The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.
The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.
> The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities.
This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
The issue is that the banks all move in lock step, undermining the basic principle of the free market.
If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad. The cumulative effect is a chilling of protected speech in a way that congress could never legally get away with.
"The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable"
I think it is about charge backs. Visa and mastercard hate charge backs. Porn has a very high charge back rate and these cost card companies so much they will often just cancel the merchant agreement. With a charge back there is human customer service involved, customer denials, fraud and complicated dispute resolution. This is why the processors that specialize in porn (ccbill) charge up to %15 per transaction. I don't think the processors wanted to go after onlyfans - they just would rather not deal with the drama. However, like onlyfans discovered, if you offer to pay a %15 per transaction fee - processors will work with you. Processors do not have morals - they are just trying to make money. They don't mind handling transactions for gun sales, tobacco, strip clubs or pyramid schemes.
This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
I don't think causation runs one way. The financial industry & "Government" aren't clearly delineated. You can see this all the time in "compliance." Banks will commonly cite "compliance," essentially blaming the regulator for various policies. If you ask the regulator itself, they'll generally consider a lot of that stuff bank policy.
The way in which banking regulation works in practice creates a ton of ambiguities like this. "Compliance" is basically the area between regulation and internal policy. One firm will adopt a policy, which has all sorts of compliance implications. Another will copy them. The regulator grows to expect it, and it develops from there.
I don't think it's getting causation wrong, it's just confusing 'accountable to [in its opinion] the wrong entities' with 'unaccountable'.
The banks are accountable to their boards which are accountable to their shareholders, which (the ones that matter) are increasingly .. I hate to use the word but 'woke' activists - nudging companies in the 'right' direction either from a moral standpoint or from a perceived moral standpoint of customers/public at large.
Progressively (as in a simple progression over time, not the political sense) investing in/lending to/providing the current account for, defence/tobacco/oil/sex are becoming bad looks, to the big voteholders even if not in general.
If people really want to fix this, they'll go back to creating independent web sites... Social media lures people in, takes a significant part of real money generated from creators, and then slowly tightens rules to protect it's own interests and profit while forsaking creators and that includes gradual suppression of promotional equality for creators.
The whole scheme to make creators pay to run ads is a failed ideology if creator content is the very thing that platforms depend on to succeed.
This is why I always edit/record to files I can re-use/re-distribute rather than using native record options on platform-specific apps.
Since the Obama administration's Operation Chokepoint, banks are loath to process transactions from certain industries, including porn, cannabis, and guns -- lest they incur greater regulatory scrutiny. This scrutiny comes whether the transactions are legal or not.
> The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.
"The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks"
Where exactly are the banks at risk or accountable?
Are we talking about fraud, or potential criminal investigation because of underaged girls forced to do onlyfans by mafia (I can imagine that) and money transfer via their bank?
You can't sell dildos with most credit card providers and PayPal. That has nothing to do with risk, I am allowed to resell cheap China stuff with a much higher return rate than the average dildo shop
If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.
The answer to regulation gone wild is not more regulation, it is to remove regulatory power. You can’t dig your way out of a hole.
I have to ask. Who is going to hold banks responsible for their role as just a payment gateway and not the actual people involved or the service?
This is like saying banks are responsible for a drug mafia using a laundromat for "money washing" by using sales proceeds of a laundromat depositing into the said bank and sending it away.
This article completely misses the causes of the rule changes. Banks and payment processes pushed new rules because they were being held accountable. The changes were all implemented in response to hugely influential NYT opinion piece on PornHub in December [1] that specifically called out payment processors, and preempted a BBC investigation into OnlyFans that was hinted to do the same [2].
The conversation here should about how rulemaking via media outrage is a problem given the public has conflicting morals.
I suspect that "accountability" is a problematic frame. Platforms are the accountability mechanism, increasingly so.
As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.
But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? of all the possible battles to lead, children and the sanity of adults would be their battlehorse? If so, I admire it.
Looks like the same thing as wikileaks to me. A combination of bad optics and lawyers getting involved causing a monopolistic supplier to pull their services.
Doubt this has much to do with MasterCard attacking the adult industry, it looks more like they want to strongly protect their existing stranglehold on the payment systems. Anything which impacts the way they're seen costs them real actually money I'd bet at their scale.
Oh please come on, stop with the monopoly rhetoric Only Fans is no where near a monopoly. It just comes across as truly naive to throw that term around in every conversation.
This issue happens evey decade or so. Last time it was wikileaks and VPNs being delisted by american credit card companies. That popularized cryptocurency and saw bitcoin rise as a censorship-beating payment system. And last week i signed up for a VPNs using my visa without issue. After that they went after filesharing platforms like rapidshare. Now "file lockers" are called "cloud storage" and are a normal online service. This time they are going after porn, an old favorite for US companies to hate. It will again come to nothing.
Is it either a form of discrimination that doesn’t line up with any protected class, or a bona fide discrimination against areas that have a high chargeback rate?
I’m interested in how much the morals we don’t like line up with the cold stats we would follow.
I was thinking of this just the other day. Just the past few weeks, Apple with CSAM, OnlyFans getting between people and their fans/clients. All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming?
The platform and banks also do not allow the following list items which are varying degrees of legal. There are categories that they crack down upon which are entirely legal and that doesn't sit well with me.
I believe central-bank digital currencies will solve this problem if they offer transactions that are guaranteed anonymous, unless there is some kind of law enforcement warrant to inspect them. This will be a much more sane and accountable system than the robber baron system of unaccountable gatekeepers.
This story cannot be discussed in any meaningful way without reference to Wikileaks being fully denied access to payment tech while having been charged with no crime.
Indeed - Payment companies like Visa and Mastercard enforcing American cultural and religious conservatism on other countries and nations is an illegal situation - per other countries' laws.
These are effectively monopolies. It doesnt matter whether there's two of them. If they collectively enforce something onto the people of other countries - like Europe - then they are violating those countries' laws
They must be investigated and regulated accordingly in Europe. American culture and American laws do not apply to Europe.
It isn't just payment processing. Recently looking at various ethical ETFs, I'm finding that they all filter out companies for social harm. Which includes porn. Even the green ETFs. So on the first few paragraphs of the disclosure doc you are investing in companies with carbon targets meeting whatever criteria, no fossil fuels, etc. And next find out they are also skipping gambling, guns, tobacco and adult entertainment.
> for these corporations this is not a matter of free expression, as it ought to be, but one of morality
Is it really true that banks block transactions related to sex work because they are morally against it? Last time I checked banks just want to make money. This is a genuine question by the way.
> But just a few weeks in, Twitch shut it down after a change of policy that included, among other things, a ban on visible nipples for those who “present as women”. At a time when societal views around gender and sexuality are in many ways opening up, restrictions on sexual expression [...] feel positively archaic and seem to demonstrate that [...] there remain highly unaccountable powers making decisions about how we express something so utterly natural and human.
Although I fully support the free the nipple movement, I can absolutely understand that a streaming platform wants to ban nudity / sexual content. Sure, sex is natural and normal, but compared to other human behaviour it is still in a league of its own.
I actually agree with the term "Unaccountable". Sure, the banks have their boards and share holders, so do the tech companies.
The question is not whether they have internal accountability, but rather if they have public accountability to their declared statements, their stated mission and non-written guarantees given by officials to the public.
Many companies like these paint themselves as for-public, while I know and so do you, that is not true, but companies should be held accountable for the image they try to portray, they should be held accountable for public announcements no matter the personnel change.
So yes, the platforms and banks have unaccountable power, given by us the public, based on false promises and sales pitches. And we the public have the power to stops that, by making them accountable, but we are the ones who have to do that, by pointing the finger at the root decision makers in those monstrous structures of organizations.
On the contrary, they are doing it as society will blame them if they do not and they will suffer if it turns out they were involved in child pornography.
Banks are not moralists on a crusade. They love making money, but they fear risk. Dealing in the adult industry is a huge public relations and legal risk.
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.
> The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities.
This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad. The cumulative effect is a chilling of protected speech in a way that congress could never legally get away with.
[+] [-] ransom1538|4 years ago|reply
I think it is about charge backs. Visa and mastercard hate charge backs. Porn has a very high charge back rate and these cost card companies so much they will often just cancel the merchant agreement. With a charge back there is human customer service involved, customer denials, fraud and complicated dispute resolution. This is why the processors that specialize in porn (ccbill) charge up to %15 per transaction. I don't think the processors wanted to go after onlyfans - they just would rather not deal with the drama. However, like onlyfans discovered, if you offer to pay a %15 per transaction fee - processors will work with you. Processors do not have morals - they are just trying to make money. They don't mind handling transactions for gun sales, tobacco, strip clubs or pyramid schemes.
[+] [-] dalbasal|4 years ago|reply
I don't think causation runs one way. The financial industry & "Government" aren't clearly delineated. You can see this all the time in "compliance." Banks will commonly cite "compliance," essentially blaming the regulator for various policies. If you ask the regulator itself, they'll generally consider a lot of that stuff bank policy.
The way in which banking regulation works in practice creates a ton of ambiguities like this. "Compliance" is basically the area between regulation and internal policy. One firm will adopt a policy, which has all sorts of compliance implications. Another will copy them. The regulator grows to expect it, and it develops from there.
Market centralisation encourages this a lot.
[+] [-] LMYahooTFY|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
The banks are accountable to their boards which are accountable to their shareholders, which (the ones that matter) are increasingly .. I hate to use the word but 'woke' activists - nudging companies in the 'right' direction either from a moral standpoint or from a perceived moral standpoint of customers/public at large.
Progressively (as in a simple progression over time, not the political sense) investing in/lending to/providing the current account for, defence/tobacco/oil/sex are becoming bad looks, to the big voteholders even if not in general.
[+] [-] winternett|4 years ago|reply
The whole scheme to make creators pay to run ads is a failed ideology if creator content is the very thing that platforms depend on to succeed.
This is why I always edit/record to files I can re-use/re-distribute rather than using native record options on platform-specific apps.
I make music, not adult content though just FTR.
[+] [-] jbverschoor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdasdf|4 years ago|reply
This is exactly the case.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|4 years ago|reply
Where exactly are the banks at risk or accountable?
Are we talking about fraud, or potential criminal investigation because of underaged girls forced to do onlyfans by mafia (I can imagine that) and money transfer via their bank?
[+] [-] hanniabu|4 years ago|reply
One of the great usecases for crypto
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] herbst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgh2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mylons|4 years ago|reply
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/01/germany-orders-deutsche-bank... is just the first result from a google search
[+] [-] snarf21|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kingkawn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adolph|4 years ago|reply
The answer to regulation gone wild is not more regulation, it is to remove regulatory power. You can’t dig your way out of a hole.
[+] [-] 2Gkashmiri|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saddlerustle|4 years ago|reply
The conversation here should about how rulemaking via media outrage is a problem given the public has conflicting morals.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865
[+] [-] recursivedoubts|4 years ago|reply
The Guardian merely has a problem with this particular application of it.
[+] [-] sarabad2021|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghomrassen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theelous3|4 years ago|reply
Post nut clarity is apparently a financial problem.
[+] [-] dalbasal|4 years ago|reply
As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.
[+] [-] laurent92|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rob_c|4 years ago|reply
Doubt this has much to do with MasterCard attacking the adult industry, it looks more like they want to strongly protect their existing stranglehold on the payment systems. Anything which impacts the way they're seen costs them real actually money I'd bet at their scale.
[+] [-] colordrops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Guthur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-dude|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301199
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
[+] [-] Causality1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobylane|4 years ago|reply
I’m interested in how much the morals we don’t like line up with the cold stats we would follow.
[+] [-] leeroyjenkins11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryeguy_24|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadilay|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point ammunition sales cable box de-scramblers coin dealers credit card schemes credit repair services dating services debt consolidation scams drug paraphernalia escort services firearms sales fireworks sales get rich products government grants home-based charities lifetime guarantees lifetime memberships lottery sales mailing lists/personal info money transfer networks online gambling pawn shops payday loans pharmaceutical sales Ponzi schemes Pornography[5] pyramid-type sales racist materials surveillance equipment telemarketing tobacco sales travel clubs
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harry8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregd|4 years ago|reply
Fine.
Crypto solves this issue...
[+] [-] unity1001|4 years ago|reply
These are effectively monopolies. It doesnt matter whether there's two of them. If they collectively enforce something onto the people of other countries - like Europe - then they are violating those countries' laws
They must be investigated and regulated accordingly in Europe. American culture and American laws do not apply to Europe.
[+] [-] stubish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] float4|4 years ago|reply
Is it really true that banks block transactions related to sex work because they are morally against it? Last time I checked banks just want to make money. This is a genuine question by the way.
> But just a few weeks in, Twitch shut it down after a change of policy that included, among other things, a ban on visible nipples for those who “present as women”. At a time when societal views around gender and sexuality are in many ways opening up, restrictions on sexual expression [...] feel positively archaic and seem to demonstrate that [...] there remain highly unaccountable powers making decisions about how we express something so utterly natural and human.
Although I fully support the free the nipple movement, I can absolutely understand that a streaming platform wants to ban nudity / sexual content. Sure, sex is natural and normal, but compared to other human behaviour it is still in a league of its own.
[+] [-] uda|4 years ago|reply
The question is not whether they have internal accountability, but rather if they have public accountability to their declared statements, their stated mission and non-written guarantees given by officials to the public.
Many companies like these paint themselves as for-public, while I know and so do you, that is not true, but companies should be held accountable for the image they try to portray, they should be held accountable for public announcements no matter the personnel change.
So yes, the platforms and banks have unaccountable power, given by us the public, based on false promises and sales pitches. And we the public have the power to stops that, by making them accountable, but we are the ones who have to do that, by pointing the finger at the root decision makers in those monstrous structures of organizations.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
Banks are not moralists on a crusade. They love making money, but they fear risk. Dealing in the adult industry is a huge public relations and legal risk.