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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25267 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.

Texas HB 1181 was passed near-unanimously. It contained two requirements for porn sites: age verification, and a surgeon-general style warning. Nothing about payments.

There’s clearly some interest in suppressing pornography. While I can’t say whether they provided MasterCard or Visa with the impetus, I expect they would endorse payment processors’ restrictions.

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