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?
How did that end, did any of the games end up getting reinstated?
Australia has the equivalent of the john birch society which is pushing racist shit, anti sex worker nonsense, and anti nsfw games.
They where the people that doxxed only fans workers and got them in trouble for taxes.
They also got itch.Io to remove a bunch of nsfw games.
We have a similar group in the united States who got prostitution to be reclassified as human trafficking, as if a sex worker doing independent work online is the same as the movie “taken” with Nissam. That resulted in backpages getting removed, along with legitimate concerns about minors being trafficked. Also all the porn websites where being pushed by this group to remove all of the porn that doesn’t have someone tied to a ID card. People say all the porn websites are owned by one person and this is to ensure that.
If you really want to look into it these kind of groups are funded by religious groups, and republicans and are in the same group of people who pushed for project 2026 or 2028 whatever it was called.
It was the work of Collective Shout.
They’re an Australian christofascist group trying to push right wing purity nonsense. There was one game, No Mercy, that really did push things too far. Collective Shout was able to poster child that game and pressure payment providers into pressuring game platforms to delist a lot of NSFW games.
A lot of the ultra wealth you may have noticed have a christofascist lean, so with the vocal pressure from Collective Shout it was easy for them to claim economic harm saying if they didn’t pull games there’d be a boycott or something.
A lot of the ultra wealth you may have noticed have a christofascist lean
I think THIS is OP’s question. It is perfectly believable that a small number of insane and delusional people might truly think that these things are bad.
But I think the bigger question is: why do the ultra-wealthy believe this,or at least support it? What is the end game? Porn is popular and profitable: why is there no billionaire who has made their money off of smut rising to defend their industry?
And it won’t be surprising when the christofascist leaders are outed as sex pests because the loudest voiced against sexual expression are personal fans that want to donimate others for malicous reasons. Like all the anti gay religious leaders that turn out to be child molesters.
I first read that as Collective Soul and thought “Why would a 90s rock band care about this?”
I wouldn’t fully credit them, at best. VISA and MasterCard have their own puritan history, that fringe group is a scapegoat to do what they wanted to do anyways.
I did mention the ultra wealthy (like those in charge of Visa and MasterCard) have christofascist leanings and they caved super easy probably because of it, using them happily as a scapegoat.
I’m sure there’s a lot more that can be said about the global elite that others have said before
Ty, I’m going to donate towards Collective Shout.
Are you really a racist and a bigot and mysoginist? The founders have a history of not just being anti-nsfw but also being anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, and conspiracy theorists. The founder comes from Women’s Forum Australia, a group so crazy they were known to withdraw their kids from school because they thought the Wi-Fi was making them sick.
These people are anti education. Anti women’s rights under the guise of moral superiority. They are against legitimate sexual education (that thing proven to reduce child sex abuse cases). They are not who you want to back unless you are a right wing nutter.
Anti LGBTQ in what way? And what have they done that’s racist? I looked at their site and they did good work opposing Andrew Tate, is there more to this group?
Yes, I literally linked to some of their history. They’re all linked to right wing conspiracy groups. The founders and several of their members have posted long tirades against diversity programs, constantly retweet staunchly anti-trans people, have claimed sexually diverse (though they say perverse with no distinction about anything) nerds are the cause of all problems.
Even several of the games Collective Shout targeted specifically shows they don’t actually care about truth and just want to scream louder until they get their way. They campaigned against Detroit: Become Human saying it’s a vile sexist game because of a scene where you actually save a woman from being beaten by her husband, thus eliciting empathy in many players for victims of abuse (I personally remember it opening people’s eyes when they played it).
They claim videogames make people violent and sexist despite mountains of evidence otherwise.
They claim Tate as their success despite many other groups actively pushing against him and his media.
Numerous LGBTQ organizations have stated how Collective Shout negatively impacts them by targeting healthy representation of being LGBTQ by calling it sexual perversion. Even Vice if I’m not mistaken ran articles diving into their negative impacts.
If you want to support truly feminist work there are plenty of valid, successful, known anti-trafficking and anti-abuse charities doing good work.
I think they’re not looking for information, they’re looking for an argument.
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.
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?
The only explanation that makes sense to me is the payment processors are ruin by shit heads who are actively looking for an excuse to censor shit.
Part of an ongoing campaign to de-anonymize the internet. Tie credit card to identity to game (adult or not) to in-game comms (can’t do that with videos). The noise is to make people aware and get them to self-censor.
Or religious nutjobs, which makes more sense?
OK, that’s nutty, but it has the same effect, along with helping identify ‘diverse sexual orientations’ as well. In Australia for example, law changes mean Steam is now using credit cards to identify adults, same in Thailand and UK I think. I guess I’ll go with ‘Why not both?’.
ETA: Oh look, the EU too https://www.euractiv.com/news/gamers-will-have-to-prove-their-age-under-eu-kids-act/
I mean… Whose funding the religious nut jobs?
Quelle surprise, it’s the crypto-fash again. Getting real tired of their shit.
