Itch.io deindexes NSFW games after becoming the latest target of skittish credit card companies and anti-porn group Collective Shout, catching an award-winning indie and more in the crossfire
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Time to order all your dildos, KY, condoms, swings, and penis pumps for life before those things get banned. Sure they'll come back one day, but do you have time to wait for that?
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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.
Oh thank you and excuse me, my bad
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Fuck that. They can collectively shout into this asshole. All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.
Lol what are you people ever going to do.
You can't just wait until you're mad to do something. It takes years building networks and getting everyone on board.
Totally doable if people had a bit of common sense but the reason why the right are kicking ass and doing this stuff is because people now are pretty brain washed and can't figure out how most of the stuff that they fight for are also the things they need to stop in order to prevent this stuff. But because they will never figure that out, you'll never get anywhere.
Just an example, we should have recognized the same tools that let content creators get paid was going to be the same tools that politicians would use to manipulate and lie to people popularising fascism again. Thanks PewDiePie
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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.
Also, relevant:
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
--- John Gilmore, founding member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn’t like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don’t redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
--- also Gilmore
Gilmore also stated that the denotation of the saying has broadened over time:
The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
I am generally bearish on the future of Internet censorship. The Internet helps facilitate some things that one might not like, extensive profiling. But it also is very good at distributing information, and I think that in general, the availability of information in the future will be greater than in the past. I do not think it likely that our future will, on the balance, be more-censorious than our past.
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Just pointing out the obvious here, but the problem isn't organizations like Collective Shout. And there has been a rather worrying development of this issue where people seem to focus on these organizations rather than the actual problem.
Payment processing is a utility.
Credit card companies should not be allowed to pick and choose who they allow and who they block. That's the job of the government. Anything illegal can be blocked, but blocking anything legal such as the delisted games, or the Japanese manga sites that visa and MasterCard killed, should count as discriminatory practice and antitrust violation.Japan is on track to force credit card companies to allow all legal transactions indiscriminately, and we need the same thing to happen in the EU and US. Once we have this fixed, organizations will be forced to instead try to outlaw the games, which is a million times harder.
If we bully organizations like collective shout out of existence, new ones will pop up to take its place, and the cycle repeats, but if we regulate credit card companies, we essentially cure the disease.
Actually insane to say that Collective Shout is blameless. Go look at the vile shit their members are spewing. Not only are they demonstrably culpable for this, they're also engaging in hate speech and disinformation and targeted harassment.
The payment situation is also to blame.
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The LGBTQ suppression slippery slope is here...and it didn't even take these fucking fascists an extra week
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Actually insane to say that Collective Shout is blameless. Go look at the vile shit their members are spewing. Not only are they demonstrably culpable for this, they're also engaging in hate speech and disinformation and targeted harassment.
The payment situation is also to blame.
to say that Collective Shout is blameless
Twitter is not, as it turns out, the only place where well articulated sentences get misinterpreted.
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Ironic, considering some of Jesus's best friends were hoes
And he despised the rich. Turns out Christianity today is what it always has been, consolidation of (male) wealth and power. It never really had much to do with the teachings of Jesus
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Actually insane to say that Collective Shout is blameless. Go look at the vile shit their members are spewing. Not only are they demonstrably culpable for this, they're also engaging in hate speech and disinformation and targeted harassment.
The payment situation is also to blame.
I love the mental gymnastics of saying that you’re a feminist and also anti-abortion. The only way a woman gets pregnant is from sperm. And in 99% of cases, that was through the interaction with a man. And it may have not been consensual.
But either way, now said woman is bound to modify her body and life because of her interaction with a man, rather than being able to make her own choice, because you said so and you know what’s best for her. She’s “empowered” to be a good little breeder and produce either men or other breeders because apparently that’s what women are good for when you take away their autonomy, which is really what these groups want. Which, is also a big reason why they hate trans women. Trans women cannot do the only job a woman should have, which is to produce offspring.
They would build such an amazing society! With so many empowered women! Freed from the shackles of being able to think or decide for themselves, ready to fulfill their ultimate dream of producing offspring, taking care of offspring, and then dying.
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Christ card companies are evil. We need alternatives
Christ card
Ironically, yes, at this point
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Ironic, considering some of Jesus's best friends were hoes
What's Jesus have to do with Christianity? Christianity has always been Paul's religion, not Jesus'.
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The LGBTQ suppression slippery slope is here...and it didn't even take these fucking fascists an extra week
Yeah, Mass Effect, Witcher, and Cyberpunk 2077 are just a few games among many that these groups would love to target and take down for giving lgbtq options. Could forsee a future where games have to start self censoring themselves to try to avoid demonetization. Best case scenario is they only censor in certain countries.
So those who think it is just attacking porn games and don't care because they play normal games will be in for a rude awakening if these groups get their way.
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Yeah, Mass Effect, Witcher, and Cyberpunk 2077 are just a few games among many that these groups would love to target and take down for giving lgbtq options. Could forsee a future where games have to start self censoring themselves to try to avoid demonetization. Best case scenario is they only censor in certain countries.
So those who think it is just attacking porn games and don't care because they play normal games will be in for a rude awakening if these groups get their way.
steam and itch capitulated here because indy games are small potatoes. the calculation changes if they start going after $70 AAA titles selling millions of copies.
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Payment processors shouldn't have this kind of power, it's insane.
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Yeah, Mass Effect, Witcher, and Cyberpunk 2077 are just a few games among many that these groups would love to target and take down for giving lgbtq options. Could forsee a future where games have to start self censoring themselves to try to avoid demonetization. Best case scenario is they only censor in certain countries.
So those who think it is just attacking porn games and don't care because they play normal games will be in for a rude awakening if these groups get their way.
Funny enough I have DRM free rips of these from my steam account.
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Always is the same thing. Why USA decides in other countries? Is Itchio international, right?
Collective Shout is Australian.
And banks are bigger than nations at this point, what they say goes.
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Lol what are you people ever going to do.
You can't just wait until you're mad to do something. It takes years building networks and getting everyone on board.
Totally doable if people had a bit of common sense but the reason why the right are kicking ass and doing this stuff is because people now are pretty brain washed and can't figure out how most of the stuff that they fight for are also the things they need to stop in order to prevent this stuff. But because they will never figure that out, you'll never get anywhere.
Just an example, we should have recognized the same tools that let content creators get paid was going to be the same tools that politicians would use to manipulate and lie to people popularising fascism again. Thanks PewDiePie
Tbh, I didnt know this group exists until this happened. So sometimes an event happens, you get mad, and you do something about it. Thats usually how most people come to action.
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Great great so what's the bloody point in itch now then?
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steam and itch capitulated here because indy games are small potatoes. the calculation changes if they start going after $70 AAA titles selling millions of copies.
They don't need to. AAA developers will start backing down on their own because they don't want to risk the confrontation.
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Start a new site and make them free to troll the card agencies.
