Kickstarter Is Forced to Ban Adult Content by Payment Processors

Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups?

Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions.

Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

This is the least of my concerns with Kickstarter. It’s so trivial to completely scam an entirely fake campaign, with zero repercussions, that no one should take this site seriously at all. I say this as someone who has backed a campaign that posted updates and even claimed that shipments were out while all the comments were the same: I received nothing.

The FT podcast series “Hot Money” season one explained a lot about this. Basically the payment card industry shapes what adult content is produced by governing the money flow.

https://www.ft.com/hot-money

So who is pressuring the processors?

My friend Rainey Reitman's new book about this phenomenon came out last month:

https://raineyreitman.com/2024/06/11/transaction-denied-my-u...

It feels like there's been a significant cinching of personal rights recently. I wonder if it has anything to do with crypto's relatively recent adoption by institutional movers. NordVPN offers crypto payments, I expect virtually every other operator would too. Seems like a good way to get adoption rolling. Tunnel to somewhere that providers will service without an ID check and stay more anonymous by the dint of the crypto exchange.

Maybe I'm trippin.

FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention.

Mastercard/Visa/Banks don't want legal liability.

There should be a national payment processing operator as an alternative to VISA/MC. Just like they do it in many other countries.

Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies?

Headline is misleading on multiple levels.

Kickstarter already banned pornographic content before this. They expanded the rules to include more specifics. That's it. That's the story. Everything else is speculation and anger-mongering.

> While the previous version of the page simply prohibited “Pornographic content,” it now contains some oddly specific restrictions, including, but not limited to, “implied sex acts,” “MILF/DILF” content, “implied nudity,” and anything featuring “female nipples/areolas, genitalia,” and “anuses.” Good heavens, they’ve even banned “buttocks.”

The article quotes some speculation from some other blog that is trying to link this to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel for maximum anger points:

> Why? According to a report by The Daily Cartoonist, Kickstarter may be under pressure from its payment processor, Stripe, which Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel and X proprietor Elon Musk partially own. Kickstarter and Stripe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However Stripe actually does service adult content sites. It just falls into a category of high-risk merchants that also includes travel sites, cryptocurrency, gambling, tobacco, and other categories where the chargeback rates are statistically much higher. They will service those sites, but you might have higher fees to compensate for the higher chargeback rates that come with those categories

Source https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-acco...

VISA is the government

You shall not receive money in "easy" ways.

Kickstarter should allow ACH transfer and checks for such projects. @#$% the man.

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."

I despise crypto and its shills, but damn if this is not some excellent use case for cryptocurrency.

Circumventing payment processors bending the knee to puritanical pressure is why God must have created bitcoin.

[dead]

I feel like if you’re going to write an article like this, you should at least engage with why it’s happening. Maybe deep down for some of the participants it’s a kind of moral thing, but mostly this is because payments for NSFW/porn stuff are dramatically more expensive. All of the “stuff” payment processors are doing is harder for NSFW/porn content, so that’s the main reason the processors want these companies to separate/cutoff that type of content.

EDIT: I’m kind of sensitive to getting downvotes on a comment. Do the downvoters think this is a high quality article giving a good amount of context for the upstream policy choices? Do the downvoters take me for supporting some kind of decision like this? Do you think I’m just wrong on my understanding of why these policies are made? I’d really encourage you to look into it. Google or chat something like “why do payment processors ban adult content”.