Need to petition Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and American Express. I don't think trying to get Valve to reverse these recent changes will necessarily be effective, since they are being pressured by the payment processors and they definitely aren't going to risk not being able to effectively do business at all.

Under what arguments would we be able to push back on something like this? Most people would agree that these games where distasteful so arguing for them to be put back to not start a slippery slope isn't that easy it seems.

Mainly that the companies controlling nearly all digital financial transactions across the entire globe should not be the arbiters of what is morally acceptable. If they must exist at all, they should just be handling the transfer of funds regardless of what is being bought and sold*.

*illegal shit would not be protected.

They are parasitic middle men that don't need to exist in the first place, though.

i would expect the multi billionaire owners of the largest gaming platform on PC to have the ability to not fold like paper mache. I can also be mad at payment processors and valve at the same time

Yeah, nah.

Petition these people:

Just a moment...

(www.collectiveshout.org)

Collective Shout is sustained by a small number of Australian partners. These are not big groups, and would quickly pull funding under any sort of pressure.

Collective Shout has a deep history with Christofascism and TERFs, so highlighting those angles is the way to go to get them pariahed. Once CS is out of the picture, we can work on undoing the damage they did.

Kinda hard to stay at the top if you literally get blacklisted from doing financial transactions. Big as they are, they're nowhere near the same level as the payment processors.

Show people that game that was delisted because of them. The idea that they only took down pornographic games is wrong, they went after things that didn't fit their christofash narrative.

If they are dealing in US currency then the wording on the bill says it all. Legal tender for a debts public and private. When they print currency they don't say, "and this one can't be used for porn."

Petition: https://www.change.org/p/tell-mastercard-visa-activist-groups-stop-controlling-what-we-can-watch-read-or-play

*illegal shit would not be protected.

They can push for some law that makes certain groups or their depictions illegal. Then it's their morals becoming a law.
If there's corruption lobbying, there's a way for them to twist "immoral" into "illegal", which is fucked.

Signed, thanks for the link

Yeah but that is a whole other can of worms. I am against legal bribery, as well as certain things being illegal. Like drugs. Or most porn. But I also think slavery, CP, bestiality, nuclear weapons, etc should be illegal to buy, sell, or even produce.

Don’t give em any ideas

Archived page: https://archive.ph/Ttyr5

Just in case.

I would go further and say they shouldn't have the ability to block any transaction consumers are making, regardless of legality.

I basically want them classified like utilities (or the Internet), and the money they're processing should operate like digital networked cash. If I hand you a dollar bill, it doesn't arbitrarily decide to stop being money if it thinks the transaction might possibly be even tangentially related to crime. That's how you end up with these corporations becoming so invasive in the first place, with their overbroad policies blocking entire groups/categories from being in the economy.

Don't think that I'm pro-crime -- but only actual crime is crime. A transfer of funds itself is only sometimes a crime. You don't see the federal reserve trying to foil small-time drug deals in cash, and for good reason -- legitimate crimes should be investigated by law enforcement, not "prevented" at the whims of overeager corpos. It's not the payment processor's right or responsibility to prevent or they to predict crime, especially once they've built such a system as to become indispensable for most of us. If they are allowed to do that they will always do it the easy way -- blanket bans with massive collateral damage to non-criminals.

These companies should be disbanded and their systems should be handed over to the public. Hot take, I know, but I'm of the mind that transaction processing (much like air and water) should not be privatized. You may think at this point that I'm a crypto-head, but not really. It seemed promising at one point and may be still, but now it's perhaps permanently associated with unsavory types. I'll use it if it fits the purpose, but expecting the general public to use it as money is insanity. Crypto brought us part of the way there, but such a system can't really flourish in furtherance of the public good in the current environment -- even disregarding the bad PR.

"Hi there, would you like to sign the petition?"

The petition is directed at Visa and MasterCard. I'm not sure why the article says it's a petition directed at Steam, because it's not.

I wish it was feasible to hve a large scale boycott of visa and mastercard. american express is already useless so it wouldn't help much to include it...

Petitioning people to do something that is against their entire purpose doesn't seem like it would be effective.