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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.

A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)

Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.

EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.

Via conversations with the people who are most affected by this, those who use sites like Pixiv commercially, they seem to believe that there's a cabal of anti-porn American Evangelicals behind payment processing restrictions. This seems to be approximately a consensus. When I tried to question them on alternative hypotheses involving a Visa/Mastercard Duopoly, even the "moderate" suggestion that excess chargebacks is the primary motive for not wanting to deal with adult content, there was a lot of pushback. Didn't even risk discussing right-wing hypotheses involving debanking or Operation Chokepoint. My impression was that they pattern match all politics they dislike to political groups they dislike regardless of whether there's actually a link.

The prevailing Twitter conspiracy is that it’s the British to blame. Because the UK has been trying to age verify porn since like 2015 (even though, as of yet, this hasn’t been implemented afaik) many of the world’s major age verification software providers are located in the UK and they’ve lobbied extensively both in parliament and as part of UK trade missions abroad. There was one in Japan recently.

(even though, as of yet, this hasn’t been implemented afaik)

I still don't understand why this is some impossibility. Is it really that huge a technical issue or does British policy just move at a glacial pace?

MindGeek claims to have the tech fully ready to go for a UK-standards version (and that's the subtext behind PornHub, a MindGeek subsidiary, not complying with the American age verification versions), and MindGeek says that it's actually in use in Germany since 2015. It's definitely the political economy of things.

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