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?
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.
Stripe _says_ they will handle these type of payments, but more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform, no matter how vigilant you were, or even if the things you were selling were more rated R than rated X. Source: my own insider knowledge along with colleagues in the space.
(Note that OnlyFans did get attacked in this same way before and briefly attempted to pivot to non-adult content before rapidly backpedaling after a user and creator uproar.)
You can have chargebacks in crypto if the payment is scripted to allow chargebacks. It would be up to the merchant and the buyer on whether or not to allow that, and who would mediate the dispute.
I think the reasons consumers don't like cryptocurrency has more to do with its overwhelming use for and exposure to scams, fraud, money-laundering, etc. than with no chargeback support or having to foot the transaction fees...
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.
And there's just so many more things you can pay for. Physical stuff. Art prints and comics. Game mods. Art commissions. Services that aren't just video platforms (social media, hookup apps and so on). There's so much more stuff out there that's not child-friendly, and I bet that all of these categories have different amounts of financial risk atrached to them.
So why are all these different things grouped under the widest net, with the worst offenders being used as reason to deny processing to the entire market segment? Why did they ban all explicit content and not just porn site subscriptions or whatever else has the most chargebacks?
This comment thread is confidently trying to steer around this topic, but there is ideology mixed up in this, and probably to a way larger extent than you think.
This has always been a lie. I work preventing stolen credit cards from being used to buy gift cards.
Payment networks do not at all care about cutting you off for having chargeback heavy flow. They demonstrate their value to customers by supporting those chargebacks, they make $20 for every single one. If you have a large fraction of your payments causing chargebacks, they just charge you more money for the privilege. They won't cut you off unless you are obviously not doing anything to prevent credit card fraud or are party to the actual fraud itself. Payment networks don't even do that much to prevent fraud, because it doesn't hurt their business at all. Everyone knows you are protected when you use a credit card, and frequent demonstrations help that.
This has always come down to some fundamentalist "Christian" groups who keep spending big bucks suing anyone they can find who sells anything adult, and suing Visa and Mastercard as accessories. They are trying to ban porn, toys, adult content in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...
This is the group that drove Pornhub to delete 9/10ths of their library.
Compare their efforts to the australian group who got so much flak for demanding steam remove violently rapey games and yet are fine with steam still being full of sexually explicit games that aren't about simulating abuse.
I can't understand why people believe this lie. If it were true, you would not be able to buy a gift card over the internet at all.
No I can't. Can you elaborate?
Because this is too specific for your understanding of the reasons to be true. They'd just blanket ban anything NSFW.
Sorry, but that's just bullshit. This is nothing more than your standard pseudogovernmental meddling in the "just build your own financial infrastructure" vein, and it's coming from foreign countries this time rather than the US itself (it currently has an administration less hostile to business).
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/suing-visa-to-shut-down-por... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-...
And yes, naturally this is backed by the Christian right. They've tried to spin/redefine the whole anti-porn thing as anti-child trafficking, as that has more support.
Seriously though, I think the fix here is not who controls it but legislation that codifies when this type of payment deplatforming can (or cannot) be done. Make some carve-outs for smaller processors (e.g. if your church group wants to set up a pr0n-free version of Stripe, go to town)
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.
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.
The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review. Rather than reporting it to the platform, activists then threaten the platform through intermediaries and force them to change their policies to drop adult content.
1) non-consensual or illegal (CP) content could come with expensive lawsuits.
2) Adult content has higher abuse (charge-backs, fraud, etc..).
They're not. I highly recommend the podcast "Hot Money: who rules porn". It's about the internet "revolution" of porn, when it went from DVD to the Internet. It's very interesting and sometimes hilarious.
4 fingers are OK. 5 fingers are NOT. The payment card cartel has an unofficial list of what is and isn't OK to show. It becomes a different act when all fingers are involved and they don't want that. I kid you not.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/hot-money-who-rule...
In order to increase circulation of cryptocurrencies, you must make it easy and secure to deal in them. The way you do that is through... political sanctions in the form of financial and banking regulations.
Which are set by bodies vulnerable to religious pressures.
Short answer — there are lots of chargebacks and (sometimes) fraud around this content. Vanilla payment processors don’t like high rates of chargebacks and fraud.
> Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?
They use a high-risk payment processor that takes a much higher cut of each sale (basically as insurance).
Opposition to such measures often hinges on false notions of freedom and the purpose of law. One function of law is to teach men to be free in the genuine sense, not as being able to do what thou wilt, but to be able to do what you ought.
There's a reason pornography has a history as an instrument of wartime psyops.
Like freedom from want and freedom from fear, Mr. Roosevelt?
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.
It's not easy money. It's reputationally risky money, that requires EXPENSIVE moderation, defensive litigation potentially fraught with fraud and chargebacks. Follow the money.
The non-government organisations involved in those cases are either proxies that always support local politicians, or have been deliberately created to create opaque decision making source that is outside of legal or public scrutiny. As always, the ones who decide morals for the masses are the ones you can not even criticise. Unfortunately, even if you don't have such activist group, there is always a queue of well-intentioned citizens full of dreams of getting in bed with any politician, and having their 15 minutes of fame.
So one thing is to show who is the boss. Just as a slave owner who randomly kills a couple of slaves just to make others tremble in fear, US reminds others who sets the rules of international trade. The pretext is not that important.
Another is to keep public in check. A citizen who says “Sonic and Mario BDSM Chamber game? Wow, so unbelievable”, and shrugs it off is a bad citizen. Good citizens must react as prescribed to any real or imagined horror stories, be attracted to sexual content in media (or outraged by it, which is the same thing), and always fear the dangers that exist “outside”. The more they do that, the more they ignore the real world around them, and rely on imaginary protections the system and its members provide.
As political entertainers are interested in keeping the status quo that benefits all of them, they always choose the lowest common denominator views on such topics. It does not matter what you really think about it, it matters that you do the trick when the command is given: gasp with others, murmur with others, shake your head with others, decide that it must be stopped by existing powers with others (and therefore let them decide for you).
PornHub was famously not immune to the same thing. Porn industry attacked free streaming sites to remove everything that was not actively copyrighted, and directly provided by industry. It probably cost them a lot to organise that through politicians, journalists, activists — and payment processors. Ironically, the rhetoric you might call religious was used to help porn business.
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.
> But he was friendly with Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Ackman texted Banga, providing a link to Kristof’s story with his tweet: “Amex, VISA and MasterCard should immediately withhold payments or withdraw until this is fixed. PayPal has already done so.” (Ackman was unaware that American Express already did not allow its card to be used on adult sites.)
> Banga quickly wrote back: “We’re on it.”
> Then things began to move. Within days, Mastercard announced it had “instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance” of [PH] charges, saying it had found evidence of illegal activity and was continuing to investigate.
EDIT: The antisemitism in some replies is disgusting and I reject it entirely. This post is about a specific, publicly reported action by one individual, not about any religious or ethnic group. Any attempt to turn this into conspiracy-mongering is bigotry, not analysis. I don’t want that associated with my comment.
Exodus Cry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry explicit christian thinktank
Collective Shout - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout not explicitly christian, but mirrors Exodus Cry almost verbatim
Going down the rabbit hole of Financial Censorship also shows a few other bad actor sin this space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_censorship
FiLiA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiLiA hard conservative feminist group, hates transgender
Morality in Media (renamed to "National Center on Sexual Exploitation" to deceive as federal org) - Intersection of Conservatives and Christians, wanting to ban anything their bronze age beliefs indicate are bad.
CATiW - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Against_Trafficking_... , another far-conservative anti-trans hate group.
So close
Your characterisation is way off the mark. FiLiA is an organisation run by left-wing feminists and their conferences cover a wide range of issues affecting women and girls.
https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-acco...
it's really asinine how stripe decides what is and what isn't allowed.
(see also: "oh, you linked your stripe to ko-fi? banned forever!" happened to me, it'll happen to you!)
They are also the groups behind the closure of big porn sites like XTube, the short-lived purge of adult content on OnlyFans (one of the few battles they lost), and the scourge of age verification bills that are sweeping the US, UK, and Europe.
The goal with age verification laws is not to protect minors or fight CSAM (as much as they pretend it is) - it's to make it expensive and difficult to legally serve content that they disapprove of, producing a chilling effect. Note that the content they disapprove of is not limited to pornography, which is why many of these bills have such vague language that can apply to other things like information on abortion, or LGBTQ+ themed material. This is not an accident; the supporters of these policies are quite open about their intention.
This is a common myth. The concerted effort that we've seen over the last 5-10 years in particular is the direct consequence of intense lobbying from a handful of groups that are openly backed by or aligned with right-wing religious groups, especially (but not exclusively) evangelicals.
In case you have any doubts about whether "morality" is their motivation, one of the groups was literally called "Morality in Media", before renaming to the more official-sounding National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Despite the new name, they actually don't care very much about "sexual exploitation" as most reasonable people would define the term (such as child abuse) but instead consider all sex work to be "exploitation" and aim to ban legal sex work.
The real chargeback rate is actually incredibly low. Probably way less than Amazon or anyone selling physical objects.
The chargeback rates might just be higher than the payment processors feel like dealing with.
I’m more than fine with more transactions leaving the traditional credit card system.
Giving Visa a 3% surcharge on the entire economy never felt right
That's why porn stars can't have checking accounts (and then become targets of property theft and violent crime - because the criminals know they are unbankable, so they have piles of cash around.)
Fun fact: the most "Christian" religious states have the highest rates of teen pregnancy, rape, divorce, murder, property crime, etc. Plus christian religious leaders seem to be attracted to child sexual abuse like Elmo is to piles of cocaine.
I feel like maybe one should focus on cleaning up one's own moral house and lead by example before screeching to everyone else that they're going to hell for jerking off to a picture of a naked man or woman on the interwebs.
The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.
The religious right really has their claws into this administration, and the far right has a much larger say in things than it seems like they would based on their proportional representation in the population. Things like gerrymandering and closed primaries don't help.
Difference is in fees and licenses. Payment processors that process high risk payments (adult industry, gambling, etc...) have higher fees and need license from governing body (usually a national bank in country where the payment processor is registered). So if you process high risk payments as low risk you will get a fine from governing body and you risk to lose your license. And if you don't have a license for high risk payments you cannot process them.
I don't work there anymore, but I heard they lost SEPA license a couple of years ago because of risky transactions.
Now I am not sure if Visa and Master are forcing payment providers to give up high risk transactions or if they are forcing them to classify all transactions as low/high risk.
It could be through vouchers sold at gas stations, bank transfers, QR payment apps, etc. But CC has by far the best penetration and most alternatives are weak at best.
If you do figure out the alternative payment or distribution strategy immune to pressure through CC, then it changes targets to legal systems and NGOs. You'd want couples of congresspeople or to push back on that front.
The way the policies work, they would either have to use the latter processor for all transactions (which would be prohibitively expensive) or relegate all "adult" content to a completely separate company and domain, which would be a huge pain and expense to operate for something that constitutes a relatively small fraction of their business.
For evidence see, well, all the other institutions of the US federal government.
Edit: forgot to say, Mir cards used to work in a few other countries, for example, Turkey and Armenia. But eventually the US government pressured the banks in those countries to stop accepting Mir, because apparently that would somehow help defeat Putin or something.
This way, there is always a threat of businesses deciding not to do business with you by unaccountable forces.
Visa/Mastercard vs the government itself is bordering on a distinction without a difference.
From the perspective of the average business or person they're both wholly unaccountable.
If you're Kickstarter or some Megacorp, well then it probably just depends which you have more friends in high places.
tbh there's a case to be made that the government should run a payment processor as critical infrastructure
I only disagree with the "the" on the GP, they are para-governamental.
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”.
Because it cost more to check that my CC wasn't stolen when I buy NSFW?
Or because there are more chargeback?
If you go through and click all the links and hunt down the source, the final source underlying it all is a comic author who says, without quoting anything, or any proof, that that's the reason why. Just a random guy saying that Stripe made them ban it, without any evidence.
I'm the King of England. There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true.
Consider this excellent article on debanking by an author who works at Stripe: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
The machine grinds on regardless if we agree with it or not.
Sir/Ma'am, this is HN, we dont actually read the articles here. WE just look at the title and get outraged
See how that works? If you dont like a behavior, dont do the behavior.
Dont you tell US what you want us to do.
This is called freedom.
I think kickstarter is gonna have (or maybe already has?) a scam problem due to the rise of AI.
I've contributed to about 7 campaigns; only one didn't work out. But the person running it actually refunded me fully (about 200$) after 3 or 4 years of very occasional updates.
Mastercard/Visa/Banks don't want legal liability.
You're right that these are connected to FOSTA/SESTA, but you're missing the actual connection.
FOSTA/SESTA were not "well-intentioned". They were the product of lobbying from explicitly religious, anti-sex, anti-pornography groups. Those same groups are behind recent campaigns to require providing government ID to access pornography, to allow attorneys general to prosecute LGBTQ content, and to ban pornography from platforms like Steam and Itch.io.
FOSTA/SESTA have worked exactly as they were intended to! The intention was to make it harder to conduct sex work legally and safely, and they accomplished that goal!
These policies have little to do with FOSTA/SESTA themselves, in that the text of those laws has no bearing here. But those bills were the first big, national victory of these campaigns, and they used that momentum to raise absurd amounts of money to lobby for the other laws mentioned above, and to target financial infrastructure as an easy point of leverage to accomplish their goal of banning pornography across the Internet.
FOSTA-SESTA, the law that increased liability for platforms facilitating porn, passed 388-25 in the House and 97-2 in the Senate back in 2018. Every senate Progressive except one voted yes, including Sanders, Warren, Kamala Harris (AG against Backpage), Booker, etc. Anti-trafficking feminist groups like NOW backed that legislation, or were silent on it. Similarly, media outlets were either quiet or in vocal support, i.e., the NYTimes 2020 attack on Pornhub.
Circumventing payment processors bending the knee to puritanical pressure is why God must have created bitcoin.
This thread has some good talk about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841149)
Maybe I'm trippin.
https://raineyreitman.com/2024/06/11/transaction-denied-my-u...
What US companies are afraid of more is PR and regulatory risk. Zelle has no chargeback process, but still bans the sale of automatic knives, fireworks, ammo, and firearm parts. Venmo bans a nebulous category of "products that present a risk to consumer safety". You better not be buying any vintage lawn darts for your collection.
The chargeback rate on knives or firearm optics is probably not any higher than on anything else. What's higher is the likelihood of a headline along the lines of "kid dead / injured because of Paypal". And so, we end up with digital payment processors as the arbiters of morality.
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...
The adult category is a very touchy one. When one get's an OK to connect to the credit card network he has to go a very arduous procedure of being approved by a CC provider. Because the worst thing that can happen from a viewpoint of a payment provider is a return. At the exact moment when someone asks for a return on a credit card, the provider is the one who is responsible and has to revert the transaction instantly.
(That's why Banks are sooooo lengthy and pushy about you filing those claims. They don't want you to initiate the return.)
Now, if you sell weed, do gambling, sell crypto, do porn or anything else of that sort, you have to pay extra for your card processing, to offset all potential problems for the payment provider.
Problems? What problems? Well, a LOT of transactions for adult content and toys happen on stolen cards. And those cards are not stolen per say. It's just a kid taking parent's CC card, or your SO is using it without your knowledge. Once found, this results in a lot of scandals and quarreling. Followed by a return request. And those returns are very annoying to that. The service "technically" was delivered. But now you are loosing it. And the payments provider does not want to be hit by that.
In fact, this is not a news in the first place. When Kickstarter sign their agreement with the card provider, they specifically stated categories of services they will be responsible for. And I guess porn was not one of them. So what? Now the provider saw a chargeback because of the adult content and did the most standard thing: Went back to the documents, noted the fact that Kickstarter not suppose to be doing adult content, and went back to Kickstarter to tell them to stop.
I handle 2-3 of such cases per month. It's called routine.
But now, enter the world of entertainment. A quick search shows one that Kotaku is a subsidiary of a larger conglamerate G/O Media (Gizmodo - Onion). A private equity company that bought out a bunch of entertainment websites like Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Kotaku. It started in 2019, and went basically bankrupt by 2023. They have been selling their websites to different holdings. In 2025 Kotaku was sold to a Swiss conclamerate that put it into a line of similar useless media resources. And if you check the author - you'll find out that he is a well-established gaming reporter. With little knowledge of the money business.
And then this article makes it to HN.
