Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories.

There's no actual evidence in the article that payment processors made them do it. They actually banned pornography long before this. They just updated the terms to clarify what counted as pornography.

> Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it.

> Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

They're not? They would have the same high risk accounts and include the higher fees into their business model.

For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases. High enough that it messes with the credit and counterparty risk modeling that processors use. You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.

Theoretically, they could just split out "explicit" vs "normal" risk categories, but there's two top problems there: 1) it's just fundamentally a smaller-yet-way-more-annoying category than the rest of their payments, and 2) tons of your partners (banks etc etc) have blanket-banned for all of the above reasons.

So... here we are.

I don't think it's so much a religious lobbying thing as it is a consent and liability thing.

If you're a processor (payment or otherwise), you have to be absolutely sure there's no CP or non-consensual content on there. The penalty for even one thing to slip through is damning, and they're under extreme pressure to be the gatekeeper on all of this.

That means you have to manually review everything. That means paying someone to sit through and review all sorts of... questionable... media. A lot of work was shipping this off to overseas review farms. And we occasionally hear reports on how degrading and traumatizing this kind of work can be.

So for Visa, Mastercard, et al I think they are more or less chomping at the bit to just be completely out of this genre of businesses.

It's not religion, it's litigation and money.

1) non-consensual or illegal (CP) content could come with expensive lawsuits.

2) Adult content has higher abuse (charge-backs, fraud, etc..).

The payment processors say the reason is high fraud and charge-back rates in those industries that make it unprofitable to service. I don't know if this is true or an excuse. Either way, its an excellent reason why this critical infrastructure shouldn't be under corporate control.

Article and comments are underrating the impact of reputational risk on payment processors and on Kickstarter itself, for hosting/facilitating sexual content.

Some amount of adult comment is CSAM, or otherwise broadly disfavored. Some companies (Pornhub, OnlyFans) are willing to specialize in discriminating between “regular” adult content and the objectionable stuff, and they have payment processors similarly willing to specialize.

Some of that specialization involves being willing to take on political exposure. Mainstream payment processors are unusually exposed to risks like “being dragged in front of Congress” — there are a lot of reasons a politician might want to put pressure on a general financial infrastructure provider. So reducing obvious ways to get embarrassingly dragged in front of Congress is rational.

I think Mastercard and Visa are deathly afraid of having their nice duopoly regulated more tightly (as is already done in the EU) and therefore they consequentially put in a lot of effort to steer clear of topics that would give politicians a good excuse to do so.

Can’t they use some push payment methods where a qr gets scanned to send money, like venmo/cashspp?

> 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?

The driving force is mostly a group of nonprofits and lobbying groups that are backed by right-wing, mostly-but-not-exclusively evangelicals.

Over the last decade, they have successfully laundered their views into the mainstream to the point where many people don't realize how influential they have been in writing all of these laws and policies and driving them across the finish line.

None of this is hidden knowledge - they've been acting out in the open for years, but people have an aversion to acknowledging it, because it's an uncomfortable truth which triggers a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

Collective Shout is behind several major campaigns.

Info on its conservative lobbyist leader, their extreme views and hypocrisies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/1FHaaaIs6T

As for why they do it?

Because conservative Christian lobbying is a lucrative grift: https://youtu.be/ms26YefUNds?si=3KLCj1RALES3aKDT

The owner runs a for-profit speaking engagement business alongside the registered charity. Many such people get into right wing politics without necessarily holding real conviction for the causes because it’s an easy way to get lots of money.

It’s kind of like the market for drill music - fans love the stories of gang violence and aura of lawlessness, so artists will exaggerate and pretend or even foment actual violence so the market buys the product they’re looking for regardless of authenticity. The fans form the artists because of what they finance. The result is a product of the fandom more than a reflection of the artists true selves, though it relies on preserving the deception of extreme authenticity.

A similar American lobbyist group is Moms for Liberty. They’re funded by a billionaire and groups like the Heritage Foundation, the ones behind Project 2025.

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