Payment processors MasterCard and Visa use their leverage to go after adult fictional works, including furry

This latest round of censorship started in late June when Fansly announced that they were removing adult furry content from their services at the call of their payment processors MasterCard and Visa. But not content to just go after the fledgling services that are derived from OnlyFans, the processors also set their sights on larger targets including the gaming markets of Steam and Itch.io in late July.

In their statement, Fansly indicated that the card services equated adult furry content with "simulated beastiality”:

Policy Clarifications:
Anthropomorphic Content - Our payment processing partners classify some anthropomorphic content as simulated beastiality. As a general guideline, Kemonomimi (human-like characters with animal ears/tails) is permitted, but full fursonas, Kemono, and scalie content are prohibited in adult contexts.

-Fansly policy update

However, it should be noted that if (and only if) furries who are engaged in consensual adult acts can be referred to as simulated beastiality, then it would also be accurate to refer to MasterCard and Visa, who charge well over 20% in interest on money borrowed through their services to the often fiscally-illiterate general public, as "simulated slavery services". It's a bit harsh, and in both cases from a technically legal standpoint, inaccurate.

The catalyst of processors being more snoopy

Asking furry lawyer Boozy Badger a bit about the liability of payment processors to monitor content provided by an Internet service, he shared with me a decision in 2022 that allowed a plaintiff to successfully move forward with filing a lawsuit against Visa. This involved the site PornHub and a disturbing case of a young teen being exploited in a fit of revenge pornography that was allowed to remain on the site for a full week without removal, back in 2014. At this time, Visa was utilized as their payment processor for subscriptions. The content was shared around the teen's school and subjected her to bullying from her peers.

The teen, now a grown adult, filed lawsuits over the situation and added Visa as a defendant. It cites that Visa was looking the other way until a New York Times article in 2020 highlighted the problem that PornHub had with the proliferation of underaged material. At that point Visa suspended payments until they investigated, so PornHub then (at that time) went through an extensive purge of their content. After this, Visa returned to processing payments for the site.

Visa also responded by indicating that they were not a knowingly involved participant in the trafficking of child exploitation material and should not be held culpable. Despite that, because of this 2022 decision, Visa will need to make this argument in the actual lawsuit case.

More about this case can be found in the decision brief and a BBC article covering the outcome.

A state of overcorrection and the impact on furry content creators on Itch.io

This brings us back to the modern day where Visa and Mastercard are now taking the lesson of this pending lawsuit and applying it to their current markets. A small moral activist group called Collective Shout in Australia started to campaign against the payment processors about their involvement with companies selling pornographic arts and entertainment. News of Collective Shout's involvement was broken by Vice, but interestingly this news was taken down by the magazine; and as a result its author and other staff quit in protest.

Despite Collective Shout being the catalyst, it is important to remember that the corporations' responses to the heckling is what causes these issues being faced currently.

Itch.io in particular was utilized by furry game designers, particularly of adult-oriented works to sell to adult audiences. One such furry creator, who will not be named to prevent any spear attacks from people reading this looking for new targets, has been making daily updates to their situation. After being de-listed they pulled their content back entirely, then they put it back after their page remained up. Now they've come to the decision to encourage people to buy their work from the site again for as long as it remains up, due to extreme demand caused by the uncertainty of the game's future on the platform.

I [re-enabled downloading] for the game for half of yesterday and through the night. Before downloads were disabled, on the night of the shadowban [my game] was downloaded 100 times. In the middle of the night, on a week night. After I re-enabled it, it was downloaded two hundred more. The period download was disabled doesn't even show up on the traffic graph. I'm glad I was able to help people get their copies up to date.
...
To state the obvious, we are on day 3 now and the game is still up. Due to continued demand and continued non-nuking of me by Itch, I am tentatively removing my request to not buy the game, and the warning on the main page. If you want to buy it here, buy it.

This does not mean things are back to normal. Far from it. This is me putting my hat on a stick and poking it over the waist-high cover to see if it gets riddled with bullets. The way I see it, if I continue on here, there is a 50% chance that if I get banned I won't see the money from, say, the next month. That might sound bad, but if I keep downloads off there is a 100% chance I won't.

Consumers fight back against the payment processing policing

While the response to Fansly was muted, probably due to the platform's relative niche userbase, the push to Steam and itch.io went after a group much larger and louder: the gamers. In the midst of a movement making progress against game developers to stop killing games, Visa and Mastercard now have introduced a whole new angle under which games can be killed. This is especially concerning due to how it was noted that Collective Shout previously indicated Detroit: Become Human should have been banned as well, due to the story depicting elements of trauma against women and children. Not that it in any way fetishizes or endorses it, but just that it exists in the story. Someone better warn the Joy Luck Club.

So in fear that this censorship will not stop with adult only games, and instead will extend to any form of media that groups such as Collective Shout would attack, gamers and anti-censorship activists have been blowing up the phone banks of the payment process services. In it you get stories of folks catching customer support in lies about the card processors not restricting legal content from being purchased, being told to just send emails, and being told exasperatingly "are you calling about the video games thing?"

The ACLU also has a general petition against the payment processers leveraging their services against sex work, that gained much more support after the recent push against adult video games.

The threats of a changing payment processing landscape

Credit cards have become a very powerful tool in the world of financial transactions, and their embracing of the Internet and processing transactions during the network's foundational years have helped give these companies a powerful moat in the marketplace. As these processors have grown to such prominence, they have to maintain that they remain above-board in multiple countries with a variety of legal rules. All while trying to maintain a relationship with merchants and consumers that helps make them more convenient than traditional means of payment.

But we are no longer in the early age of the Internet, and the moat they established is beginning to show some cracks. For instance, in May of this year the S&P 500, a basket of companies that is typically called "the market", made changes to its membership. This change was a result of Discovery Card services being acquired by Capital One card services in a merger, making those two companies into one, and thus needing a new kid on the block to add to the now 499 companies.

That company? Coinbase.

Ironically like the ticker it was replacing, Coinbase is also a financial technology service, but of a different breed. Their fintech service allows people to exchange their money into crypto coins including the highly-known BitCoin and Etherium, but also other up-and-comers including one whose premise is to actually be sustainable and less power-hungry, the payment processing service Ripple (XRP).

Fortunately for the established payment processors, these products currently have problems of volatility that don't do well to serve as an actual stable currency substitute, and the technology has still not proven itself to be easily usable in most common means of commerce. There is also a recent history of abundant greed and fraud, like the FTX scandal that completely upended many people's savings, and whose CEO Sam Bankman-Fried became the biggest financial criminal since Bernie Madoff. So noting this, be very careful when speculating in these things.

But if the traditional payment processors start to unnecessarily restrict law-abiding merchants due to the cold feet from their lawsuits, and jumping at the smallest "collective shout" from moralists, then such marketplaces may look to these digital wallets to change the middle man in the exchange. Especially if some of the expenses of the transaction are put on the consumer themselves, whereas current credit cards typically put the service fees on the seller, and result in increased prices for all consumers to deal with these merchant fees.

If there is a digital currency in the future that can lower the transaction fees even lower to undercut the card companies entirely, it could do severe damage to the card processor business model. Just as RobinHood brokerage had forced traditional brokers to reduce or eliminate fees dealing with the trading of stocks, which was their traditional way of making money, this could happen in the card-space as well with merchant fees if it is seen as a weakness in their model to attack.

Despite the adverse history that furries have had with the digital currency space, the question becomes, will they plug their nose and take the plunge if our current processors continue to overextend their leverage in the market place to harm our ability to buy and sell our products to one another? In spite of my brutal mocking of crypto in the past, it's harder to jest given this news story about the current payment processors. When these payment processing / "simulated slavery" systems we utilize believe that some kinds of art with our cognizant characters are "simulated beastiality", it is easy to see an opening for alternative means of transactions that are less morally judgmental. And as a seller who gets strong-armed by them, it's certainly a motivation to extend the offering of electronic payment types to lower our dependence on a particular processor.

Corporations are not immune to the gravity of their errors. Market caps are fickle and fluid beasts.