This wasn't America this time. Blame the Aussies.

Make America Make Sense Again

It's not the first time this has happened. That first time set the precedent that the payment processors have a vast amount of power over the transactions that can occur on the internet. There wasn't a realistic way to push back on it and so they will continue to expand this for... whatever reason they are actually giving. IDK - I would have thought that legitimate adult content payments would be quite lucrative for these processors to handle, it's not like they're beholden to advertising like YouTube is and their insane content policies.

I mean, I cannot find a valid reasoning for it apart from the vague term "high risk" which explains nothing. This is the best I've found so far:

The adult industry is no stranger to regulation and stigma. But in recent years, payment processor censorship has emerged as a subtler, more insidious threat. Companies like Mastercard, Visa, and their underlying bank networks often issue sweeping mandates, particularly regarding “high-risk” content. These decisions typically happen behind closed doors, without public accountability or stakeholder input from the communities affected.

(bold emphasis mine)

To reduce perceived brand risk or avoid legal ambiguity, even when the content is legal.

TBH they are making themselves look pretty shitty as a brand by moving sex work and other adult content back to the darker deeper recesses where it becomes less accessible and harder to regulate properly in terms of safety and legality.

I say that we must take a revenge... I am very angry for the freedom of expression and respect to individual rights. It is simply a nazi organization disguised in Christian clothes.

All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.

My guess

and I haven't seen anything where payment processors have released any details of what Collective Shout did -- is that Collective Shout didn't just call Visa and say "we don't like this". They probably found some sort of law, maybe in Australia, that processing payments for these violates, and had their lawyer send a nastygram to payment processors about it. The payment processors sent their own warning letters to the merchants.

Like, the reason payment processors are useful as leverage for countries is because countries can put pressure on them, because payment processors do business all over and are gonna be skittish about violating laws in a bunch of countries, can get cut off from doing business there. And any one retailer just isn't big enough for them to be worried about cutting off compared to getting cut off from a country.

If you want to put pressure on payment processors, I'd guess that you're probably going to have to have some kind of law to threaten payment processor with on the grounds that processing payments to Steam and itch.io and other retailers and so forth when they are deindexing games results in some kind of legal violation. I'm not saying that that's impossible, but it's probably harder to do than it is for Collective Shout is to pull their shennanigans.

I'd also note that it is not at all clear that the present situation is the final state of affairs. That is, what my guess is that Valve and itch.io and so forth did is that they got their nastygram from the payment processors, then went to talk to their own lawyers. It's entirely possible that after those lawyers have a look at it, they're going to say "you can't sell Game X in Country Z", and Valve will just restrict the regions where they sell those games. That is, I would not be surprised if the scope on this restriction narrows, and Valve and itch.io are just playing it safe until they're confident as of their legal position.

There are also quite likely legal workarounds of varying efficacy that publishers can do in various jurisdictions, and they're probably going to be looking for some kind of consensus on what can be done where. Some jurisdictions have restrictions on incest pornography, for example. There are games

Sexbot on Steam comes to mind

that were clearly written with the intent of being incest pornography, have invisible-to-the-user variables that reference interfamily relationships. However, what the user sees is that they simply permit the user to specify the relationship between game characters. If the user specifies an incestual one, then that'll be how the game plays

but it's the user providing that input; there's no user-visible incest content provided by the publisher.

Other games on Steam require patches to add content that are provided by the publisher via a non-Steam route but not provided by Steam or similar

just useless unless someone has a copy of the game from Steam or similar

to add content that may be legally questionable; that cuts Steam out of the loop, so Steam won't care. My guess is that the situation is going to be somewhat in flux as various countries hammer out the fine points of what they restrict and publishers figure out how to adapt to the situation.

And then there are games, like Skyrim, which have third-party mods providing pornographic content to add to games that I am very sure is not legal in many jurisdictions, which are provided by non-Steam sites that don't do business in the jurisdiction in question and thus don't care about legal nastygrams from that jurisdiction. The US legal system will not enforce foreign rulings against an American website that doesn't meet a number of criteria for being considered to be doing business abroad, for example, because it doesn't consider that website to be doing business in that country and thus the foreign country to have jurisdiction. The foreign country can block its users from having access to that website in the hosting country if it wants, but thus far, Australia is not doing that...and if we go down the "blocking internationally" route, then the next step for people who want to distribute content is probably going to be things like VPNs, Tor, and Hyphanet.

We do have this petition for now link

I'm gonna do 2000 calls demanding more boobies in video games

Nobody wants to pick up the phone

Christian fanatics hate anything sex-related regardless of gays.

I would imagine they're more concerned with Australia than America, since that's where they live.

A collective that defends Cuties...

That sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

Christ card

Ironically, yes, at this point

Collective Shout is Australian

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collective_Shout

This is actually an example of the opposite. Here, it's a Christian activist group in a non-US country impacting customers in

among other places

the US.

Collective Shout is Australian.

And banks are bigger than nations at this point, what they say goes.

Deindexed/delisted, not removed.

Try putting the names into the search field on the site, or browsing for them in the categories they are in.