The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.
The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.
> The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities.
This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
The issue is that the banks all move in lock step, undermining the basic principle of the free market.
If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad. The cumulative effect is a chilling of protected speech in a way that congress could never legally get away with.
There are lots of payment processors who will deal with explicit content. They tend to be fairly expensive though - partially justified since apparently chargebacks are outlandishly common. For example, CCBill will process essentially anything that isn’t illegal, albeit with 6% fees for “risky” industries and 10-15% fees for “adult” industries.
I mean, if it's really a great market that's underserved, then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market.
People think this is about morality, but it's a lot more about the cost of operating in that market. I bet that there are way more claims of fraud, money laundering investigations, subpoenas and other overhead that the banks don't want to deal with.
Like teenagers stealing credit cards to pay camgirls is probably pretty common. And there are likely a lot of prostitution investigations.
The real problem is that sex work isn't treated like normal work, which just creates freedom for criminals to take advantage of vulnerable people.
If it was licensed and regulated, then it would be easier to tell the crooks, and victims of human trafficking from the people who are legitimate, voluntary workers.
Then the economics might make sense for banks to keep serving these customers.
> The issue is that the banks all move in lock step, undermining the basic principle of the free market.
The banks all doing the same thing is exactly what you would expect in a free market.
They are all in the same market (credit card processing) and all have the same information on the risks and costs and revenue in that market for handling various types of transactions. All of them that make rational decisions supported by the data they have should come to the same conclusions and take the same actions.
What you'd expect in a free market is for specialized banks to appear that would deal with porn and other high risk customers that the more general purpose banks all conclude that they don't want to deal with.
That's what has happened, as has been mentioned in other comments.
The banks are not a free market. The banks are expressly controlled by multiple federal regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve itself. They're supposed to move in lock step by design. If they didn't, it'd be a 'Free Banking' system, which it isn't.
> If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad.
I think that's not quite what happened here. It's not that, literally, all the banks decided this; it's that the banks are so huge that, when one or a few of the mega-banks make the decision, it's effectively the same as if they all did. Ultra-consolidation is the real problem.
Agreed, but why do they move in lockstep? Is it a conspiracy among elite banks (or whatever other businesses)? Or is it a rational response to their political vulnerability? Or something else?
This is not unique to banking in the least. It’s pretty typical for most industries to follow a company that does something the others want but don’t want to be the first one to do.
Price increases are a great example. One company will take an increase and most follow.
And how is this chilling of protected speech? The constitution guarantees free speech, not payment for speech. There is nothing stop these workers from sharing their content/speech.
> If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine.
Not necessarily. Banks have a government license to create money (ok, depends on what kind of bank, but let's put that aside), and provide services many individuals and organizations rely on. That already means that even if you're a staunch capitalist, you should still support some sort of set of constraints and norms, regulation, of their activities. So it's not clear that a bank should be able to refuse service to legally-operating organizations.
Plus, if one bank can do this, then why not any other bank?
"The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable"
I think it is about charge backs. Visa and mastercard hate charge backs. Porn has a very high charge back rate and these cost card companies so much they will often just cancel the merchant agreement. With a charge back there is human customer service involved, customer denials, fraud and complicated dispute resolution. This is why the processors that specialize in porn (ccbill) charge up to %15 per transaction. I don't think the processors wanted to go after onlyfans - they just would rather not deal with the drama. However, like onlyfans discovered, if you offer to pay a %15 per transaction fee - processors will work with you. Processors do not have morals - they are just trying to make money. They don't mind handling transactions for gun sales, tobacco, strip clubs or pyramid schemes.
This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
I don't think causation runs one way. The financial industry & "Government" aren't clearly delineated. You can see this all the time in "compliance." Banks will commonly cite "compliance," essentially blaming the regulator for various policies. If you ask the regulator itself, they'll generally consider a lot of that stuff bank policy.
The way in which banking regulation works in practice creates a ton of ambiguities like this. "Compliance" is basically the area between regulation and internal policy. One firm will adopt a policy, which has all sorts of compliance implications. Another will copy them. The regulator grows to expect it, and it develops from there.
I don't think it's getting causation wrong, it's just confusing 'accountable to [in its opinion] the wrong entities' with 'unaccountable'.
The banks are accountable to their boards which are accountable to their shareholders, which (the ones that matter) are increasingly .. I hate to use the word but 'woke' activists - nudging companies in the 'right' direction either from a moral standpoint or from a perceived moral standpoint of customers/public at large.
Progressively (as in a simple progression over time, not the political sense) investing in/lending to/providing the current account for, defence/tobacco/oil/sex are becoming bad looks, to the big voteholders even if not in general.
The bank prudery is a response to the government's willingness to hold banks accountable for turning a blind eye to money going to illicit purposes.
Yes, both PornHub and OnlyFans haven't been careful enough with screening their material but we normally don't hold hosts responsible for perfect policing of user content--except when sex is involved.
If people really want to fix this, they'll go back to creating independent web sites... Social media lures people in, takes a significant part of real money generated from creators, and then slowly tightens rules to protect it's own interests and profit while forsaking creators and that includes gradual suppression of promotional equality for creators.
The whole scheme to make creators pay to run ads is a failed ideology if creator content is the very thing that platforms depend on to succeed.
This is why I always edit/record to files I can re-use/re-distribute rather than using native record options on platform-specific apps.
Since the Obama administration's Operation Chokepoint, banks are loath to process transactions from certain industries, including porn, cannabis, and guns -- lest they incur greater regulatory scrutiny. This scrutiny comes whether the transactions are legal or not.
> The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.
"The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks"
Where exactly are the banks at risk or accountable?
Are we talking about fraud, or potential criminal investigation because of underaged girls forced to do onlyfans by mafia (I can imagine that) and money transfer via their bank?
You can't sell dildos with most credit card providers and PayPal. That has nothing to do with risk, I am allowed to resell cheap China stuff with a much higher return rate than the average dildo shop
> If that were true they wouldnt be investing in Facebook.
It's easier to stir up outrage against porn—sexual prudishness has a long history—than against Facebook—the ability so globally to overshare, and the (inevitably delayed) realization of its consequences, is only in the very beginning of forming.
If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.
The answer to regulation gone wild is not more regulation, it is to remove regulatory power. You can’t dig your way out of a hole.
I have to ask. Who is going to hold banks responsible for their role as just a payment gateway and not the actual people involved or the service?
This is like saying banks are responsible for a drug mafia using a laundromat for "money washing" by using sales proceeds of a laundromat depositing into the said bank and sending it away.
This article completely misses the causes of the rule changes. Banks and payment processes pushed new rules because they were being held accountable. The changes were all implemented in response to hugely influential NYT opinion piece on PornHub in December [1] that specifically called out payment processors, and preempted a BBC investigation into OnlyFans that was hinted to do the same [2].
The conversation here should about how rulemaking via media outrage is a problem given the public has conflicting morals.
Yeah this piece seems to forget that the Guardian[1] was also very critical of Pornhub when the NYT story came out. It seems like their position is that neither a completely hands off approach or a complete ban is acceptable, and that the only moral path is to allow the good and police the bad with perfect precision and recall.
Accountability by definition requires proper accounting practices. There should be level-headed discussions, legal actions, and punishment proportional to the wrongdoing.
Taking damage from public outrage is being lynched, coerced, blackmailed, retaliated, scapegoated, it is being anything but held accountable.
The author is talking about having power to discriminate anyone's business via private corporate decision. It seems OK in the context of sex trafficking/CP because we know those are bad things, but the power is not limited to any of that, and that is unaccountability.
What's your point? That someone at the Guardian does not share your personal opinion?
As for me, I'm not okay with either banks discriminating against free speech and banks discriminating against porn. For example, I was vigorously against banks blocking Wikileaks payments. Therefore, I'm fine with the Guardian article.
The article is an Opinion and not representative of The Guardian. It is written by Jillian C York, the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism.
Trying to conflate this opinion piece with The Guardian itself is dumb and shows a failure to understand what an Opinion is.
I thought it was a side effect of "know your customer". Sex work is high risk because it's adjacent to trafficking (organized crime) and underage workers result in CP. It's very difficult to determine if every amateur sex worker is a consenting adult.
What about sex toy shops? As small provider selling selected sex toys you constantly face a PayPal and stripe (or whatever) ban. IMO it makes no sense.
Or a portal for prostitutes to advertise their services. I tried forever to find a way to charge CC or PayPal but it's impossible without a huge existing volume. These providers basically enforce a monopoly on this market. Even thought it is completely legal here.
For me the US is enforcing their moral believes on us. In my culture this differentiation does not make sense
Given how cryptocurrencies are rapidly growing (again), we should expect their deeper integration into payment systems. Eventually, all sites related to sex toys, sex services, or any kind of sex pleasures will shift to independent payment systems based on cryptocurrency. As for me, I'm not pleased too with this monopoly while hiring babes on https://aurumgirls.co.uk. You said that "the US is enforcing their moral believes on us". I think it's their state policy. You need to follow their rules and believes, otherwise you are "wrong".
I wonder if that is related to dodgy subscription schemes on porn websites as well. I looked into it a few times and every portal had ridiculous hidden subscriptions. Every access pass automatically converted into a hugely expensive monthly subscription. And I presume it is similarly hidden or difficult to get out of it again.
I'm really happy to pay for content, but shit like that makes me nope right out of there and look for alternatives or not bother.
Businesses with high chargeback rates might get rejected by some payment processors, but there's usually another one willing to take them on in exchange for higher fees.
I suspect that "accountability" is a problematic frame. Platforms are the accountability mechanism, increasingly so.
As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.
But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? of all the possible battles to lead, children and the sanity of adults would be their battlehorse? If so, I admire it.
>> But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn?
I think a secret meeting to form a secret cabal is unlikely. More like an approximate consensus, that has always existed in an industry that has always been highly centralized, in a world where sex work has always been marginalised.
My point was that there's nothing new about relatively arbitrary power at banks to decide who can do business.
It's pretty uncontroversial, if you think about past decades. Was there no profit to be made providing financial services to women, before it became normative in the 50s-70s? Theoretically, there probably was. In practice, banking norms were not to.
Looks like the same thing as wikileaks to me. A combination of bad optics and lawyers getting involved causing a monopolistic supplier to pull their services.
Doubt this has much to do with MasterCard attacking the adult industry, it looks more like they want to strongly protect their existing stranglehold on the payment systems. Anything which impacts the way they're seen costs them real actually money I'd bet at their scale.
Oh please come on, stop with the monopoly rhetoric Only Fans is no where near a monopoly. It just comes across as truly naive to throw that term around in every conversation.
This issue happens evey decade or so. Last time it was wikileaks and VPNs being delisted by american credit card companies. That popularized cryptocurency and saw bitcoin rise as a censorship-beating payment system. And last week i signed up for a VPNs using my visa without issue. After that they went after filesharing platforms like rapidshare. Now "file lockers" are called "cloud storage" and are a normal online service. This time they are going after porn, an old favorite for US companies to hate. It will again come to nothing.
Readit News
The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.
> The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities.
This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad. The cumulative effect is a chilling of protected speech in a way that congress could never legally get away with.
https://ccbill.com/pricing
(As an aside, one sort of neat thing about CCBill is apparently they’ll never kill your account without warning, unlike PayPal & co)
People think this is about morality, but it's a lot more about the cost of operating in that market. I bet that there are way more claims of fraud, money laundering investigations, subpoenas and other overhead that the banks don't want to deal with.
Like teenagers stealing credit cards to pay camgirls is probably pretty common. And there are likely a lot of prostitution investigations.
The real problem is that sex work isn't treated like normal work, which just creates freedom for criminals to take advantage of vulnerable people.
If it was licensed and regulated, then it would be easier to tell the crooks, and victims of human trafficking from the people who are legitimate, voluntary workers.
Then the economics might make sense for banks to keep serving these customers.
Anyone discussing this needs to be aware of "Operation Chokepoint".
The banks all doing the same thing is exactly what you would expect in a free market.
They are all in the same market (credit card processing) and all have the same information on the risks and costs and revenue in that market for handling various types of transactions. All of them that make rational decisions supported by the data they have should come to the same conclusions and take the same actions.
What you'd expect in a free market is for specialized banks to appear that would deal with porn and other high risk customers that the more general purpose banks all conclude that they don't want to deal with.
That's what has happened, as has been mentioned in other comments.
I think that's not quite what happened here. It's not that, literally, all the banks decided this; it's that the banks are so huge that, when one or a few of the mega-banks make the decision, it's effectively the same as if they all did. Ultra-consolidation is the real problem.
Just another reason to smash these banks into a million pieces.
Deleted Comment
Price increases are a great example. One company will take an increase and most follow.
And how is this chilling of protected speech? The constitution guarantees free speech, not payment for speech. There is nothing stop these workers from sharing their content/speech.
Not necessarily. Banks have a government license to create money (ok, depends on what kind of bank, but let's put that aside), and provide services many individuals and organizations rely on. That already means that even if you're a staunch capitalist, you should still support some sort of set of constraints and norms, regulation, of their activities. So it's not clear that a bank should be able to refuse service to legally-operating organizations.
Plus, if one bank can do this, then why not any other bank?
I think it is about charge backs. Visa and mastercard hate charge backs. Porn has a very high charge back rate and these cost card companies so much they will often just cancel the merchant agreement. With a charge back there is human customer service involved, customer denials, fraud and complicated dispute resolution. This is why the processors that specialize in porn (ccbill) charge up to %15 per transaction. I don't think the processors wanted to go after onlyfans - they just would rather not deal with the drama. However, like onlyfans discovered, if you offer to pay a %15 per transaction fee - processors will work with you. Processors do not have morals - they are just trying to make money. They don't mind handling transactions for gun sales, tobacco, strip clubs or pyramid schemes.
I don't think causation runs one way. The financial industry & "Government" aren't clearly delineated. You can see this all the time in "compliance." Banks will commonly cite "compliance," essentially blaming the regulator for various policies. If you ask the regulator itself, they'll generally consider a lot of that stuff bank policy.
The way in which banking regulation works in practice creates a ton of ambiguities like this. "Compliance" is basically the area between regulation and internal policy. One firm will adopt a policy, which has all sorts of compliance implications. Another will copy them. The regulator grows to expect it, and it develops from there.
Market centralisation encourages this a lot.
If you had billions to invest and transact with, you'd have banks bending over backwards for your business too.
The banks are accountable to their boards which are accountable to their shareholders, which (the ones that matter) are increasingly .. I hate to use the word but 'woke' activists - nudging companies in the 'right' direction either from a moral standpoint or from a perceived moral standpoint of customers/public at large.
Progressively (as in a simple progression over time, not the political sense) investing in/lending to/providing the current account for, defence/tobacco/oil/sex are becoming bad looks, to the big voteholders even if not in general.
Yes, both PornHub and OnlyFans haven't been careful enough with screening their material but we normally don't hold hosts responsible for perfect policing of user content--except when sex is involved.
The whole scheme to make creators pay to run ads is a failed ideology if creator content is the very thing that platforms depend on to succeed.
This is why I always edit/record to files I can re-use/re-distribute rather than using native record options on platform-specific apps.
I make music, not adult content though just FTR.
This is exactly the case.
Where exactly are the banks at risk or accountable?
Are we talking about fraud, or potential criminal investigation because of underaged girls forced to do onlyfans by mafia (I can imagine that) and money transfer via their bank?
One of the great usecases for crypto
Deleted Comment
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/01/germany-orders-deutsche-bank... is just the first result from a google search
Dead Comment
It's easier to stir up outrage against porn—sexual prudishness has a long history—than against Facebook—the ability so globally to overshare, and the (inevitably delayed) realization of its consequences, is only in the very beginning of forming.
The answer to regulation gone wild is not more regulation, it is to remove regulatory power. You can’t dig your way out of a hole.
The conversation here should about how rulemaking via media outrage is a problem given the public has conflicting morals.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
Taking damage from public outrage is being lynched, coerced, blackmailed, retaliated, scapegoated, it is being anything but held accountable.
The author is talking about having power to discriminate anyone's business via private corporate decision. It seems OK in the context of sex trafficking/CP because we know those are bad things, but the power is not limited to any of that, and that is unaccountability.
The Guardian merely has a problem with this particular application of it.
As for me, I'm not okay with either banks discriminating against free speech and banks discriminating against porn. For example, I was vigorously against banks blocking Wikileaks payments. Therefore, I'm fine with the Guardian article.
The article is an Opinion and not representative of The Guardian. It is written by Jillian C York, the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism.
Trying to conflate this opinion piece with The Guardian itself is dumb and shows a failure to understand what an Opinion is.
Post nut clarity is apparently a financial problem.
Or a portal for prostitutes to advertise their services. I tried forever to find a way to charge CC or PayPal but it's impossible without a huge existing volume. These providers basically enforce a monopoly on this market. Even thought it is completely legal here.
For me the US is enforcing their moral believes on us. In my culture this differentiation does not make sense
I'm really happy to pay for content, but shit like that makes me nope right out of there and look for alternatives or not bother.
Dead Comment
As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.
I think a secret meeting to form a secret cabal is unlikely. More like an approximate consensus, that has always existed in an industry that has always been highly centralized, in a world where sex work has always been marginalised.
My point was that there's nothing new about relatively arbitrary power at banks to decide who can do business.
It's pretty uncontroversial, if you think about past decades. Was there no profit to be made providing financial services to women, before it became normative in the 50s-70s? Theoretically, there probably was. In practice, banking norms were not to.
Doubt this has much to do with MasterCard attacking the adult industry, it looks more like they want to strongly protect their existing stranglehold on the payment systems. Anything which impacts the way they're seen costs them real actually money I'd bet at their scale.
Welcome to cancel culture.I can recommend some reading to get caught up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301199