This is a furry blog, where I write about whatever interests me and sign it with my fursona’s name. I sometimes talk about furry fandom topics, but I sometimes also talk about applied cryptography.
If you got a mild bit of emotional whiplash from that sentence, the best list of posts to start reading to get a feel for my usual fare is here.
When one of my more technical blog posts makes it to Hacker News or Reddit, I will inevitably read some pearl-clutching comment declaring the inclusion of furry art on my furry blog as somehow “pornographic” (as absurd as that really is).
Considering the recent action taken against games with NSFW content on Steam and itch.io, it’s high time we really talked about the threat of payment processors being weaponized against free expression online.
How We Got Here
The weaponization of payment processors to enact target censorship is not a new tactic. It was famously used by the US government against Wikileaks in 2010, and more recently against SciHub (for daring to make academic papers freely available online).
This is a problem that technologists have been acutely aware of for decades.
Separately, organizations like Collective Shout (the one behind the recent Steam and itch.io censorship waves) and Exodus Cry (who went after Pornhub) have adopted the tactic of targeting payment processors to enforce their weird brand of Christianity onto the rest of us.
On Queerphobia in “Christian Activism”
While researching this topic, I came across many Internet comments that claimed that Collective Shout has anti-LGBTQ motives. However, I could not find any evidence to substantiate this claim.
It’s not necessarily true that every Christian activist movement is bigoted. However, this relationship exists with sufficient frequency (even if they try to obfuscate it) that we would be remiss not to at least be cautious.
Exodus Cry, in particular, has well-known anti-LGBTQ+ roots, with its founder campaigning against gay marriage.
Collective Shout is certainly following the Exodus Cry playbook for censoring adult content online, yet also claims to be a “feminist” organization (where Exodus Cry merely calls itself a Christian one).
Interestingly, Collective Shout’s founder, Melinda Tankard Reist, is famously opposed to women’s right to body autonomy. This is generally an anti-feminist position to take, and is enough to raise eyebrows about the organization’s actual motives.
But I must emphasize: There is no specific evidence to date that Collective Shout (or Melinda in particular) holds any specific anti-LGBTQ views. Melinda has previously threatened to sue bloggers for allegedly misrepresenting her viewpoint before, so being careless with these assertions is not a good idea.
All that said, anti-abortion politics and opposition to LGBT rights often share a bed. If someone uncovers proof of their stance either way, I will update this section at a later date.
But for now, it remains to be seen. I urge people to not spread unsubstantiated claims online. Misinformation doesn’t help you.
Why Oppose Collective Shout?
If you read into the specific types of pornographic content that were being targeted by Collective Shout, it’s quite harrowing.
At the top of the list was an incest rape game called No Mercy, which has separately sparked outrage for glorifying sexual abuse. This is disgusting stuff, and will make many people sympathetic to its removal. I personally won’t lose any sleep over finding out that glorifying rape isn’t profitable.
The problem, however, is how Collective Shout achieved its goals.
They didn’t succeed through a petition to Steam, or to one of the governments that have jurisdiction over Steam and/or the developer of this game.
They pressured the payment processors into demanding Steam and itch.io comply with the activists’ demands. The term of art for this extralegal tactic is “jawboning”.
Neither Visa nor Mastercard are elected by the people, yet they have unchecked power to decide who can engage in commerce on the Internet.
This is a vulnerability that will be exploited by other groups unless we close it.
Even if we are ultra-charitable and assume that Collective Shout will never try to scrub LGBTQIA+ content from the Internet, what’s to stop another “Christian” anti-queer organization from learning from their victory and increasing the pressure?
What’s to stop someone from using the same exact tactic to censor my blog for *checks notes* being perceived by Hacker News users as “pornographic” just because I’m a furry?
To right-wing extremists that don the cloak of Christianity for their bigotry, such at the Heritage Foundation, any visible queerness is framed as pornographic, and therefore must be purged for the sake of “the children.”
What Can We Do?
This is a political problem, not a technical one.
Repeat after me: all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first.
I’ve seen some comments floating around that suggest that the fix is to jettison Visa and MasterCard in favor of cryptocurrency.
I think this is fundamentally a losing strategy: It moves the burden and risk of being unbanked onto the developers and publishers rather than the platforms. Yes, it decentralizes (to a point), but each node has less resources to defend themselves in court when the oppressors change their tactics again. I believe it’s better to stand together than fragment.
Technology isn’t a silver bullet. We need political solutions to this political problem.
I’ve seen comments proposing H.R.987 and S.401 (the “Fair Access to Banking Act”) as remedies for this vulnerability. However, many people are petitioning their government to oppose these bills for fear that it could make things worse.
I am not a legal expert, so I offer no analysis of my own here.
If anyone is deeply familiar with the law, please take this as an invitation to write your own. I may update this blog post to link to it once someone does.
If you want to close this vulnerability that allows Australian hypocrites flying the flag of feminism to unceremoniously censor video game distribution platforms in other countries, then technologists, gamers, and queer activists need to organize.
A few years ago, I motivated the furry fandom to raise money to help the local library survive the anti-LGBT demands of the mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi.
We will need that kind of energy here.
But please, for the love of everything good in the world, do NOT let any such movement devolve into the pointless misogyny of “GamerGate”. The world has suffered enough.
Other Political Solutions
Shortly after I initially posted this, Arik shared this with me:
(..)
In the EU, a payment systems where banks can process payments directly among themselves is now being built, with full deployment in 2026. It’s called WERO, at https://wero-wallet.eu/ and it’s already partially deployed.
In the US, the federal reserve bank has a program called FedNOW that does much of the same thing. Their home page is https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow and there’s a rather small number of banks already involved.
These two systems – when deployed – are going to shift the decision of who decides if your business can process transactions from those 4 operators to the over 10K banks and payment providers, and that is going to offer a lot of choice.
(…)
This would directly solve the underlying problem of Visa and MasterCard having too much power over society, and would be a better long-term fix than any short-term political measure.
If you are a US or EU citizen, talk to your bank and ask them to support WERO and/or FedNOW.
I’ve also been queried for my opinion on GNU Taler, but I’m going to save that for a later blog post about blind signatures.
I’ve historically been hesitant to recommend GNU projects that involve cryptography, but Taler would superficially be an excellent solution for this vulnerability. The devil’s in the details, though.
Header art: CMYKat
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