<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/28/financial-censorship-and-the-love-affair-between-payment-processors-and-anti-porn-campaigners/>
"Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to
purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only
content.” The news rippled across tech and gaming news media, even for adult
entertainment industry journalists like myself. But if it weren’t for the
reporting of Ana Valens (which
Vice then deleted) then we wouldn’t know the
source of this “pressure.”
Collective Shout, a far-right anti-pornography group from Australia, has
claimed credit as one of the key organizers in the recent campaign against
Steam. And it was Collective Shout’s Melinda Tankard Reist who took the victory
lap on X, claiming victory over “pedo gamer fetishists.” The group also claimed
responsibility for the campaign against indie gaming storefront Itch.io. Many
reports indicate that the Itch.io campaign placed critically acclaimed game
titles in controversy.
Despite this, Reist’s supposed tactics of signing “open letters” to the chief
executive officers of the world’s credit card companies, payment processing
platforms, and financial institutions are not new ones. Collective Shout
learned it from another far-right anti-pornography group based here in the
United States: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). NCOSE is the
same group that has published its so-called “Dirty Dozen” list each year,
attempting to shame mainstream companies for engaging in “sexual exploitation.”
But NCOSE and Collective Shout provide a glaringly broad definition of that
term to describe anything that is even remotely out of line with their
worldviews. Those organizations and other anti-pornography campaigners have
used tactics like these in ways that led to rippling censorship across various
platforms, verticals, and genres.
The anti-pornography movement has proven effective in pressure campaigns
targeting payment and banking partners for companies and individuals who
produce controversial subject material.
We saw this with Pornhub and the moral panic that journalist Nicholas Kristof
kicked off against the platform in December 2020. Credit card companies like
Visa and Mastercard turned the screws on Aylo, referred to as MindGeek at the
time, due to the unbalanced reporting of a washed-up Pulitzer Prize winner
whose unrequited hubris presents him as a carceral feminist with a White savior
complex. This caused a crisis for content creators and producers who use an
adult tube site like Pornhub.com for distribution and monetization. Kristof and
his confederates were able to whip up so much moral panic that it forced
MindGeek to rebrand and be acquired by a private equity firm featuring sex work
academics, law enforcement officials, and lawyers on the board of an ownership
group called Ethical Capital Partners. That’s the power of moral panic."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
