> The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society"

That's their framing, it's not what they actually do.

If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand.

They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does.

In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.

> It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things;

In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.

If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.

It's pretty wild that people think that porn is more damaging to society than censorship.

> the claim is "this is damaging to society"

There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.

Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.

This is the exact claim of "hate speech" as well.

Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.

  > it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.

I think this is critical insight and applies to a lot of topics. I think it is true for pretty much every heated topic.

The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person.

Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...

No, this is killing revenue streams for people. You should be under a company to earn money. The problem is, more stupid the general populace is, more stricter rules will be introduced, otherwise you cannot keep the herd together.

The other common (valid) argument is that it's easy for children to access this content because they're already using Steam and unless they have mature content filters enabled, it's already trivial to bypass age gates by lying.

That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.

Even if thats their claim, I doubt it has evidence. What if its actually beneficial to society?

We regulate speech based on its damage to society? Well, sounds like a certain canidae TV network ought to be regulated out of existence.

They are talking about games, right? Somebody drew/built all of them, unlike porn.

> and I think they should be banned from doing so

In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.

Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.

To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.