It's Time for Action!

For those of you who are not aware, the largest game platform for indie developers, Itch.io, de-listed every adult game on their platform today in order to capitulate to payment processor's demands. Steam also came under attack this past week and purged numerous games from their store that do not adhere to new requirements. This is not the first attack payment giants have made against the adult industry. I'm sure many of you remember the time OnlyFans attempted to ban adult content, or when numerous developers were de-platformed from Patreon for content that violated payment processors ToS. This will not be the end of the story, and it certainly is not the end goal of the people pulling the strings to enact their agenda. This is only one avenue of attack these organizations are doing in order to ban pornography outright and imprison those who make it.

So what exactly is the problem? Major credit card networks like Visa and Mastercard, along with payment processors like Stripe and Paypal, are coming under increasing pressure from anti-porn groups like Collective Shout, the group that has taken responsibility for Steam's purge and has recently made their Twitter account private due to the backlash. These groups are also attacking our rights from another angle as they also push for legislation requiring adult content websites to enact age verification for its users, often under the guise of protecting minors from elicit content. Age verification has already shown to be an ineffective strategy at combating access to pornography for minors, instead pushing workarounds like VPNs or switching to different platforms that don't require age verification and are more likely to contain extreme content. Russel Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the United States, has admitted on a secret video recording that age verification is just a "back door" to banning pornography. We should expect the increasing limitations and scrutiny on legal adult content from credit card networks and payment processors to be no different, just another way to ban pornography.

So what can you do about this? This is a global problem and the actions you can do will depend on where you live. The best thing you can do is contact your government representative and urge them to look into the matter and propose legislation to remedy the issue. This would mean enacting a law that prevents credit card networks and payment processors from declining legal transactions because of political or reputational risk considerations. Essentially, they shouldn't be allowed to decline a person or business that is being lawful in order to prevent bad publicity. This should also extend to banking, as I personally have been unable to open a bank account for my business because of its nature.

Now let's get into a little more detail. If you live in the United States, there is a currently a proposed bill in the Senate and the House of Representatives, named the Fair Access to Banking Act, which attempts to remedy some of the issues at hand. I urge you to contact your representative and explain the attack on your rights that's currently under way. Tell them to include payment processors in Section 5 in addition to strengthening the language to add clarification in this section. If you can't be bothered to write to them yourself, I'll be creating another post with more details and a letter template that you can use to make the process much easier.

For those living in the rest of the world, I highly recommend you contact your representatives and have them look at the bill in the United States and have them draft and propose a similar law. And everyone should be contacting their local or national governments to urge them to drop any attempts to enact the ineffective and potentially damaging age verification for platforms that have adult content. The only way forward is for our governments to enact laws enshrining our rights to access adult content!

Let me be clear, this affects you! You're losing access to the adult games that you enjoy, and you may never be able to play those games again unless YOU do something about it! Don't just sit back thinking this will all blow over because it won't! This will only get worse as these people push to rid the internet of all adult content. It's time to FIGHT for the content that you know and love!