Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups?

Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions.

Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories.

There's no actual evidence in the article that payment processors made them do it. They actually banned pornography long before this. They just updated the terms to clarify what counted as pornography.

> Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it.

> Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

They're not? They would have the same high risk accounts and include the higher fees into their business model.

For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases. High enough that it messes with the credit and counterparty risk modeling that processors use. You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.

Theoretically, they could just split out "explicit" vs "normal" risk categories, but there's two top problems there: 1) it's just fundamentally a smaller-yet-way-more-annoying category than the rest of their payments, and 2) tons of your partners (banks etc etc) have blanket-banned for all of the above reasons.

So... here we are.

While the executives have their own biases, suing Visa/Mastercard, and damaging their reputation, became a strategy to attack pornography in-general:

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/suing-visa-to-shut-down-por... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-...

And yes, naturally this is backed by the Christian right. They've tried to spin/redefine the whole anti-porn thing as anti-child trafficking, as that has more support.

The payment processors say the reason is high fraud and charge-back rates in those industries that make it unprofitable to service. I don't know if this is true or an excuse. Either way, its an excellent reason why this critical infrastructure shouldn't be under corporate control.

I don't think it's so much a religious lobbying thing as it is a consent and liability thing.

If you're a processor (payment or otherwise), you have to be absolutely sure there's no CP or non-consensual content on there. The penalty for even one thing to slip through is damning, and they're under extreme pressure to be the gatekeeper on all of this.

That means you have to manually review everything. That means paying someone to sit through and review all sorts of... questionable... media. A lot of work was shipping this off to overseas review farms. And we occasionally hear reports on how degrading and traumatizing this kind of work can be.

So for Visa, Mastercard, et al I think they are more or less chomping at the bit to just be completely out of this genre of businesses.

Article and comments are underrating the impact of reputational risk on payment processors and on Kickstarter itself, for hosting/facilitating sexual content.

Some amount of adult comment is CSAM, or otherwise broadly disfavored. Some companies (Pornhub, OnlyFans) are willing to specialize in discriminating between “regular” adult content and the objectionable stuff, and they have payment processors similarly willing to specialize.

Some of that specialization involves being willing to take on political exposure. Mainstream payment processors are unusually exposed to risks like “being dragged in front of Congress” — there are a lot of reasons a politician might want to put pressure on a general financial infrastructure provider. So reducing obvious ways to get embarrassingly dragged in front of Congress is rational.

I think Mastercard and Visa are deathly afraid of having their nice duopoly regulated more tightly (as is already done in the EU) and therefore they consequentially put in a lot of effort to steer clear of topics that would give politicians a good excuse to do so.

It's not religion, it's litigation and money.

1) non-consensual or illegal (CP) content could come with expensive lawsuits.

2) Adult content has higher abuse (charge-backs, fraud, etc..).

> why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune

They're not. I highly recommend the podcast "Hot Money: who rules porn". It's about the internet "revolution" of porn, when it went from DVD to the Internet. It's very interesting and sometimes hilarious.

4 fingers are OK. 5 fingers are NOT. The payment card cartel has an unofficial list of what is and isn't OK to show. It becomes a different act when all fingers are involved and they don't want that. I kid you not.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/hot-money-who-rule...

> Why payment processors do it?

Short answer — there are lots of chargebacks and (sometimes) fraud around this content. Vanilla payment processors don’t like high rates of chargebacks and fraud.

> Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

They use a high-risk payment processor that takes a much higher cut of each sale (basically as insurance).

Can’t they use some push payment methods where a qr gets scanned to send money, like venmo/cashspp?

You seem to suppose that those businesses are really independent, only focus on goals they advertise, and exist in a vacuum. I can't even imagine how many “services” they offer to governments to keep their market shares.

The non-government organisations involved in those cases are either proxies that always support local politicians, or have been deliberately created to create opaque decision making source that is outside of legal or public scrutiny. As always, the ones who decide morals for the masses are the ones you can not even criticise. Unfortunately, even if you don't have such activist group, there is always a queue of well-intentioned citizens full of dreams of getting in bed with any politician, and having their 15 minutes of fame.

So one thing is to show who is the boss. Just as a slave owner who randomly kills a couple of slaves just to make others tremble in fear, US reminds others who sets the rules of international trade. The pretext is not that important.

Another is to keep public in check. A citizen who says “Sonic and Mario BDSM Chamber game? Wow, so unbelievable”, and shrugs it off is a bad citizen. Good citizens must react as prescribed to any real or imagined horror stories, be attracted to sexual content in media (or outraged by it, which is the same thing), and always fear the dangers that exist “outside”. The more they do that, the more they ignore the real world around them, and rely on imaginary protections the system and its members provide.

As political entertainers are interested in keeping the status quo that benefits all of them, they always choose the lowest common denominator views on such topics. It does not matter what you really think about it, it matters that you do the trick when the command is given: gasp with others, murmur with others, shake your head with others, decide that it must be stopped by existing powers with others (and therefore let them decide for you).

PornHub was famously not immune to the same thing. Porn industry attacked free streaming sites to remove everything that was not actively copyrighted, and directly provided by industry. It probably cost them a lot to organise that through politicians, journalists, activists — and payment processors. Ironically, the rhetoric you might call religious was used to help porn business.

> Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions.

In order to increase circulation of cryptocurrencies, you must make it easy and secure to deal in them. The way you do that is through... political sanctions in the form of financial and banking regulations.

Which are set by bodies vulnerable to religious pressures.

This religious lobby idea you have is hardly a real thing in the way you seem to imagine it being.

I don't know the specific cause. However, as such, it is a moral issue, not a religious one per se. Pornography is abusive and incredibly damaging to individuals and society and thus the common good. It is entirely reasonable even for governments to take measures to restrict or ban the production and sale of such content.

Opposition to such measures often hinges on false notions of freedom and the purpose of law. One function of law is to teach men to be free in the genuine sense, not as being able to do what thou wilt, but to be able to do what you ought.

There's a reason pornography has a history as an instrument of wartime psyops.

Practically, adult content has a lot of chargebacks. I can understand not wanting to deal with that out of the box, especially in the context of kickstarter.

> Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups?

The driving force is mostly a group of nonprofits and lobbying groups that are backed by right-wing, mostly-but-not-exclusively evangelicals.

Over the last decade, they have successfully laundered their views into the mainstream to the point where many people don't realize how influential they have been in writing all of these laws and policies and driving them across the finish line.

None of this is hidden knowledge - they've been acting out in the open for years, but people have an aversion to acknowledging it, because it's an uncomfortable truth which triggers a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

Collective Shout is behind several major campaigns.

Info on its conservative lobbyist leader, their extreme views and hypocrisies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/1FHaaaIs6T

As for why they do it?

Because conservative Christian lobbying is a lucrative grift: https://youtu.be/ms26YefUNds?si=3KLCj1RALES3aKDT

The owner runs a for-profit speaking engagement business alongside the registered charity. Many such people get into right wing politics without necessarily holding real conviction for the causes because it’s an easy way to get lots of money.

It’s kind of like the market for drill music - fans love the stories of gang violence and aura of lawlessness, so artists will exaggerate and pretend or even foment actual violence so the market buys the product they’re looking for regardless of authenticity. The fans form the artists because of what they finance. The result is a product of the fandom more than a reflection of the artists true selves, though it relies on preserving the deception of extreme authenticity.

A similar American lobbyist group is Moms for Liberty. They’re funded by a billionaire and groups like the Heritage Foundation, the ones behind Project 2025.

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