Financial Censorship and the Love Affair Between Payment Processors and Anti-Porn Campaigners

Free Speech

from the collective-stupidity dept

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.

Using present-day numbers, the market capitalization of Mastercard is said to be half a trillion dollars–nearly $512 billion. Visa has a market capitalization of about $686 billion. Visa and Mastercard are the leading credit card networks based on market share, with Visa accounting for over $6 trillion in purchase volume in 2024. Considering the insane amounts of money flowing through these credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard could’ve dealt a death blow to the entire Aylo conglomerate before their makeover and reorganization. 

Add the dimension that thousands of adult content creators at the time were actively enrolled in Pornhub’s model and revenue-sharing programs, the loss of payment partners like the two credit card companies could have been catastrophic. This is especially true if Pornhub did shut down due to Mr. Kristof’s columns in the New York Times opinion section in the five-ish years since.

Major players in the payments and financial industries are flush with great power. That power can be and has been used to censor forms of expression that are otherwise legally protected. In the vertical of sexual expression and sexual labor, the power exercised exceeds levels that could be considered unaccountable and inscrutable. There is extremely well-documented evidence – anecdotally, journalistically, academically, and legally – that speaks to this inscrutability: banks backing OnlyFans almost forcing the platform to ban porn, debanking of adult content creators, and the financial-related closures of independent small businesses that deal with sexual subjects.

To culminate this, the approach of Collective Shout allegedly pressuring the executives of firms like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB, and others speaks to the love affair anti-pornography and far-right censorship campaigners have with the existing establishments in key financial sectors. It is a love affair that is incestuous by its very nature. This “incestuous love affair,” as I describe, is clear: the anti-pornography movement and the financial services sector have long been engaged in a relationship where one uses its morality as a weapon and the other uses virtue capitalism as a means to enforce censorship. All of this is in the name of supposedly protecting public decency. 

This all came full circle with Operation Choke Point under the Obama White House, and attacks on sexual expression have increased with the administrations of Trump 1 and Trump 2. President Donald Trump’s policies and his bullshit “federalism” arguments for weakening civil liberties for us all have resulted in a patchwork of inconsistency across the fifty states as it relates to issues such as age verification, privacy rights, and freedom of speech. The example of the Collective Shout group speaks to deeply seated prejudices against millions of people who simply wish to express themselves freely online – whether it’s adult entertainment or a racy video game.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Filed Under: adult content, censorship, payment processors
Companies: collective shout, mastercard, visa