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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25657 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

  1. The biggest problem is that payment processors are usually an unholy alliance of governments, banks, and financial groups. This makes them allergic to competition and new entrants to the market. The Internet has reshaped society over the last three decades and I'd say only 1.5 payment processors came out of it. PayPal, and the crypto market. The term "coup complete" got thrown around a lot in the Biden presidency to describe what was necessary to build a competing Internet ecosystem.
  2. I'm worried this might signal the revival of the religious culture wars that happened in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's. It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind. I think woke culture has plenty of religious elements. The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious. But it seems the longer term strategy is just have a different religion.
  3. Neutrality as a default. This is the end goal. Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics. We are cancelling thots and porn this year. 4 years ago it was lab leak conspiracies. I certainly think some things are more important to not be censored, but the machinery of censorship seems to work regardless of the subject being censored. Once it is built it will be used.

and that adult products have higher charge back rates

The banks are not wrong on this point. The industry is rife with bad practices on the customer side - teenage boys using their dad's credit cards, dads telling mum that a teenage boy used dad's credit card, people paying (real and virtual) card thieves for stolen credit cards to protect their anonymity, people who just feel comfortable committing so-called "friendly fraud" (i.e. buying something and taking advantage of the pro-consumer bias in the chargeback process to avoid paying for it) against a pornographer in a way they wouldn't against any other website, real post-purchase regret. And it isn't immune to bad practices on the website side - particularly hard-to-cancel subscriptions. Also, from a bank perspective, the low barriers to entry attract the kind of business that will be surprised by this and go bust under a wave of chargebacks leaving their acquiring bank with a loss.

Most banks are not interested in providing payment processing to the online smut industry for sound commercial reasons - it is a specialised market niche for banks who are happy dealing with massive chargeback fraud and whose fees reflect this. I suspect the Venn diagram of "Banks Valve management are comfortable working on Steam payments with" and "Banks which want to bank smut" looks like a pair of spectacles.

That these bans follow political winds is, I think, sufficient to demonstrate that the chargeback argument is just an excuse/soldier. This content has been around for years, being paid for by credit card, and the credit card companies didn't somehow not notice a high chargeback rate that whole time.

And throughout that time, being an acquiring bank for online smut peddlers has been a niche business that the JP Morgan Chases of the world don't really want to do.

Visa and Mastercard have always been happy to have payments for mainstream smut on their networks. It looks like they still are - Valve are saying that the problem with smut on Steam is being driven by their "payment processor" and that they are looking for an alternative, which strongly suggests that the party that wants out is the acquiring bank.

Visa and Mastercard have always been happy to have payments for mainstream smut on their networks.

You might be surprised.

That these bans follow political winds is, I think, sufficient to demonstrate that the chargeback argument is just an excuse/soldier.

Do they follow political winds? I don't think so.

In 2014, Chase Bank went after the personal accounts of "adult entertainers." This was part of Operation Choke Point, done under the Obama DOJ.

In 2021, OnlyFans banned adult content (I...guess this just didn't stick?) again due to banking issues. OnlyFans is based in the UK, but it seems it had issues with JPMorgan Chase as well.

This is just on a quick Google, I'm sure there's more examples out there.

In 2014, Chase Bank went after the personal accounts of "adult entertainers." This was part of Operation Choke Point, done under the Obama DOJ.

That sounds pretty damned political to me. Certainly it's not about chargebacks.

Then I think I misunderstood you - I agree that Choke Point was political, but I took you to be saying that it had to do with what party was winning at musical chairs this time, when it's actually a consistent feature across administrations - my mistake!

Operation Chokepoint was explicitly political in the sense that it was an Obama administration policy designed to achieve the policy goals of the Democratic party.

The identification of certain industries, including smut, as high-risk and the expectation that banks who choose to bank them have appropriate procedures in place rather than just handing out small business accounts on standard terms, is something that has been around for a very long time regardless of the party in power and reflects a combination of regulatory common sense (some industries really are fraud magnets) and bipartisan views on the role of the banking system (including, critically, the idea that banks should actively seek to avoid banking criminal businesses)

Before Operation Chokepoint was revealed, the explanation for the debanking, at least for payday lenders and porn, was exactly what you claim is the explanation here: those industries are high risk. This wasn't true; they were debanked because the government told them to. They may have actually been high risk, but the claim that they were being debanked for that was a coverup for the true reason. The lesson from this is that you should not just say "sure, those industries are high risk" and credulously believe that the credit card companies and payment processors are only reacting to market forces.

As you note, dealing with high risk has been around for a very long time. Which means that if the behavior changes, it probably isn't because of high risk, even if someone claims it is.

Operation Chokepoint was explicitly political in the sense that it was an Obama administration policy designed to achieve the policy goals of the Democratic party.

Isn't part of the point being made that when Operation Chokepoint was taking place, it's results were being explained away as "the identification of certain industries, including smut, as high-risk and the expectation that banks who choose to bank them have appropriate procedures in place rather than just handing out small business accounts on standard terms, is something that has been around for a very long time regardless of the party in power"?

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