Itch.io is shadowbanning or deleting NSFW and LGBTQ content

My point is if we can't discuss politics, then we can't engage THIS particular topic fully ....

Mod Note:
Fully? Perhaps not.

But, EN World does not hold that treating people fairly, without discriminating against them due to gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, and so on, is anything more than being a good human.

We cannot go deeply here into how some choose to use the machines of governance to impose on others. But standing up and saying, "Hey, that's messed up!" about something in our gaming hobby is thoroughly within bounds.
 
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Is it your view that you cannot choose with whom to do business?
As an individual, I totally can. I can spend my money wherever I choose.

As a business, I have an obligation not to discriminate based on various things. I can't refuse service to black people, for example, or relegate them to a separate part of my business.

And if I'm running a business that performs a vital infrastructure service, such as facilitating payments for e-commerce, I should be required to provide those services to all comers unless otherwise prohibited by law (e.g. money laundering).

I would also argue that something being in poor taste doesn't mean it should be illegal.
 

Obviously it’s jurisdiction dependent, but in most places you cannot choose not to do business with somebody based on their membership of a protected class.
This reminds me of the wedding cake maker several years ago, and if he should be forced to make a cake for a gay wedding which he did not want to claiming religious beliefs. This thread seems to have the opposite view in that the religious people are forcing themselves on the other side.

How (I feel) that is relevant to this topic is that engaging in public discussion within a community is more productive with a better understanding of the community's generally shared views.
I do not think that the community has a lot of shared views on a lot of topics. There seems to be a lot of right/left/center leaning people here and how much each group is vocal about things might depend on the topic at hand.
 

Hear here, @Umbran. And this is deeply messed-up.

Question for those who know a lot more about this stuff than I do: what recourse does the average LGBTQIA+ ally (me) have in this situation? Does anyone have any ways to push back? I play a lot of games that are tagged as "NSFW" and/or "LGBTQ+" on Steam--Stardew Valley and Baldur's Gate 3 most recently, neither of which I would classify as pornographic--and I don't want to log in one day and find them gone.
 
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Hear here, @Umbran. And this is deeply messed-up.

Question for those who know a lot more about this stuff than I do: what recourse does the average LGBTQIA+ ally (me) have in this situation? Does anyone have any ways to push back? I play a lot of games that are tagged as "NSFW" and "LGBTQ+" on Steam--Stardew Valley and Baldur's Gate 3 most recently, neither of which I would classify as pornographic--and I don't want to log in one day and find them gone.
Write to your local politician expressing your dismay that unaccountable, uncontrollable, international payment processing companies are deciding morality and harming LGBTQ+ people and others, and hurting perfectly legal content, and further, are clearly vulnerable to political manipulation from other countries, and suggest that they need to be regulated/restricted, I would say.

I mean, unless you local politician thinks that's cool, but even then you might be able to craft a letter than hits an angle that they don't like, because almost everyone, right and left, can find something to hate about this. It's certainly potentially threatening to everyone, because effectively we've become completely reliant on these companies, and they can now choose whether we can buy things or not, and that's only going to get worse until they get regulated. Right now that's being turned against LGBTQ+ people, anyone who creates anything even sexuality-adjacent, and so on, but it'll be turned against others.

Also, I don't have the addresses, but write directly to the people in charge of those companies, Visa, Mastercard, etc. - that's what these freaks did. Hell, if you look into it, you may be able to take their addresses they used! And say that it's not okay for them to hurt LGBTQ+ people and perfectly legal businesses just because someone in another country doesn't like them.

I suspect the whole thing will come to a head in the next decade anyway, and either will see heavy regulation on payment processors and those who use them or push people toward crypto (I hope not the latter).
 


Also, I don't have the addresses, but write directly to the people in charge of those companies, Visa, Mastercard, etc. - that's what these freaks did. Hell, if you look into it, you may be able to take their addresses they used! And say that it's not okay for them to hurt LGBTQ+ people and perfectly legal businesses just because someone in another country doesn't like them.
There's some info in this BlueSky thread that looks useful:
 

Hear here, @Umbran. And this is deeply messed-up.

Question for those who know a lot more about this stuff than I do: what recourse does the average LGBTQIA+ ally (me) have in this situation? Does anyone have any ways to push back? I play a lot of games that are tagged as "NSFW" and "LGBTQ+" on Steam--Stardew Valley and Baldur's Gate 3 most recently, neither of which I would classify as pornographic--and I don't want to log in one day and find them gone.
I have posted link to at least one petition in one of my previous post. If you are living in EU you can also try to contact Central Bank of Europe, which is supposed to enforce regulations that make the practice used by Visa and Mastercard illegal, but are not enforcing them. If we get EU to step in maybe they can put the opposite pressure on them.
 

This reminds me of the wedding cake maker several years ago, and if he should be forced to make a cake for a gay wedding which he did not want to claiming religious beliefs. This thread seems to have the opposite view in that the religious people are forcing themselves on the other side.
That's actually a misunderstanding of the case(s) on your part. It's a common misunderstanding but still a misunderstanding. Or concluding that it relates to this demonstrates a lack of understanding of the case(s), rather.

If the wedding cake maker in question had refused to sell any kind of cake at all to the person because they were gay or black or w/e, they would have lost that case(s) in both the UK and the US, because they'd be just straightforwardly violating the law.

The specific issue was, in both the UK and US cases, that they were being asked to create a CUSTOM-DESIGNED wedding cake for a gay couple who were getting married, and that's different, from a legal perspective, to just "doing business with", or selling something to someone of a protected class. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is (and to be honest, I think it should be, otherwise you could force artists to draw homophobic pictures etc).

As such it was a free speech case, because of the CUSTOM-DESIGN of the cake, not a simple case about goods and services. The determination, in both the somewhat homophobic region of the US this happened in, and in the UK, one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world (just we have an insanely transphobic media and politician class right now, that's a long story, but most of it is down to "JK Rowling sucks real bad and is real rich and the media worships her as a dark god"). Like, if I went to a cake maker and said "Yo, I need a cake which says Call of Duty Sux, Battlefield Rulez", they could say "Nah mate, I disagree, not making that", and that applies even with protected classes, because it's a free speech thing essentially.

Here's an okay Wikipedia article on the UK case: Lee v Ashers Baking Company Ltd and others - Wikipedia

EDIT - Note particularly that Peter Tatchell, one of the bravest and strongest gay rights activists in recent British history agreed, ultimately, that no-one should be able to be forced to write/say something they disagreed with, because obviously this is a double-edged sword, and it's best that no-one gets cut!

Absolutely none of that is relevant to a payment processor, because they're not making something custom, they're not expressing free speech at all, by generically enforcing the bigotry of weird Australians who they are inexplicably afeared of. They are supposed to just process payments, not to try and enforce foreign morality on perfectly legal businesses.
 
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