The best censorship is creators' self-censorship.
The best censorship is creators' self-censorship.
spoiler
"At least our free countries don't have morality police controlling what people can wear" - "Just because you don't see them doesn't mean they don't exist... maybe they're just better dressed and better hidden... they don't have to control what you wear if they can control what you see..."
A quick and dirty meme after seeing the latest updates. Saimin? Really? But 50SOG with its dubcon (at best) is fine? Hmm.... I wonder why. u/kaigyuu2016 would probably have a field day with this.
I mean, I'm no fan of ryona/guro myself, but I don't go around telling others they can't access it (even if they might need a bit of Touhou Jesus after that).
Then again, I guess when you have money and monopolistic/duopolistic power in a market/industry, you'll try to reshape what society can see according to what you think is right... just like Steam.
I wrote some time ago that "this isn't stopping at looks = age, but going beyond that. It's anyone's guess where it'll stop."
If they don't stop at saimin... what's next, timestop?
u/Jaggedmallard26 nailed it pretty well... "You can launder money from drug cartels so they can buy heavy weaponry with a bank but god forbid you use their service to see a titty."
My condolences to our German weebs, though.
Sources:
The control of card processors over what we're allowed to see and buy is absolute bullshit. And this is coming from someone who spent $0 on porn in my life.
This is why we need digital cash systems outside the control of those companies. I'm not specifically talking about cryptocurrency. Even a central bank digital currency is better than this. Benjamin Franklin in your wallet doesn't care what you spend him on. Neither should your digital money.
I’ve never seen a news outlet disguised as a meme before
It was never about the morality. Who cares if someone makes something out of the ordinary? all it matters is the sweet control of the internet.
Can someone explain what this is about in a way that I can understand ? I know nothing about this situation, in fact I don’t even know much about animé in general which this seems to be about.
Payment processors are controlled by puritanical conservatives and have been for decades. It's not (just) about anime, sex workers have been pushed to worse and worse places because of these evil companies.
Reading the sources you'll see they pushed to ban sexual depictions of minors and rape on one website, and changing the names of such tags on the other two.
How puritanical banning child porn.
This doesn't deserve sympathy and isnt comparable to not providing payment services to sex workers.
Basically the major credit card companies are forcing their puritism and morality onto others. They are forcing these services that host nsfw content to remove or hide it or they won't be allowed to use the credit card services. That's where the big debate of censorship comes in. Where its okay to see violence but god forbid you see a boob.
Some things others didn't mention:
- FOSTA and SESTA, they're laws designed to remove the "good Samaritarian" clauses from many service providers when it comes to sex related stuff. It is very vaguely written, so likely it is the thing that made Visa and Mastercard overpolice things, not the anti-proshippers.
- I have read that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media) uses bad faith arguments to get a de-facto ban on porn. One of these efforts included the aforementioned FOSTA and SESTA. The other seems to be there being a pressure campain to get Visa and Mastercard drop porn altoghether, thus the only real option for paying for it being in either cash or crypto.
A lot of these organizations try to first make more reasonable sounding arguments before they push for less and less reasonable ones. In the UK, they banned not just the "just drawings", but also forms of "extreme" pornography, as it could normalize "dangerous sexual acts". I have a feeling that it has the very same people behind both of them.
These other guys have given a good gist of the issue, but IMO it's inaccurate. The problem lies with society and capitalism at the end of the day. Basically, credit processors are in it for the money, obviously. And they view porn as a risk to profits, because puritanical society means that statistically a lot of sex related purchases lead to charge backs when someone finds out and the purchaser denies having any knowledge of it. So as a result the credit processors don't allow their services to be used for sex stuff.
This is not to say that the credit processors AREN'T led by puritans with an agenda. Just that their profit motive probably has more to do with it.
Germany is even worse and it's not even CC companies' fault. You can't buy h vns on steam (or gog) in germany, with the reasoning being "the user's age can't be verified". Thankfully jast works.
Which I could accept if other 18+ games, like... gta v, weren't perfectly purchasable. I've kinda been thinking about complaining to the youth protection agency responsible, maybe if they also make steam ban sales of hugely profitable games they'll care, or the legal debate about verifying age there being a privacy violation would kick off. But I also don't want it to get worse.
I recoginze pixiv from them hosting one the largest mastodon instance, pawoo. Which is widely blocked for child porn.
Wasn't surprised reading the article on pixiv's policy change:
The prohibited content includes (but is not limited to): "Sexual exploitation of a minor, incest, bestiality, rape (or any other non-consensual sexual behavior)," and "non-consensual mutilation of a person or body part."
Oh the horror.
This post was kind of a pain to read, with all the reddit links. I had to convert them to old.reddit.com to get them to display properly.
I think Steam was in the right to remove that one game. "Looks = age" is true for cartoon characters, since they have no biological age. It seems the character was described as 19 in lore, but in Steam's opinion, they looked like a prepubescent child. Since cartoon child pornography is illegal, they were right to remove it.
But that other stuff seems to be legal. Cartoon rape porn games are appalling to me, but are probably legal, and should be legal. I agree that people being unable to pay for legal (even if appalling) content is a form of undesirable censorship.
It's probably Visa's fault. They seem like a complete monopoly. I rarely see anyone with a non-Visa credit card. I myself have a Discover card, but I have to have a Visa card too because some merchants don't accept Discover. Every merchant accepts Visa, and every customer has to have a Visa card. Merchants today are more likely to refuse cash than to refuse Visa.
Possible solutions:
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The libertarian approach: The government needs to remove barriers to entry in making new payment systems. Loosen BSA requirements for smaller payment systems. Require existing banks to interoperate with the design of new payment systems, if their customer requests it.
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The socialist approach: The US government could create a payment system. It would be protected by constitutional free speech rules, so legal content couldn't be blocked.
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The moderate approach: Treat Visa like the monopoly that it is. Treat it as a defacto commons, where people are forced to go even if they don't want to be there. As long as it remains a monopoly, it should be required to carry all legal customers. Even customers selling appalling content, like cartoon rape porn games.
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