part of it definitely still exists outside of it.

We need more digital systems that exist outside of governments. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but stuff like this is egregious.

I wonder what our view on all of this is in a 1000 years. People in the future probably look at us in disbelief with how we practiced our ethics.

Two things can be true at the same time, however. The US has a strong stance on freedom, which means that they'll allow most things even if they're against them. Specially when that thing generates income. But that doesn't mean they're not also a puritanical society. They just take more of a "shame you" approach than a "you're forbidden" one to force you not to do stuff.

I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.

I'm amazed that producing porn in Iceland can lead to gaol. Can you expand upon that further?

Well not equivalent, they taught their women to read after all.

But let's be real here, they were a bunch of jerks. There's a reason it took no time flat for Rhode Island to exist.

Yes that’s exactly what they were and are today

When I finally got around to reading Fukuyama, I had an "aha" moment where I realized... oh, this is how liberal democracy thinks. They think they've perfected society and everyone agrees with them, except for a few weird superstitious cults.

Then I realized that it was all wrong, countries accept western liberal democracy only as long as the free aid keeps flowing. And the libdems were in for a rude awakening if they ever ran out of kibble.

In England such laws were lobbied by NCH (7000 staff), so it's not necessarily opinion of people, especially in places like Brazil.

Several of the BRICS (& other "global south" / non-neoliberal / non-western) countries also imprison journalists and nonviolent political opposition groups, and some even have the death penalty for minor cannabis possession. "Everyone else does things this way" isn't a legitimate justification.

The groups behind are two US companies. Some random group of weirdos from Australia are just a good excuse, at best.

Also penicillin, trains, and the Haber-Bosch process.

>Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.

So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.

Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.

I'll take the hard stance on this. I don't see how Sex is anymore harmful, addicting, or dangerous as any other number of socialties. Including Alcohol, fast food, gambling, and simply getting to into any given hobby (be it video games or playing guitar).

A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.

> you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom

I'd actually hypothesise that if you locked three sets of teenage boys in rooms, one with only porn games, one with only social media and one with only sitcoms, that the first group would likely emerge the healthiest of the three. I'm basing this on my bias towards activity and that nobody seems to have bothered with actually doing research on porn games, the organisation pushing for these bans included [1], instead proxying research on porn as a whole for this specific category.

[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/research

I'd have an easier time with this argument if it got equally applied to violence. It's ridiculous that exposure to sex is considered worse than to violence.

And I've seen video games cause people to destroy their lives.

What else should we arbitrarily ban based on this criteria? It doesn't seem to hold up to much scrutiny.

Not sure if you are talking about religion or porn games..

IMHO the creation of organized religion has led to far more injustice in the world than a stray nipple (outside of Helen of Troy).

I really hope you don't like alcohol or any kind of spice because historically those are coming next

Thing is, with things like these, they only need one or a handful of cases. With everything, there is always a handful of cases - porn addicts, gambling addicts, revenge porn victims, trans women in women's spaces and sports, etc. The fundamentalists and right-wing media will hyperfocus and signal boost these statistically insignificant cases to push their own agenda.

For them, n=1 is enough evidence. For their moral compass or larger scale goals, n=1 is one too many.

There will always be some people - teenagers or otherwise - that develop mental health issues from e.g. porn games. But there's people developing mental health issues from Farmville or ChatGPT supposedly turning sentient and sharing the infinite Truth of the universe too. Somehow those aren't an issue.

It's not about preventing mental health issues. It's not about protecting women.

This is not the correct way.

If cigarette was banned from the beginning, we would still see people getting mad without much evidence.

The truth is the evidence is coming half a century after when everyone got cancer.

Precautionary principle should always prevail.

That's why we just don't go full GMO, and you would still not wait for any proof that "it's harmless".

You also don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless.

Additionally, without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette).

TL;DR: You actually need a proof, but it's a proof that it's harmless and not the other way around.

That's your line, but others have other lines; violence in games was a big thing twenty years ago, and some pearl clutchers tried to have all violent video games banned.

Thing is though, if violent video games caused people to become violent, Columbine wouldn't have been a rare incident.

But it's a difficult one. People play video games but for most people it doesn't change their moral compass; it doesn't make them think ripping out people's spines is normal or acceptable. It desensitizes them to a point I suppose.

Does porn, porn games or simulated CSAM make people normalize objectification and violence towards people and children? I can't answer that, and I don't know if there's been any studies towards especially CSAM since it's such a taboo. N=1, but 20+ years of porn on occasion hasn't turned me into some rampant sex addict.

The problem with simulated CSAM is that there is a risk that the viewer develops a fetish for such repulsive practices. It has then destructive consequences for the viewer and, should he try to perform it, his victims.

Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.

The assumption they're making is "interactive incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior".

In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.

How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?

> Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives.

The pragmatics of activism prove contrary to this ideal. The reality is that this is a failed argument and it will continue to fail regardless of how often it's repeated. I hate to say it, but the only way to counter is to win at the activism game rather than complain about the rules.

Your propositions are contradictory. If "society" decides to harm itself, and I'm part of it, I'll have to suffer from the choices taken by others.

The advocate group who do this believe they are exercising the will of God and do not need to mess with things like laws

One of the example games that was banned was “daddy twins incest BDSM” and similar titles.

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They're Australian. So no.. not really. There's no freedom of speech in Australia.

Making sure I get this straight. You're saying that if you shared that believe, you would go out in search of evidence to prove it? I hate to break the news, but if we read the literature published by members of Collective Shout, they have in fact done this. The evidence they have supports their claims. Let's be clear, the evidence they have is independent of the veracity of the claims, but they have done with you suggested. However, it had the effect of confirming their beliefs.

I hate to ask the question again, but if you believed the same thing and felt like you empirically proved it, how would you behave?

You say that, but history shows that people are much more likely to move based on what _feels_ true to them.

Sorry no. No amount of "market power" should compel you to engage in behavior you find immoral.

Also "credit card companies" are not a monopoly for any reasonable definition of monopoly. There are four major ones. That's like saying Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Tesla are a monopoly.

And if you do, your monopoly gets broken apart.

I think it comes down to how much society is an entity in its own right vs just a collection of individuals. Proportionaly, saving society may be worth restricting the absolute freedom of individuals to some degree.

But not because I think people who don’t like nazi content should simply not buy nazi content. It’s because I don’t trust the government to ban any kind of political speech.

He is a lawyer in the US and most lawyers in the US oppose the banning of Nazi content, which is why Nazi content is not and has never been unlawful in the US.

any sex questions led to non answers.

the point was that content is blocked almost by default nowadays

It was llama-7b

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>But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing?

The issue is bigger then that. It's weird though. First for context, when population grows, that growth is compounding usually. There's an acceleration.

Now that the population is in freefall, the freefall is also compounding. Like there are structural impacts that will effect most of the asian countries (where this problem will hit first) that will effect them economically.