Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-ar...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being-blamed-on...

[3] https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstreams/761eb6c3-9377-...

I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.

What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?

Plenty of religious groups have the money to be able to start the "holy card". And there's plenty of businesses that'd be giddy to accept Jesus card.

Consider, for example, companies like hobby lobby or Chick-fil-A banning visa and promoting Jesus card.

It also wouldn't take much for such a card to advertise itself as kid friendly.

Thinking about it, I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened already.

Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.

Maybe? Depends on how customers are sold on the mission. If it's sold as protecting children I could see a number of people ditching their cards.

> Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.

True. It'd take a large amount of initial capital and would likely need a targeted and regional rollout with some nice incentives to the merchants.

Visa being responsible for CSAM isn't a theoretical lawsuit they're afraid about. (2022)

Well, this coverage identifies two restrictions that Valve is enforcing:

(1) No video footage of humans. Animation only.

(2) No incest.

Onlyfans clearly hasn't implemented restriction (1).

If they've implemented (2), that seems like much less of a problem as applied to onlyfans than to animated content on Steam. But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.

The unspoken arrangement is that the government allows them to keep charging a de facto sales tax on a massive portion of the economy as long as they cooperate and de facto ban things that the government wants banned but can't ban themselves due to that pesky constitution.

Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.

The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.

They're half of a duopoly.

> What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?

The US courts.

Visa was specifically pulled into the lawsuit against PornHub; here's Visa's official statement on the matter: https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/compan...

The lawsuit is still ongoing.

But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.

Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.

Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.

People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.

No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!

Like for instance the outrage if you have a sign on your lawn stating that x president is a rapist to the economy, people will say that children should not be "exposed" to such words.

We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]

” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans

And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.

I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.

They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.

Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.

Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.

Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.

I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).

So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.

I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops taking card is not a given (Bulgaria, Hungary).

At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees. Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.

Also the arguments concerning cash restrictions are seen very differently by the population: since there existed two oppressive regimes on German soil in the 20th century, a lot of people realize that the restrictions on cash are just another step towards restrictions of the citizen's freedoms (thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash).

Thus, in Germany there exists the saying "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" [cash is lived freedom].

Of course the constituency that is openly pro-incest is small. On the other hand, I believe the constituency for a quite encompassing freedom of speech has to be taken seriously.

Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.

Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.

I'd rather have that than a complete loss of privacy.

Sure, but that's for small, everyday amounts. For values upwards of 500€, I think the familiarity of paying cash would be swamped by the nervousness of carrying way too much money with you, what if it gets stolen?

> this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees

The only time my bank has ever charged me a per-transaction fee was, ironically, when I withdrew cash abroad using my credit card.

I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.

In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800).

And while convenience stores, fast food, etc., won’t take a bill over $20 (which is understandable but really a trifling sum when you consider inflation - it’s a fast-food breakfast for three people), many other businesses are happy to do so. Nothing above $100 is in circulation anymore, and inflation means that $100 in 1980 is worth over $400 in today’s money even by government figures. A $20 bill 45 years ago was worth almost $100 in today’s money. And, of course, cash declaration rules have not updated the amounts to reflect this.

What do you mean?

> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.

It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.

Now, check this out:

> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.

> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.

> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/ecb_surveys/space/html/ecb.s...

This is to be expected though:

> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).

> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.

Regarding privacy:

> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.

I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.

Let's not exaggerate. While I am often enough exasperated at how often certain restaurants or bars will still only accept cash (or sometimes EC card), I'm still able to do about 90% of my transactions by card.

Well as you can see from the US currently, a country that is now free and democratic, might not continue to do so in the future. But once you've given up the ability to use cash because you didn't need it then, how are you going to get it back when you do need it?

Log in to your account and toggle the “I want porn” option? It’s annoying, but not onerous.

> And I know for a fact that the UK has much stricter limits on kink and BDSM in adult content as well.

I know what you’re referring to, but don’t know the full details. I believe it’s around violent porn (rape, etc). We certainly have a “think of the children” brigade. I still think the discourse is significantly more civilised than that of the US, which feels like it’s approaching virtual civil war levels. When these subjects are debated, it's usually in parliament and doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.

I think some of the policies you mention are more artefacts of the politicians not understanding the technological future we’re in, rather than ideology. Many of them think they can make the internet a safe space for kids through policy. It’s naive, for sure, but usually not dogmatic.

> What gives with people claiming it's just the US?

It’s not just the US, but when the people standing outside of UK abortion clinics harassing women are funded by US ‘pro life’ religious groups then you know there’s a problem. Puritanism is a US export.

The vitriolic political divisions in the US, which leads to all sorts of fringe issues becoming mainstream (trans rights, for example), is leaking out into the rest of the western democracies, poisoning the debate everywhere.

The Visa issue is just one more of these puritanical US exports.

Yes, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, but there is a large fraction that is less sex focused, it's a fair generalization and comment to express that.

Besides, I’m not advocating for the abolishment of cash, but against dramatic claims of an evil scheme to control and spy on citizens. That’s a right-wing narrative in Germany, but nonsense nonetheless.

Otherwise, your claims run counter to more credible sources I have read. (Which I am not willing to search up for this post.)

No, in the UK it was left-wing feminists who led the opposition to gender identity policies long before any conservatives got involved, on the basis of this being harmful to women's rights.

Just look at the recent For Women Scotland win in the Supreme Court, it's nothing to do with US religious groups at all, and everything to do with protecting sex-based rights and sexual orientation in law.

In 2014, Time magazine declared trans rights as "America's next civil rights frontier" [1]. For Women Scotland was formed in 2018 [2].

(Just looked at your comment history. Just, wow... is the trans issue the only one you care about?)

[1] https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/

[2] https://forwomen.scot/about/

So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?

> doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.

When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one. Instead of everyone just handwaving and ignoring it...

Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.

Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.

> Even 120-130 years after the point

There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.

Feminist women opposed to the Tory government's plans to introduce "gender self-id" law and similar policy had already started organising by this point. Groups like Woman's Place UK and Fair Play For Women. This had nothing whatsoever to do with religious arguments from the US.

There's also significant liberal opposition to all this in the US, again not linked to religion but, like the UK, on the basis of women's rights.

> So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?

It isn't law. But even if it was, that doesn't contradict what I am talking about. I'm talking about the export of puritanism. If you think having to turn the porn button from 'off' to 'on' in your phone contract's options is the same, then I don't know what to say.

> When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one.

Yeah maybe, but that's not the topic of conversation here. The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world (like the Visa issue).

Look, you have the right to believe whatever you want, but making every single discussion you have on here about how much you hate trans people is not really something I want to get involved with. Good day.

I believe English puritans were also in Holland and France for a while.

I recommend you go look up the feminist groups I mentioned and educate yourself on what's actually been happening in the UK on this.

Here's an article to get you started: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/hundreds-women-gat...

Also, I believe when buying used cars and such, most people still prefer cash transactions.

They're responsible for numerous other calls for bans against games like Detroit: Become Human, GTA, etc.

The major far-right fundamentalist opposition party has built its unprecedented success on a narrative of low government trust, and has been gaining ground in both polls and elections for years and years now.

So perhaps we shouldn't dismiss the parents' perspective entirely.

> Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions.

If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled. In a truly free payment system that safeguards democratic freedoms, these descriptions would be encrypted from end to end. (Just in the same way all personal communication should be protected.) This will, of course, never happen.

> And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.

Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?

Germany recently experimented with greater financial control over some parts of the population, and it wasn't a total disaster in terms of control. In terms of freedom, however, it is a disaster.

Unfortunately, the source is German-language: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/faq-was-bezahlkarten-fuer-geflu...

Despite cash being a pillar of freedom and democracy in an open society, there is still no good anonymous alternative to it that is usable by normal people on a daily basis.

thats BS. most people have indeed had such, and while not frequent, it was fully legit.

The real reason they want to do away with cash is so they can monitor everything you buy, and in time, perhaps more

Anyway I don't think that the English Puritans/etc. were somehow particularly exceptional (besides the fact that they emigrated to North America) compared to other similar groups in Europe.

Sure, technically its government imposed domestic puritanism which isn't exported. I agree its a completely different thing.

> The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world

Yes, US has its quirks but it's not that exceptional as you are implying. e.g. when it comes to banning/regulated video games Australia is inarguable much more restrictive.

Germany also has a history of banning violent video games and its again much worse than the US e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/ki12if/steam_now_reg...

Post "Online Safety Act" UK is not that much better either.

US is very tame and less "puritanical" by your definition than those countries. The core difference being that the government can't really regulate it directly so credit card companies might be acting as some sort of a proxy.

Or are you implying that US somehow turned Germany and Australia more "puritanical" than itself and there would be no domestic support for censorship there otherwise?

I had a debit card with some hundreds of EUR already charged, but I ended up using it with an NFC enabled smartphone.

No issues at all, even going in far places outside Barcelona. Everyone very receptive in BCN.

I looked at ATM terminals and they seemed full of rules and complications. I tried to get some cash just to collect the notes as a souvenir, but I gave up.

Again, everyone accepted my NFC enabled smartphone, I tested my debit NFC card and my local bank CC NFC card as well

So I think ATMs present a lot of friction for sure.

Many banks have tried to start other electronic payments independent from those 2 (for example Wero) but it doesn't really get any traction.

So I don't see how the duopoly is any less powerful here.

(It's clear in the article, btw).

> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established.

Another plausible reading could be that this is just a widely believed incorrect thing (or most exactly, they are just saying it is widely believed, and not anything about the underlying truthfulness of the belief). This seems easy for somebody to observe about the society around them (although I bet it is a regional thing, or something like that) and less likely for there to be hard data on. Perception is also more likely than actual facts to drive behavior, right?

> They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.

This, on the other hand, seems like a specific action taken by the government to solve a specific problem, so I’d expect it to be well documented…

ApplePay connected to my no forex transaction credit card earning 3% cashback covered 95% of these transactions and a few times I had to use that credit card directly.

And yet, that is very far from the majority.

> If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled.

That isn’t true. If you put "murder contract + 2kg heroin" in the description, at most a bank clerk will call to ask you to avoid that. The description is reviewed to detect fraud, and protects a lot of people from illicit transactions. We have that for the same reason we have KYC regulations; you may disagree with it, but it protects a lot of people, right now. If you need to obfuscate the description, you’re free to use an encrypted string or a numeric reference without any trouble.

> Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?

There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example. There also is fraud potential actively being used for sure. Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen. Still, even Germans could benefit from questioning our ways from time to time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_Bank_Card_Group

[2] https://www.cartes-bancaires.com/cb/chiffres/

So, you compare the whole USA to only a part of Europe? Why is that?

Some card fees are capped by the EU: https://www.visa.co.uk/about-visa/visa-in-europe/fees-and-in..., quoting "From 9 December 2015, European regulation on interchange fees (Regulation (EU) 2015/751 of the European Parliament and of the European Council of 29 April 2015 on interchange fees for card-based transactions, “the IFR”) imposes interchange fee caps on most product types within the European Economic Area (EEA).".

It is true though that French banks have huge fees even for debit (0.20%) compared to, for example The Netherlands (0.02 eur).

So the doupoly is not as powerful everywhere, but I have no clue why the difference.