Private censorship rising: How payment processors are silencing legal content - Vegter

Key topics:Payment processors are enforcing vague content bans on platformsLobby groups pressure companies to censor legal adult-themed materialCensorship bypasses law enforcement, threatening free speech globally.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Ivo Vegter*.Governments are dangerous agents of censorship. Behind the scenes, however, there are far less accountable private censors, acting on behalf of self-appointed fringe moralists.Steam, the world’s most popular full-featured video game distribution platform, quietly added a new rule for game developers.In addition to the usual list of sanitary precautions for games it offers to its users – which prohibits all the expected objectionable content – it added a 15th prohibition: “Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.”.The new rule coincided with the removal of certain adult-themed games from the Steam platform. These games reportedly involved fantasy scenarios of what many (including me) would consider questionable activities. Valve, the company that operates the Steam platform, confirmed that it removed these games without any notice to the developers or players at the behest of its payment providers.As rules go, the new addition is terribly vague.Checking with payment processors (like Visa and Mastercard) does not make things much clearer. Perhaps acquiring banks and merchants get access to better information, but I couldn’t find any detailed description of what is and isn’t allowed, or what measures merchants are expected to implement to detect, remediate and prevent illegal content on their sites.The claimed goal of these processors is to act against, and prevent, illegal transactions on their network.It extends beyond adult content, and also covers online gambling, dating sites, escort services, pharmacies, cloud storage and file sharing services, financial trading platform, cryptocurrency platforms, telemarketing, and tobacco (but not alcohol) sales.At first glance, this sounds unobjectionable, and the intent, of course, is noble. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The effect of this morality policing by payment processors is a widespread chilling effect on free speech and legal content, and actual social harm..Other victims.Other platforms have also fallen foul of the wagging fingers and extortionate power of payment processors.Itch.io, a distributor of indie games, has also had to scurry to block access to not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, while it conducts a detailed review of the content it hosts and its policies to block content that might violate laws, somewhere in the world.Five years ago, The New York Times ran a major exposé on Canadian company, Mindgeek, which publishes adult websites including the popular PornHub. It documented several cases of non-consensual content, including of under-age victims of trafficking, and claimed that it was easy to discover such content on the site.Although PornHub responded by deleting most of its content, including not only illegal material, but also all user-contributed videos that did not include sufficient documentation to verify the age and consent of the actors, Visa and Mastercard both withdrew payment processing services. Despite Mindgeek’s apparent efforts to comply with the payment processors’ content standards, these services have not been reinstated..Right and wrong.It is, of course, common cause that content, be it photos, videos, or computer games, that violate the law ought not to be available to consumers. Nobody disputes that PornHub, for example, did permit illegal content of sexual abuse on its platform. The legal term, I believe, is “reckless disregard”.Why this is a matter for payment processors to police, however, is a mystery. If a content provider breaks the laws in a given country, then it surely is up to that country’s law enforcement authorities to institute action? And if the violation crosses borders, Interpol will undoubtedly render assistance.Ordinarily, police action against infringing content will take the form of targeted action to remove that content, or, if the content is lawful in other jurisdictions, block the offending content in the country in question.Payment processing companies operate globally, however. If someone says, “This content is unlawful”, the first question to ask is, “Where?”Threatening to withhold payment processing services from a company applies the same content standard globally, which is a highly questionable practice..On whose behalf.Companies like Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal don’t act out of their own angelic convictions, of course. They put pressure on content platforms like Steam, Itch.io, and PornHub because they, in turn, are feeling pressure.That pressure often does not come from law enforcement agencies, but from non-governmental lobby groups with dubious motives.New media has always aroused moral panics and attempts by self-appointed guardians of morality to censor it. In this, modern games or adult content is no different from yesteryear’s “scandalous” dime novels or pulp fiction.What is different is that these groups have taken to lobby not the government, but the private payment processors without which content platforms cannot (easily) do business.The way they operate is to find some examples of egregiously unlawful or distasteful content, and then to demand that payment service providers threaten to boycott the entire platform because they allegedly profit from objectionable content.The actions by Steam and Itch.io were precipitated by a religious-conservative Australian anti-porn lobby group known as Collective Shout. The group opposes not only pornography, but even lingerie advertising and barmaids working in skimpy clothes. It wants the Grand Theft Auto games franchise, and the Fifty Shades books banned.In true moral panic tradition, it describes its opponents as “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists”. Maybe some of them are. But there is plenty space between the extremes of religious-conservative moralists on one hand, and criminal degenerates on the other, for legitimate dissent..Thin end of a thick wedge.Like the anti-adult-video-game campaign, the campaign that got PornHub to cull its content was not initiated by law enforcement, nor by the payment processors themselves.The outcry began with a Christian anti-sex-work lobby group, Exodus Cry, and a conservative Catholic group previously known as Morality in Media, which now calls itself the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (perhaps to engender confusion between it and the perfectly legitimate National Center for Missing and Exploited Children).These groups oppose not only illegal sex trafficking and underage prostitution, but all sex work, of any kind. They also oppose abortion, LGBT rights, same-sex marriage, strip clubs, sex toys, comprehensive sex education in schools, and various works of literature or visual arts they consider obscene, profane, or indecent.They pretend to be the good guys, just fighting for women who are exploited against their will, or on behalf of trafficked children, but it isn’t just about illegal activity for them.Acting against a minority of content that violates the law is the thin end of a very thick wedge, and removing that illegal content is not a sufficient remedy for them.They ultimately want to ban all adult content, of any kind, no matter the age of the participants and regardless of consent. They want to ban anything that violates their ultra-conservative religious moral standards, and they want to make it excessively expensive, difficult, or impossible for major platforms to distribute such content.When payment providers place extortionate pressure on content platforms like Steam, threatening to withdraw their services from all content creators on the platform, this is at whose behest they are acting..Entitled and not entitled.In cases of actual rape and child abuse, these groups are, of course, perfectly justified in their demand that the content be removed.However, they are not entitled to demand that payment services be withdrawn even for content creators or game developers who do not produce offending content.Instead, if the content platform declines to act, they may direct their complaints to the police, who can institute the appropriate criminal proceedings.Furthermore, when the offending content involves mere depiction of sex, these moralist groups are not entitled to demand anything. If that is to be the standard, then all sorts of books and movies would have to be withdrawn, because they profit from objectionable content.A tiny selection of examples of works that depict not just sex, but criminal sex acts, includes American Psycho, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Bastard Out of Carolina, The Prince of Tides, City of God, Game of Thrones, The Piano Teacher, The Shawshank Redemption, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Deliverance, Myra Breckinridge, The Handmaid’s Tale,and A Clockwork Orange. Many of these works depict or address supposedly objectionable material, yet are considered to have considerable merit..Moral outrage.One might add another book to this list: the Holy Bible. Some of the underage sex, rape, violence, and genocide it depicts will make your hair stand on end.The New York Times’s moral outrage about PornHub extended beyond isolated examples of clearly illegal content to fictional recreations of kink-related situations that might constitute crimes if they occurred without consent in real life, or might simply be offensive to a majority of people.Yet it is farcical to demand that dangerous activities, criminal acts, or weird obsessions may not be depicted in film, games, or literature. Whether or not they have artistic merit is subjective, and ultimately, irrelevant.By that standard, every heist movie, every murder mystery, and most steamy romance fantasies would fall foul of moral busybodies.Therefore, taking down content en masse and implementing aggressive filtering to pacify payment processors, acting on behalf of unelected morality lobby groups, takes down a great deal of legal content as collateral damage.Consequences Suppressing legal outlets for adult-themed material also has negative social consequences.The group Sex Worker Outreach Project Behind Bars, like many other such advocacy groups, argues that online platforms for sex work make the world a safer place for sex workers and their clients. They say campaigns to get payment platforms to cut off adult content providers constitute a “war against sex workers”, which causes real harm.Without the income safely earned from behind video cameras, many sex workers will be forced back onto the streets, where they are marginalised, subject to arbitrary arrest and extortion, and vulnerable to disease, violence, and abuse.Sex worker advocacy groups are careful to distinguish between voluntary sex work involving consenting adults, and sex trafficking. Policing the latter by acting against the former does more harm than good, they argue.Threat to democracyA famous game developer, Yoko Taro, reflected on the exploitation of payment processors by private lobby groups to impose censorship around the world.He said: “Publishing and similar fields have always faced regulations that go beyond the law, but the fact that a payment processor, which is involved in the entire infrastructure of content distribution, can do such things at its own discretion seems to me to be dangerous on a whole new level. It implies that by controlling payment processing companies, you can even censor another country’s free speech.”Taro added: “I feel like it’s not just a matter of censoring adult content or jeopardising freedom of expression, but rather a security hole that endangers democracy itself.”Whether or not adult-themed content has positive or negative consequences for individuals or for society is a subject best left for another occasion, but either way, it is not for self-appointed guardians of morality to dictate.Moral values Now one might entirely agree with the moral values of the groups agitating for censorship of adult content. There’s nothing wrong with that.One might disapprove of (or simply dislike) fictional representations of sexual violence, or incest, or rough sex, or weird kinks, or even just sex in general. I’m certainly not a fan of all of the above.One does not have to be a “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishist”, however, to agree that imposing these values upon others is not appropriate in a free society. Nor does saying so constitute a defence of the more objectionable material that’s out there.Censorship and puritan values have a restrictive impact on freedom of expression, creativity, and individual autonomy.Puritanism, rooted in a rigid moral framework, tends to repress natural human impulses, which can itself cause serious social harms. A great many actual rapists and murderers grew up in highly repressive, highly censored environments.It also suppresses diversity of thought, promoting a homogenised and conformist society. If freedom and progress are to flourish, then we ought to resist moralists who make it hard to challenge prevailing norms or explore complex themes such as sexuality and social dissent.As Salman Rushdie so pertinently said: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”Private versus governmentPayment processors are private companies and have the right to impose whatever conditions they want on their customers.Having the right, and being right, are two different things, however.Just as open media platforms ought not to censor users, beyond limiting clearly illegal activity, so payment platforms that operate as near-monopolies in a necessary and highly regulated sector with high barriers to entry ought to be neutral facilitators of transactions.Whether those transactions are legal or not is largely the remit of the police, in the same way one would not prohibit a business from accepting cash payments simply because cash can be used anonymously for criminal purposes.The police actually have an advantage when criminal acts are committed via payment processors, because there is an electronic trail with a high chance of enabling positive identification, unlike with untraceable cash.It isn’t the payment processor’s business to impose elaborate red tape upon acquirers and merchants to minimise the chances that some law, in some country, might be violated. And it certainly isn’t their business to police adult content more broadly, at the behest of extremist, self-appointed moral lobby groups.Doing so has consequences that goes far beyond merely limiting criminal activity and has a chilling effect on a great deal of perfectly legal expression, as well as harmful consequences for society.Leave law enforcement to the authorities, and don’t give a handful of outraged moralists the power to dictate content policy for the entire world..*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist.This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission.

Private censorship rising: How payment processors are silencing legal content - Vegter

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