The LGBTQ suppression slippery slope is here…and it didn’t even take these fucking fascists an extra week
Yeah, Mass Effect, Witcher, and Cyberpunk 2077 are just a few games among many that these groups would love to target and take down for giving lgbtq options. Could forsee a future where games have to start self censoring themselves to try to avoid demonetization. Best case scenario is they only censor in certain countries.
So those who think it is just attacking porn games and don’t care because they play normal games will be in for a rude awakening if these groups get their way.
steam and itch capitulated here because indy games are small potatoes. the calculation changes if they start going after $70 AAA titles selling millions of copies.
They don’t need to. AAA developers will start backing down on their own because they don’t want to risk the confrontation.
And that’s how many AAA are failing.
Funny enough I have DRM free rips of these from my steam account.
Christ card companies are evil. We need alternatives
Christ card
Ironically, yes, at this point
Time to order all your dildos, KY, condoms, swings, and penis pumps for life before those things get banned. Sure they’ll come back one day, but do you have time to wait for that?
Start a new site and make them free to troll the card agencies.
Just pointing out the obvious here, but the problem isn’t organizations like Collective Shout. And there has been a rather worrying development of this issue where people seem to focus on these organizations rather than the actual problem.
Payment processing is a utility. Credit card companies should not be allowed to pick and choose who they allow and who they block. That’s the job of the government. Anything illegal can be blocked, but blocking anything legal such as the delisted games, or the Japanese manga sites that visa and MasterCard killed, should count as discriminatory practice and antitrust violation.
Japan is on track to force credit card companies to allow all legal transactions indiscriminately, and we need the same thing to happen in the EU and US. Once we have this fixed, organizations will be forced to instead try to outlaw the games, which is a million times harder.
If we bully organizations like collective shout out of existence, new ones will pop up to take its place, and the cycle repeats, but if we regulate credit card companies, we essentially cure the disease.
Actually insane to say that Collective Shout is blameless. Go look at the vile shit their members are spewing. Not only are they demonstrably culpable for this, they’re also engaging in hate speech and disinformation and targeted harassment.
The payment situation is also to blame.
Actually insane to say that Collective Shout is blameless
Nobody said that. Except you, I guess.
They didn’t say blameless, but they did heavily imply Collective Shout isn’t a problem and that people are worried about the wrong thing. I think Noxy’s interpretation and response that there’s multiple things to blame was pretty reasonable.
I love the mental gymnastics of saying that you’re a feminist and also anti-abortion. The only way a woman gets pregnant is from sperm. And in 99% of cases, that was through the interaction with a man. And it may have not been consensual.
But either way, now said woman is bound to modify her body and life because of her interaction with a man, rather than being able to make her own choice, because you said so and you know what’s best for her. She’s “empowered” to be a good little breeder and produce either men or other breeders because apparently that’s what women are good for when you take away their autonomy, which is really what these groups want. Which, is also a big reason why they hate trans women. Trans women cannot do the only job a woman should have, which is to produce offspring.
They would build such an amazing society! With so many empowered women! Freed from the shackles of being able to think or decide for themselves, ready to fulfill their ultimate dream of producing offspring, taking care of offspring, and then dying.
its why they are called radical feminists
Except
Radical feminism** is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts
But by making sure that women carry children to term whether or not they want to, it’s basically male run, they haven’t said anything about male/female equality.
It’s not the right terminology. Radical feminism has its own flaws, but this is Christian fundamentalism, nothing more, no matter how they label it.
No one is saying they are blameless. We are saying they are not the issue that we need to focus on fixing here.
Yes they are. Yes the fuck they absolutely are.
Fuck. You are right, my apologies.
to say that Collective Shout is blameless
Twitter is not, as it turns out, the only place where well articulated sentences get misinterpreted.
Always is the same thing. Why USA decides in other countries? Is Itchio international, right?
Collective Shout is Australian.
And banks are bigger than nations at this point, what they say goes.
This is actually an example of the opposite. Here, it’s a Christian activist group in a non-US country impacting customers in — among other places — the US.
Oh thank you and excuse me, my bad
Collective Shout is Australian
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collective_Shout
Great great so what’s the bloody point in itch now then?
a reminder that collective karens bragged about doing all of this based on just 1000 phone calls.
I’m gonna do 2000 calls demanding more boobies in video games
Nobody wants to pick up the phone
Payment processors shouldn’t have this kind of power, it’s insane.
It’s not the first time this has happened. That first time set the precedent that the payment processors have a vast amount of power over the transactions that can occur on the internet. There wasn’t a realistic way to push back on it and so they will continue to expand this for… whatever reason they are actually giving. IDK - I would have thought that legitimate adult content payments would be quite lucrative for these processors to handle, it’s not like they’re beholden to advertising like YouTube is and their insane content policies.
I mean, I cannot find a valid reasoning for it apart from the vague term “high risk” which explains nothing. This is the best I’ve found so far:
The adult industry is no stranger to regulation and stigma. But in recent years, payment processor censorship has emerged as a subtler, more insidious threat. Companies like Mastercard, Visa, and their underlying bank networks often issue sweeping mandates, particularly regarding “high-risk” content. These decisions typically happen behind closed doors, without public accountability or stakeholder input from the communities affected.
(bold emphasis mine)
To reduce perceived brand risk or avoid legal ambiguity, even when the content is legal.
TBH they are making themselves look pretty shitty as a brand by moving sex work and other adult content back to the darker deeper recesses where it becomes less accessible and harder to regulate properly in terms of safety and legality.
I mean, getting rid of anything that even acknowledges the existence of queer folk is absolutely on brand for Christofascists.
Christian fanatics hate anything sex-related regardless of gays.
It’s okay if their pastors touch little boys though! /s
The sexual shame they groom Christian kids into to control them enabled the sexual assault and coverup thereof
They do love them some pedophilia, don’t forget.
Ahh, yes
A collective against the objectification of women, which somehow has no Problem with the current system in america, pornography itself, and dosent advocate for anything except banning Video games.
A collective that defends Cuties…
What’s wrong with liking cuties?
Sometimes you don’t feel like eating a large orange.
Oh I’m sure they have lots of problems with the system in America. They’re going after anything they think they’ve even got a chance of affecting. Their website also says they’re trying to ban porn on X.
wait, a few australians can ban porn games to the entire world?
Well, they’re trying anyway
I would imagine they’re more concerned with Australia than America, since that’s where they live.
Meanwhile known pedo and rapist Donald Trump is President of USA. Make it make sense.
This wasn’t America this time. Blame the Aussies.
The payment companies which gave way were American.
Lol Lemmy can’t go one comment thread without mentioning the U.S.
Steam, Visa, Mastercard are not U.S companies?
They are, but it’s an aussie doing the lobbying to get them to do this
I am sure there is some overlap
or china lol.
but to be fair the us can’t go one administration without couping and bullying everyone else.
TDS is a real thing. every time I see someone in denial of this, a little part of me dies. there are people who spend all day every day scanning 7 different social media websites for threads that they can connect to the president of the united states. they want every single website on earth to be turned into “ihaterepublicans.com”
Hello mister 4 day old 1 comment account.
WHY did you come all the way here if you’re just going to act like you are on reddit
Make America Make Sense Again
Reports on Twitter that they are deleting previously purchased games from users’ libraries as well.
That sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Hm? From a sample size of 10, 10 are still online on itch.io.
Deindexed/delisted, not removed.
Try putting the names into the search field on the site, or browsing for them in the categories they are in.
Did that ever work anyway? For the last few years i only find porn games via duckduckgo and “You might also be interested in”.
edit: right, respective tags list no porn games anymore.
edit: right, respective tags list no porn games anymore.
Which could cause them to no longer be indexed by search engines depending on other settings. So you’d need to find direct links from other websites.
But (not-meta)search engines crawl websites.
Exactly. They “crawl” category/tag lists, etc. and follow links. And if there are no links to those pages, they wont be indexed.
(Depending on some settings. For all I know they’ve set up “hidden redirects” for popular crawlers to pages that show them)
Fuck that. They can collectively shout into this asshole. All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.
I say that we must take a revenge… I am very angry for the freedom of expression and respect to individual rights. It is simply a nazi organization disguised in Christian clothes.
Each sect of the insane Yahweh-cult has a way bigger body count than the Nazis ever accomplished.
You’re making it sound like this isn’t straight up Christianity.
For this one Christianity is to blame, not Nazis.
Ironic, considering some of Jesus’s best friends were hoes
And he despised the rich. Turns out Christianity today is what it always has been, consolidation of (male) wealth and power. It never really had much to do with the teachings of Jesus
What’s Jesus have to do with Christianity? Christianity has always been Paul’s religion, not Jesus’.
What’s Pangaea got to do with this?
My brother in Christ, it’s all the same ideals.
“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Except Collective Shout is Australian (which is unsurprising, considering that AUS is also a hotbed of hate groups).
Feel free to provide the Australian equivalent of the quote if there is one. The country can be substituted for any not-yet-Fascist-controlled country and still apply, in my opinion.
Different countries might have different symbolism instead of a flag and cross, but the sentiment is that Fascism disguises itself and evolves to fit in wherever it goes.
Lol what are you people ever going to do.
You can’t just wait until you’re mad to do something. It takes years building networks and getting everyone on board.
Totally doable if people had a bit of common sense but the reason why the right are kicking ass and doing this stuff is because people now are pretty brain washed and can’t figure out how most of the stuff that fight for are also the things they need to stop in order to prevent this stuff. But because they will never figure that out, you’ll never get anywhere.
Tbh, I didnt know this group exists until this happened. So sometimes an event happens, you get mad, and you do something about it. Thats usually how most people come to action.
All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.
My guess — and I haven’t seen anything where payment processors have released any details of what Collective Shout did – is that Collective Shout didn’t just call Visa and say “we don’t like this”. They probably found some sort of law, maybe in Australia, that processing payments for these violates, and had their lawyer send a nastygram to payment processors about it. The payment processors sent their own warning letters to the merchants.
Like, the reason payment processors are useful as leverage for countries is because countries can put pressure on them, because payment processors do business all over and are gonna be skittish about violating laws in a bunch of countries, can get cut off from doing business there. And any one retailer just isn’t big enough for them to be worried about cutting off compared to getting cut off from a country.
If you want to put pressure on payment processors, I’d guess that you’re probably going to have to have some kind of law to threaten payment processor with on the grounds that processing payments to Steam and itch.io and other retailers and so forth when they are deindexing games results in some kind of legal violation. I’m not saying that that’s impossible, but it’s probably harder to do than it is for Collective Shout is to pull their shennanigans.
I’d also note that it is not at all clear that the present situation is the final state of affairs. That is, what my guess is that Valve and itch.io and so forth did is that they got their nastygram from the payment processors, then went to talk to their own lawyers. It’s entirely possible that after those lawyers have a look at it, they’re going to say “you can’t sell Game X in Country Z”, and Valve will just restrict the regions where they sell those games. That is, I would not be surprised if the scope on this restriction narrows, and Valve and itch.io are just playing it safe until they’re confident as of their legal position.
Also, relevant:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
— John Gilmore, founding member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn’t like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don’t redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
— also Gilmore
Gilmore also stated that the denotation of the saying has broadened over time:
The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
I am generally bearish on the future of Internet censorship. The Internet helps facilitate some things that one might not like, extensive profiling. But it also is very good at distributing information, and I think that in general, the availability of information in the future will be greater than in the past. I do not think it likely that our future will, on the balance, be more-censorious than our past.
We do have this petition for now link
That’s fine, but what if they say
