- How Porn and Video Games are Canaries in a Mineshaft

Thoughts from @CabanaBoySteven

Porn and video games have a lot in common—both are billion dollar online industries, both are ubiquitous yet controversial, both advocate for personal sovereignty, and most importantly, both are protected as free speech under the US Constitution. Unfortunately, in spite of these protections, they are used as scapegoats socially and legislatively for society’s perceived shortfalls.

For starters, porn is now being held responsible for the male loneliness epidemic, citing porn addiction as the root cause. It claims that porn has created unrealistic expectations, objectified women, and normalized sexual violence. However, porn critics have been caught misquoting research to further their own agenda and often confuse correlation with causation.

 While porn is an easy target, making it the sole pariah fails to address the rise of social media, shifting gender norms, unprecedented dating challenges, and current socioeconomic pressures, all of which make it more difficult for men to fulfill their traditional role as providers. While society has grown with respect to women’s rights, there’s also unprecedented backlash for men seeking their place in society. NIH studies indicate that dating apps can sometimes make it more difficult for people to find love, and that doesn't even factor in the difficulties approaching in person. These shifting cultural norms are not only confusing, but take out the fun of dating and can even be punishing. Many well-intentioned men fear that approaching a woman will be seen as offensive, or worse, get them branded as the next #creepyman viral hashtag.

There are some studies that connect male loneliness and porn consumption, but the research only confirms porn usage as a symptom of loneliness, not the other way around. There’s no current evidence that porn consumption drives loneliness. Just like hunger drives people to eat, hormones drive people to find sexual outlets, wherever they may be. To say porn consumption leads to loneliness is akin to saying eating leads to hunger.

Research actually suggests that porn may actually be a stabilizing resource for those without alternatives. Thanks to technology, parasocial connections with creators help provide a positive outlet that decreases loneliness.

Even though porn is legal and has potential upsides, the blanket insistence that porn is harmful has led to decades of discrimination against sex workers across America. Though it was not a law, banks invented their own category called reputational risk, then used it to target sex workers, who often are in vulnerable financial situations and some resort to sex work as a means of survival. Last year, we did a survey at AVN interviewing male and female sex workers about their debanking experiences, and the numbers were illuminating—two out of three women had been debanked, while none of the men had any issues.

This discrimination extends to payment platforms, which are used to provide a safe way to manage funds. In 2020, Visa and Mastercard cut ties with Pornhub, supposedly to prevent child abuse. Pornhub responded by removing over 10 million videos from unverified users—sacrificing nearly two thirds of their content. Yet even with these adjustments, Visa and Mastercard refuse to platform them. Only a fraction of the 10 million removed videos may have contained children. This style of broad enforcement most often emerges when risk mitigation becomes more expensive than the anticipated benefits (eg. revenue, reach). These wide sweeping policies punish both creators and users, many of whom may be avoiding KYC due to privacy and data concerns.

Visa and Mastercard play favorites, greenlighting megacorporations like Roblox and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more). In 2021 alone, Meta had 20.3 million incidents of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). That’s double the number of videos Pornhub took down (many which were not CSAM). What’s more, 92% of the total 29 million 2021 CSAM reports in 2021 came from Meta, and the pattern continued into 2022, where they accounted for approximately 84% of CyberTipline reports—a staggering 27 out of 32 million.

So why do Visa and Mastercard continue to give companies like Meta a pass? One can only speculate, but what we know for sure is that the porn industry is in their crosshairs and they are shooting for all they are worth. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express process approximately 95% of the American purchases, so the consequences of debanking are lethal. The lost revenue, legal risks, and increased cost of compliance made it unaffordable for Pornhub to continue operating in several states and the entire country of France. 

And people don’t always wait for the law. Backdoor regulation has led to mass censorship, and was illegal until the recent Supreme Court ruling, which greenlighted deplatforming through age verification laws. This sparked a heated controversy in video games, led by the pretext that games increased sexual violence against women. When Mastercard got scorched by the heat, they claimed to be responding to a feminist group Collective Shout, who are not even from the United States, they’re in Australia. Collective Shout sent letters to video game distributors (Steam, itch.io, etc.), demanding that they remove a subsection of controversial NSFW video games. While it's important to have open discussions, and I even went so far as to write to Steam about my own concerns weeks before this all went down, their approach was poorly researched, poorly executed, and led to catastrophic collateral damage.

Collective Shout mentioned (but did not cite) a 2022 meta-analysis that found “a significant and meaningful positive effect of violent video games on subsequent physically aggressive behaviour.” After some digging, we found a meta-analysis from 2022, but the research concluded the opposite of Collective Shout’s claims. 

The meta-analysis reported that “exposure to sexualization in games was not found to be associated with negative outcomes,” and further concluded that “better quality studies were less able to find evidence for effects.” In other words, Collective Shout had cherry picked lines from the least credible research, then presented them as “facts.”

When Steam and itch.io ignored Collective Shout’s demands, Collective Shout brought their complaints directly to the payment processors. Mastercard’s banking partners responded by demanding that platforms remove content under the threat of fines and termination of services. After this battle made headlines, the contagion spread at a regional level, and several Steam users reported that PayPal was removed as a payment option.

In response, the platforms removed all NSFW games from their libraries. Although neither platform commented on their reasons, we suspect that the blanket takedown was due to the astronomical costs of reviewing each game and the increased legal exposure.

Mastercard tried to claim it wasn’t their fault, but Valve, Steam’s parent company, publicly revealed that Mastercard's Rule 5.12.7 provoked them to take down their content.

Mastercard's Rule 5.12.7

A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks. The Corporation considers any of the following activities to be in violation of this Rule:

1. The sale or offer of sale of a product or service other than in full compliance with law then applicable to the Acquirer, Issuer, Merchant, Cardholder, Cards, or the Corporation.

2. The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.

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Doesn’t this sound a bit familiar? This is the same reputational risk that was recently banned by Executive Order on August 7th, making it illegal for financial institutions (including banks, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, etc.) to deplatform content on the basis of reputational risk. Mastercard further attempted to deflect blame, claiming that they were not involved in the decision process, as they just facilitate the technology being used to process the payments.

Except that logic doesn’t fly when adult themes are explicitly banned in Mastercard’s policy, and it was Mastercard’s policy, and the potential consequences of violating it, that was the ultimate incentive to take down the NSFW content. Although the original complaint from Collective Shout focused on “nonconsensual sexual behavior,” the rule also prohibits “nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part,” which could put other video games on the chopping block. Although Mastercard has not threatened to pull violent video games, from a policy level, they already are positioned to do so at any time.

When you give an opportunist an inch, they’ll steal a mile, or to quote my ex-girlfriend, “If you give a mouse a cookie, they will shit all over your floor.” Zealous suppression of sexuality is a violation of basic human rights. To move the goal posts and play favorites is not censorship for the greater good, and can be a slippery slope towards authoritarianism.

At this point, it should be clear that putting free speech in the hands of payment processors and banks is dangerous. Although one could argue that the Executive Order banning reputational risks should prevent banks and Mastercard from deplatforming an entire genre of games, getting them to follow the order requires costly legal battles with uncertain outcomes.

One could play a little Devil’s advocate and argue Mastercard has a right to choose with whom they do and do not conduct business. According to the Supreme Court case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023), the government cannot compel an individual or business engaged in expressive activity to create speech with which they disagree. As a payment processor there’s a reasonable argument that these protections may not apply to Mastercard, but on the other hand, they also apply to the content being censored.  As much as we want to wave a wand that will bring back all the games, these nuances mean that the fight is far from over.

The simple solution staring everyone in the face...

Sexualized and violent video games may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but one does not have to partake in an activity in order to respect its right to exist. Payment processors are censoring content that adults have a first amendment right to consume. Fighting in court will not guarantee resolution, only expensive legal fees. 

So what can you do?

As an individual, you can fight for your freedom by exercising it.

Freedom is like a muscle, the stronger it is the safer you are, and if you do not exercise it then it will atrophy and die. Freedom of choice in a free market leads to competition, and competition for market share is a democratic process in which everyday people vote every single day through every dollar they spend. This begs the question, how does one compete with companies that already control trillions of dollars worth of market share?

Innovation has a long history of disrupting entrenched oligarchies, and thankfully, the technology to challenge these payment processors already exists in the form of crypto. 44% of all monthly credit card payments are paid in full, meaning that it’s solely a means of transferring funds as opposed to lending. This is because credit cards offer a fast and secure way to process payments. This is particularly valuable when transacting online where cash payments are not an option allowing credit cards to make money from every transaction. If the crypto market took even a small fraction of these payments, it could capture billions of dollars in market share.

Some companies and governments see the writing on the wall, and are already building crypto alternatives. Coinbase has teamed up with Shopify to allow USDC payment options by default. PayPal, though part of the censorship problem, recently enabled crypto payments as well, claiming it could save global businesses billions of dollars on cross border banking fees. In 2022, Colorado became the first state to allow citizens to pay their taxes using crypto. Utah followed Colorado’s example in 2023, and currently there are more states looking to do the same.

If Steam wants Mastercard to ease censorship without spending a fortune on lawyers, they can integrate crypto as an alternative. There are numerous benefits of adopting an apolitical decentralized payment system secured through cryptographic blockchain technology. Maybe the cake isn’t always a lie in a world where we can lower processing fees to third parties and international banking, while simultaneously protecting individual sovereignty from entities like Mastercard.

Crypto has already streamlined payments, but for it to work both consumers and businesses need to adopt it. So let’s all walk this mutually beneficial path together and help protect our constitutionally granted freedoms and save money along the way.

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