Paypal ramps up NSFW censorship by beginning to go after not just adult creators but also customers. In a lot of ways, this is even more terrifying than the adult creator bans. With them, it's only me at risk, but how do I navigate a space where putting a game on Itch might put customers at risk?
what can people do about it besides cyber attacks on the owner´s accounts?
I don't encourage anything criminal. The entire movement so far has been legal. And there's a lot that people can do! First things first - every support call to Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, or Stripe costs those companies money - they have to pay for support. This has been our main attack so far.
Has it worked? Well.. callers have gotten screamed at. One of the representatives for Stripe slipped up and said LGBTQ content was banned and Stripe had to put out a statement saying they were wrong. Stripe has literally disconnected support numbers over this. They fucking HATE this.
So a lot of times when you engage in protest, it's easy to wonder - is this just getting ignored, is it doing any good? For these calls - it is absolutely annoying and hurting the companies involved. We know that because they're ignoring it. So far, their reaction has been angry backlash.
because they're *not* ignoring it, fuck I would literally kill for an edit button on this site.
I think Paypal has ramped up censorship in response to these calls. They're starting to put normal callers onto lists so they can filter them through support more easily - and that's part of why new callers are so important - callers that Paypal and Mastercard and others can't filter out.
But continuing to push support costs is a decent threat, and one we should use.
The other thing we can do is write (encouraging/helpful) messages to journalists to directly encourage them to cover the topic. I've written before that the responses of paypros are not new - they have a playbook that they return to regularly:
We can look at these past movements and see why we havne't made progress - and a big part of it is that over time coverage drops off. We need every time that Visa lies or Paypal makes a mistake and bans somepony over-zealously - we need that to get covered in mainstream news sources.
So this is an area where we want to be polite, helpful, non-antagonistic - but we want to be regularly contacting reporters and writing to news sites and updating them on the situation and telling them that we want to see coverage of this. This is something I have not seen emphasized.
Yes, contact paypros and contact representatives (I'll get to them). Yes, spread the news yourself. But also.. we need to makes as easy for sites to cover as the anti-porn groups do. We need to pay attention to how news shapes narrative and realize that we can influence news sites too.
The part that pisses me off is that it'd be amazing if everyone just suddenly dropped stuff like PayPal, YouTube, etc., but the catch is that that's how a decent percentage of the GOOD people out there are able to make a living month-to-month.
And the FtC the people in charge of breaking trusts are actually compromised. Heavily. www.freespeechcoalition.com/blog/federal...
The only good corpos, are the ones who became fertilizer.
Is this all some winding long winded way of getting us all into crypto? Are we going to end up in a gift card trading economy? Because yknow, that's what money was for.
Not sure if you mean me or the paypros, but crypto won't solve this problem. It's environmentally unfriendly, largely inaccessible and cumbersome for customers, filled with scammers, and also it's generally not that private - I feel confident that exchanges would be censored in the same way.
I honestly believe I could start accepting checks in the mail and that would be more accessible than crypto for my commissioners and me. >w<
I was talking about the paypros and the techbros and the whole lot of them, the "ruling class" trying to interfere with our lives.
Ah, sorry for misunderstanding
Is okay! But yeah you're right, crypto is literally the opposite of private and they would use that fact to further identify and target victims
I'm sure they'd find some way to regulate that as well because many people tried to sound the alarm when the national Center on sexual exploitation used feminist language to try and get games banned from Steam. www.freespeechcoalition.com/blog/federal...
Bitcoin is a lot easier to track than most critters realize - and it has an obvious censorship point of attack - exchanges. There are privacy-oriented coins, but.. they're not nearly as widespread (not that any of them are in a position to be feasibly used as an alternative right now).
When critters look at crypto I think they tend to imagine an ecosystem that is a lot more capable than it actually is. And like.. I dunno, I'm sure that the county that has floated banning VPNs would definitely not blacklist coins that went through a mixer /sarcasm.
bingo. also. more bad bills. www.freespeechcoalition.com/blog/federal...
We need to seriously ramp up pressure. Porn bans are coming, if not officially, then at least in effect. We need to start moving things in the opposite direction. Stories like this provide more ammo to use when talking to representatives.
If you're in the UK, ask why an American company is able to cut you off for legal purchases. If you're in the US, raise hell with your representatives too. This is a dangerous escalation that has me worried, and is also extremely valuable ammo for getting press/congress to focus on the story again.
This is getting shared a *lot*, so I want to really encourage direct action. You can call a payment processor using information at stop-paypros.neocities.org Calling is important for them - each call to their support costs them money. The goal is literally to cause them trouble until they yield.
For political representatives and news organizations the goal is different - it's to be persuasive, the whole thing is less antagonistic. You can call them, physically write to them, or email them - the goal is to build political pressure (which will really scare Paypal) and to get news coverage.
News coverage is something that I don't see talked about very often, but is very important for building awareness. "Payment processors ban *customers* for what they buy" is a much bigger story and is a GREAT opportunity for us. But news sites won't cover it if it's not brought to their attention.
This fight is winnable. The extreme backlash from companies like Paypal is wild, but it's also them overplaying their hand, and it's proof that they are genuinely mad at us. They know how we're protesting, and they hate it. That makes it a good protest. So if they ramp up the pressure, we do to.
So, remember guys. Your actions in annoying a giant corporation that handles around cash matters, so keep on calling PayPal and Visa/Mastercard to show that you care about the fact that you want to buy Porn/NSFW stuff with your hard-earned money.
We're not going to go away, and we're not going to stop disrupting their operations and making all of these businesses miserable until they yield. They can make the protest go away at any time by getting rid of their restrictive policies. Or, they can escalate. In which case, this continues.
I’m guessing we’re probably gonna get one or two more double downs before we start seeing some more movement. They can’t maintain this forever.
They're big, but there's always more of us than there areof them. By the thousands. Logistically speaking it's a nightmare for them to hold this stance from all fronts. And they ARE getting jumped.
Businesses are made to serve the people, not the other way around
Posts like these are the beacon in the darkness I needed to keep going. Let's keep it up.
I'm annoyed that I'm from the US but some Austrian fundie group that claims to be "anti-exploitation" but is just "porn bad" is making decisions for everyone.
Australian but yeah but also yeah, the payment processors HATE porn so much, it is ideological. They care more about that than profit
That's what I meant.
Especially in a digital world, banning porn doesn't stop porn, it just drives people to darkness. We can't have healthy conversations about what we're not admitting to. (Porn's not for me, but anyone who wants to ban it needs to make their phones public. Yes, also the burner you use for...)
> you finally have adult money > can't spend the adult money on things YOU want (you = in general)
This is how fascism works. They will direct you to "approved" entertainment like sports where millionaires race cars around a track and act all sad if they lose as if they didn't still make 600 grand by finishing last. I enjoy motorsports, but I don't deny what it really is.
Maga bitch for a couple days and Cracker Barrel reverts their logo, we've been bitching for a month and they're only getting more adamant. Really shows you where these big corporations allegiances lay doesn't it?
This is censorship.
What do you mean it's been censorship all the way down? It's been shitty ever since 2009
What country was this person in or these blocks and bands are coming from?
I've seen two cases so far. I don't know the country for the first, for the one I've linked above the poster says that they're in England. I kind of doubt Paypal is making these decisions based on the country of origin for each person/critter, but it does affect what options they have.
well the reason I ask is because it matters VERY much what legal representation they can or cannot get. or what laws do or do not protect.
We need to drop PayPal let them suffer from their own puritanical stupidity they ban everyone soon they'll have no one and they'll go under from their own bad choices
A good thought, but no one will leave paypal. Everyone has one excuse or the other. I use cashapp despite not residing in the US. My luck was that I have a US bank account to link it to. This might not be an option for everyone but my point is, there are loopholes.
We need to keep calling and them then along with beging to start finding and promoting alternatives to PayPal they've been on this puritanical bullshit kick since 2016 but only ramped it up in 2020 they've been anti customer for over a decade thanks a certain orange fucks rise to power emboldening
They actually ban artists/sellers for calling so it's up to the customers now if it's the first option. But yeah I totally agree that we should switch to another alternative. I wouldn't be surprised if ppl used Substar via "pay per post" as a work around. I've seen some do it with kofi before.
I actually wrote up a thread about Subscribestar recently going over tips for artists looking to switch over! <3 You'll pay much higher fees, but Subscribestar can be used for commissions :3 bsky.app/profile/foxy...
Oh I switched long ago so I already know the fees. If it comes to having to use ONLY substar for commissions too though, prices will just raise accordingly since I'm one of those "art is my only income" artists. Though it's nice to know I'm not the only one considering it as backup.
What's wrong with bank transfers?
Tbh i dont know if people can do that internally. I know you can transfer to and from the same bank, but for example, but a I, as a Chase user cant transfer to someone who has Banco Guayaquil. I HAVE to use a check, debit card, or withdraw to pay in cash. One is US and the other is Ecuadorian.
In the UK, the app from my bank lets me send cash to anyone in the UK for free, and it's normally instantaneous, they get a notification for it It's not normally used in stores as we use contactless, but is used for tradesfolk and friends. Had this for 15+yrs now
You're sending to other people within your region, presumably to all people with banks also based on that region. The issue here is that Chase is USA, not Ecuadorian and Banco Guayaquil is Ecuadorian, not USA. I cant send to them and vice versa. That's what i meant by "no international transfers".
However, now that I'm a perma resident in Ecuador, I COULD get an account with any bank here and do free transfers with other people with ECU banks here, but whether i want to or not is a different question due to cons unrelated to this whole banning mess.
Ah, see, I was more responding to the "dont know if people can do that internally" bit, it should be possible, easily, to set that up, but it's a regulatory thing more than anything else
International wire transfers are possible but according to Wikipedia, outside the EU (US and Australia) the fees for wire transfers are ridiculous 😥, ouch.
Oof. That might be why banks down here don't do international wires at all (from what i can tell). No one here has money like that lol
We need to pressure politicians to start talking about regulating payment processors like PayPay. PayPal absolutely doesn't want to be regulated at all, they'll do practically anything to avoid it. And it's easy to push, no need to even bring up questionable stuff:
"dubcon"? That's a huge portion of romance novels, anything where the heroine doesn't want to go with the dashing hero, doesn't like him, but eventually after he forces her to go with him she comes around.
Indeed, isn't that the plot of every Shrek movie?
PAYPAL HATES SHREK, GET THEIR ASS
Anything where she gets kidnapped or something by the villain and forced into a relationship or marriage the hero rescues her from? That's flat-out non-con and rape right there. And this is all on the supermarket shelves, housewives buy it in huge numbers.
This. If we're able to get this to actually break into the mainstream in a serious way, we don't even need a bill. The moment Paypal realizes we're the reason politicians are questioning them (even if the politician's don't), Paypal will bend the knee to make us go away.
We need Paypal to believe that we have a regulatory apparatus on our side. Whether we do or not, they just need to be scared about it. They just need to internalize that censoring NSFW and queer content opens up a can of worms that they don't want to touch.
Good that Europe is building its own system called #wero. Right on time. User to user payment is already available. 40 million user.
And yet you're up to some of the most restrictive laws that criminalize that which has no harm. And have pushed for ID verification which is a scam
They think it will drive up the birth rate if the only way men can see women naked is in person. It will drive up the sexual assault, septic miscarriage, and back alley abortion rates. This is why MAGA celebrated rape right after the election was hacked.
This. ☝️ It’s all rooted in their insane belief that apparent declining birthrates spell out the end of western civilization, based on nothing but numberbending and fearmongering, but obviously fueled by oligarchs needing more bodies for their war machine and lithium mine meatgrinders.
Yes and no. Yes, this is a thing that people believe, and yes, some prominent fascists have very directly said that they blame porn for lower birthrates and called for it to be banned on those grounds. That's not even subtext, they've just said it. Both of you are right. BUT..
In addition to those fascists, there are also a large number of Republicans who have no problem with *porn*, but have a very big problem with people/critters getting *paid* for porn. What they object to is sex workers and adult creators having autonomy and being treated like moral equals.
So there's two fronts: - both a radical wing of the GOP with a lot of power that wants to increase birth rates - and a kind of casual bigotry that has similar roots to the GOP's disdain for the McDonald's cashier - somepony they rely on, and who they will happily use, but who they see as subhuman.
(and not subhuman in the good, otherkin way lol X3) They hate for sex work not to be an exploitative thing. They hate the idea that porn artists would make a living. They like the porn, they hate for the porn to be part of a community. They want porn and also want to look down on its makers.
Isn’t that just America though? I’ve been the primary breadwinner of every household I’ve been a part of since I was 14. That’s 31 years of being used because I stress, labor, and battle while everyone in my life lounges and makes shitty excuses.
I’ve never been recognized for achievements or contributions, validated for the way I feel about all this, comforted, supported, nor allowed respite. Americans are just slavers. The whole culture is a heartless consumer of human life. Why does the right wing have to mock like they have morals?
I don't see how this is related to the fact there are people who think SW and erotica shouldn't cost money. Capitalism devalues all labor but the amount of disdain is a whole other level for SW. Your experience of being underappreciated by people you lived with is a different conversation entirely.
It absolutely is not. There are two primary components to American culture: those who get by doing as little as possible and those who get by through ruthless greed. They go back to the same cultural root of undervaluing people. Also, it’s not your place to police what others talk about.
The topic is sex work/erotica censorship in this thread you are putting your trauma out unnecessarily and making this about you.
Well good on you for seeking out people who are obviously going through things so you can condescend to them. It’s predatory and masturbatory but it makes you look like the best 👍🏻
And the censorship and hatred of SW is not exclusive to the US. It's incredibly American of you to center your experience as the topic.
But I have been told for years this is only for the good of children.. I mean, you can work doing something else if it's for the good of children, right?
looks like time for me to stop using Paypal; after sending some $ to a friend, I think I am going to
Yeah but the list of viable alternatives are small and dont have the same international coverage.
true, it shrinks things down some If it's a purchase from somebody I know/trust, I'd just mail them a money order instead, or even cash if it's say $20 or below this reminds me why I've always preferred cash to buy things, but the digital age messes that up : (
I don't know if its better but theres a platform called "Wise" formerly TransferWise
Yeah, this puts large corporations at risk, too. How are people going to pay them if their customers' payment methods are being blocked? Imagine not being able to sell someone a McRib because they bought art of someone getting McRibbed for their pleasure.
Just imagine Ronald McDonald porn is what makes McDonald's go out of business because payment processers don't want to be associated with the company they think owns a yellow clad clown banging some chicken girl
Yes this is why you're going to have to press for the most opportunistic law firms going on
I’m thinking of deleting my PayPal account. Fuck them I only use them so I don’t hate to put in my credit card info into every account I make and then have to delete it after.
Well you can ask a lawyer about all this