Collective Shout always said they targeted payment processors, which for itch.io is PayPal, and it’s PayPal that they’re now looking to replace to resolve this issue, so I think MasterCard saying “we had nothing to do with this” is simply evidence that people were confused and targeting the wrong company.
Edit: Sorry, I just woke up and misremembered which company they had called out, so I’m no better at correctly identifying the problem than the people calling MasterCard, as it turns out, but I think the point stands that neither Itch nor Collective Shout ever actually said credit card companies were involved.
Itch has also specifically called out Stripe; in the post Kastel linked here, they say:
Stripe Update
For those who aren’t aware, Stripe is one of the payment processors we’ve used since our early days. They have provided the “Pay with card” option on our checkout page for over 10 years.
We spoke with Stripe yesterday about their content policies. They confirmed that they will not be able to support adult content that fits the following definition: “content designed for sexual gratification.”
Stripe asked us to pass along the following message to our users:
Stripe is currently unable to support sexually explicit content due to restrictions placed on them by their banking partners, despite card networks generally supporting adult content (with the appropriate registrations). Stripe has indicated that they hope to be able to support adult content in the future.
We are in the process of talking with other payment partners to accept card payments that Stripe is unable to process. We disabled Stripe payments last week on pages identified as having “adult NSFW content.” Now that we have a more specific definition from Stripe, we may review that initial list for potential re-introduction. However, our long-term plan is to implement one or more new processors to avoid putting the platform at risk.
That’s one of the problems with modern commerce, nearly every transaction has so many links in the chain, many of them either poorly identified or outright hidden from the consumer and the creator, that it’s nearly impossible to identify the weak link when something goes wrong. Doesn’t help that most corporate entities default to hollow platitudes that make it hard to tell genuine claims of innocence from deceitful denials and almost never volunteer information about other links in the chain out of fear of retaliation. Sure, it beats every creator needing the skills to personally manufacture every unit of their goods and having to handle selling their wares face-to-face and dealing with physical money, but damn if it ain’t annoying that it enables bad actors to hide like needles in a needle stack and make one wish it was more viable for digital creators to sell their products direct to their audience and accept payment directly instead of having to go through a third party digital market place and half-a-dozen payment intermediaries.
The thing with Mastercard, at least according to what I’ve read, is that they don’t directly do business with companies like Steam. They have intermediaries like PayPal do it instead. And this is where the crux of the issue lies:
Mastercard’s terms of service include a broad rule saying “payment processors can’t allow anything that might reflect badly on us”, and what exactly that means is never put down in writing, only in negotiations between Mastercard and the payment processors themselves.
The result is that the payment processors have to do what Mastercard wants, but Mastercard has plausible deniability about it, because how exactly they interpret “anything that might reflect badly” is never publicly documented. This is also why payment processors who specifically market to sex workers can exist: Mastercard’s terms of service are the same for all payment processors, but the unwritten agreements aren’t.
That’s why PayPal and Stripe care about threats from groups like Collective Shout: Mastercard can effectively destroy them at any time for any reason. Meanwhile, Mastercard can say honestly that they’ve never required restrictions, here, look at the terms of service, we don’t say anywhere that adult content is forbidden.
(Which isn’t to let PayPal and Stripe off the hook for their own scummy behavior. Just to say that we shouldn’t be exculpating Mastercard either. Mastercard and Visa have an effective monopoly on their industry, and that’s why it’s not easy for itch.io to just switch to a different processor.)
I was kind of accounting for the above when I said that Visa or Mastercard could put pressure on the intermediary payment processors (PayPal and Stripe). But they didn’t admit to that, either.
Oops … on re-reading my previous post, I see I only wrote that the intermediaries (PayPal and Stripe) might have pressured Itch, which is different.
Anyway, from what I missed, I am now persuaded that Stripe was actively involved in pressuring Itch, or at least enforcing its rules if Itch acted first.
Tangentially, I think that the card companies and payment processing companies do narrowly outline what adult content is allowed in their terms of service. It’s just that these are rarely distributed widely. Visa does have some public documents naming prohibited adult content … this is one of them.
assuming you’re right and it’s predominantly the processors like pp and stripe, what is their motive? Assuming also, they’re a bunch of moneygrabbing bankers with no ethics, that means it’s all about money.
Someone said eatlier, they want to charge a higher transaction fee for adult material. Is this what’s going on? And wouldn’t it be convenient for more things to be labelled as such.
I asked Collective Shout if it would show me the research, name any of the 500 games they found other than No Mercy, or disclose what that research entailed. “We found almost 500 other games tagged with rape or incest on Steam. Some of these included extreme sexual torture and abuse of women,” Caitlin Roper, campaigns manager at Collective Shout, told me in an email. …Roper did not disclose any specifics about the group’s research. I asked Roper if the Collective Shout team played any of those tagged games to check the context of the content, and did not receive a response.
Ted Litchfield, a journalist at PC Gamer, noted that the “nearly 500 other rape and incest games” figure Collective Shout cites in its own timeline of the campaign doesn’t make sense, and the only way to arrive at it would be to count duplicates, DLCs, and unrelated games removed in that time. “Counting up all ‘Removed’ and ‘Retired’ games on SteamDB since the 15th, I got 456 hits, but that includes double counts for most of the offending games (many of which were both ‘Removed’ and ‘Retired’), DLC and demos for those games (also given the double-r treatment), and a number of unrelated games that were taken off Steam during this time,” Litchfield wrote.
Even if and when the tags are accurate, “rape” and “incest” themes in media, whether it’s literature, visual arts, personal memoirs, or games (which are often a combination of these things, especially from indie developers) can represent a range of themes that’s impossible to define. Talking about one’s own sexual abuse is not the same as glorifying sexual abuse, but relying on keywords and tags creates that false equivalency, and seems to be what Collective Shout relied on for its pressure campaign.
There’s a financial reason that isn’t 100% pretextual: the high rate of chargebacks (i.e. consumers reversing payments after receiving the service), fraud, and other malicious behavior in the online adult industry.
My first reaction when I saw this was to assume this was just a company line to justify puritanical squeamishness. But you’ll find it ruefully affirmed by service providers to the adult industry and techies who worked for online porn providers. (Along in the latter case with a tedious amount of argumentation over whether crypto is the solution, on any of the dozens of threads discussing this issue.)
This could help explain why so many fresh entrants in the payment processing space like PayPal and Stripe have actually tended to be less lenient on these issues than the older Visa-Mastercard duopoly. They’ve got (way) less of a profit cushion to absorb costs around chargebacks, disputes, and fraud.
And the duopoly has been lenient… slash-highly-corruptible. The internet is full of places you can buy hardcore explicit material with your credit card, and has been forever. But that’s almost all through wink-wink runarounds of the card companies’ longstanding policies. It’s through specialized high-risk payment processing companies like CCBill, who wined and dined and orgied card company staff while charging adult-industry customers sky-high fees to process their transactions for them.
From the Buzzfeed article I just linked:
So if a company is selling “financial services” rather than adult services, and the percentage of their clients deemed “high risk” doesn’t go over an unacceptable threshold, Visa/Mastercard will process payments for them … and for their clients who would, on their own, violate Visa/Mcard’s TOS.
This leaves the ecosystem of payment providers for adult vendors in an unstable, exploitative, and expensive equilibrium where Visa/Mastercard will periodically cut off some company and its clients because its volume of high-risk transactions gets too high (or the steps it’s taking to massage down the appearance of risk get too obvious). Or where, as in this case, customer complaints draw the Eye of Sauron to a company that has more transactions in the “high risk” category than previously noted. The challenging part for itch wouldn’t be finding a payment processor who’ll accept adult material, but one who wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg for doing so.
It also complicates advocacy on the issue – whether you’re a free speech maximalist who’ll defend company decisions to host CSAM or rape sims (as long as they’re fictional, obvs, not depicting a real-world criminal act) or someone who’ll defend the right of companies to censor grossly nonconsensual material but doesn’t want that to bleed over into sweeping anti-NSFW policies. The payment companies aren’t solely responding to groups like Collective Shout. There’s a risk management side to this, too.
Collective Shout put the spotlight on Visa and MasterCard.
Visa and MasterCard responded by telling the payment processors (a.k.a., the acquirers) that they better be sure they’ve got their clients using the right merchant codes, especially for those clients selling adult content.
The acquirers want to keep clients like Valve and itch.io using the “sells computer games through online store” merchant code. If a client of theirs had to switch to (or add) a high-risk merchant code for “sells adult content,” the acquirer would be required to undertake ongoing risk assessments (and possibly other burdens). So the acquirers told clients like Valve and itch.io to drop adult content.
When Valve asked why, the acquirers pointed at Visa and MasterCard policies and said, “they made us do it.”
Valve told everyone Visa and MasterCard are making them do it.
Visa and MasterCard denied content-specific censoring and told them to deal with the acquirers.
I believe this is consistent with every report and official statement I’ve read. If I’m correct, that would mean nobody outright lied, but the payment processors left out significant details.
Background
Curious, I read portions of the Visa Network Integrity Program documents. I assume MasterCard’s are very similar.
Payment processors and banks that connect merchants to Visa’s payment network are called acquirers. The policies assign responsibilities to the acquirers. One of those is ensuring that their clients use the proper merchant codes.
Reading through the catalog of merchant codes was eye opening. The distinctions between some of the codes are nuanced. For many businesses, it seems multiple different codes would be required. In some cases, those businesses may use a single merchant code, but others must separate charges so that different purchases are associated with distinct merchant codes. (They give a hypothetical example of two beauty salons that also sell retail products. One salon is allowed to use a single merchant code, but the other must use distinct merchant codes for the retail products.)
There are distinct merchant codes for selling digital media, selling software, and selling computer games. If merchant sells those as downloads from an online store, they’ll have a different code than one that sells the same products on physical media from a brick-and-mortar store.
Some merchant codes are considered “high risk.” In the Visa documents, these are merchants who have a higher risk of posting illegal transactions. (In the MasterCard case, I think they also consider them a higher risk to the MasterCard brand.) “Adult content” is one of the merchant codes in the highest risk tier (along with telephone psychics). The precise definition of adult content must be in a different document that I didn’t read.
Visa (and presumably MasterCard) place additional burdens on the acquirers when they sign up a merchant that uses one of these “higher risk” merchant codes. The acquirer is responsible for doing additional vetting and performing periodic risk assessments to mitigate the (presumed) higher risk of illegal transactions. They may have other additional responsibilities, but I didn’t read much farther.
Valve have confirmed to RPS that this withdrawal of support for Steam transactions by one of PayPal’s acquiring banks “is regarding content on Steam, related to what we’ve previously commented on surrounding Mastercard”. “In this case, one of PayPal’s acquiring banks decided to stop processing any Steam transactions, which cut off PayPal on Steam for a number of currencies,” a Valve spokesperson added.
On itch, a content creator can be the “Merchant of Record” (MoR). This means you set up your own payment accounts with Stripe, PayPal and whomever. In this scenario Itch is not actually selling your product, but rather acting as an intermediate commissionaire.
Years ago, you could be MoR on Google Play, but not anymore. Apple were always the MoR from the start and presumably Valve too.
So my point is, if you are the MoR, Itch have no business removing your products unless you ask them as they are legally not in the sales chain.
Edit: just to clarify, this doesn’t apply to the separate problem of UK OSA, only the payment process fiasco.
Is there anywhere to go? Any alternatives to turn to? Because it sounds like nowhere that uses the main online payment processors will take NSFW work, at least not for long. Is it crypto or bust to make money off my smutty dating sim?
I never expected to make even a hundred dollars off it, but now no one can throw me $2 for all the work I put in?
I have a following on the fanfiction site archiveofourown, so theoretically I can post there for free. They don’t allow links to donation sites, but if I’m forced to not make (literally any) money off my hard work, I might as well get eyes on it.
Well, outside their core business (reissues of old games and Polish blockbusters) my impression of GOG is "somewhat more than ‘meh’ ", but considering the rather european approach to sex in said Polish blockbusters (at least on PC versions) I think can became an acceptable haven of refuge, at least until things cool down and a new course can be plotted.
Apologies for the delay, I’ve been trying to get the site to work with my computer again.
The explainer I linked does list all of the issues I mentioned. Everything up to "epilepsy-inducing patterns” is in the “New offences that the Act has introduced”. The rest are in “Types of content the Act tackles” (a couple of them, such as immigration, I re-worded slightly as I disagree conceptually with how the the Online Safety Act defines those activities). The latter section states that “content relating to” the categories is deemed illegal and affected by the law - there’s nothing in the law that allows for distinction based on glorification or disapproval of such actions, or (as far as I can see) any other criterion. I haven’t even got into the parts that are to be age-restricted rather than banned according to that explainer. And the way the Act was debated in Parliament, banning depictions was clearly the law’s intention.
I still can’t find the bit where it says that it’s illegal to depict anything which is against the law. I have read a fair amount of the actual text of the OSA by this point, and it’s pretty specific about what it covers.
That’s part of the problem with legislation’s tendencies to extreme and ridiculous verbosity, no one, not even the law makers voting on them,can realistically read through the entire text of a typical piece of legislation, leading to near universal uncertainty of what the law does and doesn’t say, and leaving those paranoid about accidentally violating the law in a bind as they try to comply with restrictions rumored to be in the law that may or may not actually be in the law.