I don't have a problem with e.g. DTRPG refusing to carry RAHOWA. I would have an issue with Mastercard telling DTRPG they can't carry RAHOWA, and that's the situation we have here.
That's exactly where I am. Stores can make their own decisions on what to carry, subject to the laws of jurisdictions they're selling in.
But payment processors shouldn't be essentially enforcing weird, vague and legally inconsistent "morality codes" themselves.
It's wholly inappropriate and anyone saying it wasn't a "slippery slope" has been proven wrong because we just slid down the slope quite a long way, from "plainly illegal" material not being worked with to "completely legal and with common themes in our society/media" material being demanded to be removed!
Again, if we follow the guidelines Visa and Mastercard have provided them, a bunch of Shakespeare plays, ASoIaF/Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades and so on are not allowed to be sold at all on Itch.io - I suspect Steam, being much more powerful, wealthy and litigious, has pushed back more firmly, given they don't seem to have published similar restrictions - but that further illustrates the problem and proves this is about bullying stores into specific morality, not about legality at all). And there's no real ESG excuse for it, because in the US, UK, and and EU, laws do not, generally, hold payment processors to account for the content of a site. Instead (and quite sensibly) they hold sites to account, and formally request payment processors stop doing business with ones they find to be illegal.
this kind of censorship is an old old play - next up is "degenerate art."
Yup massive "degenerate art" vibes from Visa/Mastercard's behaviour here.
Interesting quote from Collective Shout: "We called on Itch.io to remove r*pe and incest games that we argued normalised violence and abuse of women. Itch.io made the decision to remove all NSFW content. Our objections were to content that involved s*xualised violence and torture of women."
It sounds like they view the response as in many ways too broad.
I mean, liars going to lie.
They lie twice in that one short statement.
First off, they didn't just call on Itch.io to remove "r*pe and incest games" nor did they just object to "s*xualised violence and torture of women". That's a proven lie, because Collective Shout's members discussed quite openly the games and so on that they were targeting, and one the games they most wanted to get pulled down was
Detroit: Become Human (which isn't on Itch, but is on Steam), and which features none of that (but have some domestic violence, depicted very negatively, but I guess even depicting it at all isn't okay with these people). Also, they didn't "call on itch.io", they bullied Visa and Mastercard. That's like saying you "asked [your neighbour] to trim their hedges" when actually you just phoned the council and told them the neighbour's garden was a hazard and if they didn't send people down there to deal with it right now you were going to start phoning everyone, beginning with the newspapers.
Second off, Itch.io didn't "choose" or "make the decision" to remove all NSFW content. Itch.io have been clear about this. They were presented with a list of content that they had to remove of Visa/Mastercard would stop processing payments for them, and this was directly and wholly due to Collective Shout (as Itch.io have directly stated, link earlier in this thread). That list was pretty vast in what it encompassed, and as I've repeatedly noted, includes themes very common in mainstream and popular shows, books, and plays. The list of content they've been asked to remove correlates pretty well with the issues Collective Shout's members openly discussed that they wanted to get rid of.
Third off, Itch.io hasn't "removed" all NSFW content, they've just made it temporarily hard-to-find whilst they sort of what complies with the vague and nebulous rules and what doesn't. I'm assuming that's stupidity/lack of comprehension on the part of whoever wrote that not lying though.
