[lllllllllllllll]

Original thread title: Freedom to use your own money and receive from others L I B E R T Y and such idk

In light of Steam rejecting anime games at random, loli in general being deplatformed,
Playstation removing long running titles from their console (like Senran Kagura),
Nintendo region-locking popular titles to Japan only, fanart featuring anime being arbitrarily removed or the account suspended,
and domains within Japan itself being forced to censor their storefronts,
all by credit card companies pressuring them or their providers, what can realistically be done about money changers
acting as a 2nd government?

What started as ***extreme*** content is now just any anime they do not like and has moved from merely art to video games.



The spoilered image (NSFW) shows on Patreon there is no sense behind what they decide needs to be removed.

Spoiler

http://archive.is/axL3g
http://archive.is/2rF5S

The approval process for getting a [anime] game onto Steam is vague to the point that the same game will not even get the same outcome
when submitted under different editions (although once rejected a game cannot be submitted a second time for approval, which leads to self censorship).

You may have already heard of the panties beneath skirts of ingame characters replaced with a black abyss if you play
recent releases of any anime like games, or the Type 1/Type 2 drivel, which are brought on by self proclaimed experts telling them what the global audience wants.
But if they get away with denying you using your money as you decide to use it on products that are there, this will extend into something much worse. On the vendor side
content that appeals to customers simply won't get made anymore because the people who want to buy it can't or it cannot even be placed for sale.
On the side of this extralegal government it becomes possible to smudge out undesirables from being online, to whatever criteria they decide on.
And worse than that I think AI is being used to automatically label things to which this will doubly become an ideaological tyranny as the models I was able to tinker with
have all had directionated results- things being added to the prompt of their own accord or unavoidable additives.
The only thing worse than the unelected being given power is power given to unelected idiots letting yet another third party [who provides the AI] do the thinking in their stead.



I don't articulate it well but the short version is credit card companies are taking it upon themselves to make things allowed or unallowed ignoring that they are legal,
and trying to circumvent them as a business online, to my knowledge, is impossible. When Mastercard / VISA control online commerce, what can be done to preserve your basic rights on the internet?
The integration of the internet into daily life and communications is such that there is no reason it is not considered an extension of the 1st amendment. There was that successful lawsuit about being blocked from President Trump's tweets on twitter after all.

[The Battlelord]

Because of hypocrisy, freedom is a mere illusion, the world is going in the wrong direction and with all these weird behaviours anyone get offended for anything.

There are wars, but who cares? "We have our own stupid little dramas to think about first"...

Search as anonymous user for any famous name of a young woman and the very first thing you'll see is "SafeSearch" that get in the way, you don't even need to bother to type "bikini, sexy, hot, boobs" or whatever.

If you search any famous name of a man, does not matter the age, i't's all ok, cuz "it's just a man".


Because the future is coming and i guess "Simon Phoeinx" was right: "I'm sorry to say that the world has become a pussy-whipped Brady Bunch version of itself, run by a bunch of robed sissies."


Why i did pop up out of blue saying this? It sounds the right topic to talk about this connected stuff and vent some anger about all of this anti-freedom bullshit situation we are living in, unfortunately is not just on the anime and games side, is a bit everything and affect everyone.

[lllllllllllllll]

I don't mind and I dislike the trend of everything getting watered down in that manner.


Maybe good things still happen:
A new bill in US congress with around 40 senators introducing it seems to be purposed to removing the ability of financial service providers from engaging in the very behavior I was whining about above.
In the senate S401 and for the house HR987

SEC. 5. PAYMENT CARD NETWORK.
...
(B) Prohibition.—No payment card network, including a subsidiary of a payment card network, may, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise,
prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of this Act, to obtain access to services or products of the payment card network because of political or reputational risk considerations.

My understanding is the credit card company can't bullshit you as long as what you are doing is not illegal. But only "politics" and "reputation" are prohibited in the current form. That might allow weaseling with "religion", "morality", and "human rights" or other cop outs.
If any of you American fags value your sovereignty call a representative. If you do bother to call, I suggest strengthening the limitation upon payment processors to only denying transactions when laws are being violated. Giving them any room to wriggle out of
providing their service to their customers makes this law a futility.

[lllllllllllllll]

This has turned into something with consequences worldwide.


In the United Kingdom, all websites classified as vaguely "adult" are required to check the ID of users and shoulder the fees incurred for doing so.
This in effect makes free domains or those that operate at a loss impossible to maintain.
The site is also required to do some nonsense in the vein of evaluating the user's interactions and speech or face legal penalties.
The law is so draconian that sites outside of the United Kingdom have opted to range ban the country instead, never mind sites hosted within it.

In the EU, although delayed by a year, ID to use the internet is in the works in accordance to a law being passed.

In Mexico, digital biometric ID (meaning fingerprint/retina scans) is becoming law.

Canada has drafted its own version of digital ID which I do not believe has made it into law as of yet.

In the United States, in addition to the states that have passed ID laws for porn sites, there is an effort to pass their own version of the EU's internet ID law.
Currently 2 versions I am aware of exist in the senate. The first is the Screen Act which is more a federal version of the states' ID check, the second is the Kids Online Safety Act which has localized ID hidden within. The Identification of the user occurs before even going online whether this would be in the form of the microsoft store for example, or as part of the operating system itself.
These bills are S.737 and S.1748. The latter S.1748 has actually already passed the senate once with a 94-3 vote.
I would urge you to contact your senators and house members and ask they reject these bills and all like them including S.1671 which is the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act that generously removes the Miller test from consideration. This would make porn and things beyond porn absolutely illegal federally.
You should spread the word that this is going on everywhere worldwide and if you reside in one of these countries in your own government.

This type of law suddenly popping up globally all at once proves it is not the will of constituents or the result of voting.

~
~
On the topic of payment processors they are taking it upon themselves to enforce the state porn ID laws which on their own are unenforceable. VISA / Mastercard open an audit on the website in question, inform them of it along with a notice of noncompiiance with the new law, and thus capitulation occurs. The behavior is at complete odds with their political leaning where up until this election cycle they had been demonstrably happy functioning as a censorarm of leftists by deplatforming the "alt right", alternatives to uncontrolled social media, and Japanese media in general. They have since 2018 sponsored pride parades and proudly displayed their logos on floats. The justification offered in passing state porn ID laws has been "porn addiction" and "it leads to transgenderism" which goes against their gay parades, even if untrue.

After Steam was forced to drop games, Itch.io was given the same treatment. A list of terms which flags games was provided and it is laughably sweeping, and worse inconsistent to such lists provided to Patreon and Fanza which receive this extortive behavior for art.
In function, this is no different to me than what ESG had been doing. Only it skips to the end where the content simply stops existing.

Before Steam, the credit cards have long been harassing storefronts in Japan for well over 10 years. When they first entered the Japanese market their condition was to drop all R18 listings and sale. Then after service was contracted they would coerce the removal of anything suggestive. For anime fans this is the reason that ecchi was steadily phased out the last decade and the ratings groups have become so black/white that having a nipple gets you the same rating as outright full frontal sex. For business that initially refused to drop R18, after some months VISA contracted service to them anyway without the condition, and then around 2019 suddenly began demanding the removal of things like loli and rape, having entrenched themselves for a few years. Not wanting to lose the service they would be complied to again and again losing a little more categories each time. Such storefronts as DMM and DLSITE. While being 2D focused, DMM at one point did open their own domain for selling JAV to the west and this was instantly killed by VISA by threatening to leave again.


I've been noticing that neither the credit cards nor lawmakers ever go after things like The Last of Us 2 having a self-professed tranny rape in the game. Not that I want fiction regulated to begin with. The behavior of all entities involved strikes me as explicitly killing competition to western porn, antiJapan.

Anyway, speak to congressmen. Not caring about hentai or lewd games is no reason to allow a payment processor to dictate when you can buy, what you can sell, or what you can see. Walling "adult" content behind ID is a starting point of some major censoring fuckery moreso when fees and liabilities are involved in the ID part.