Collective Shout, a small but vocal lobby group, has long called for a mandatory internet filter that would prevent access to adult content for everyone in Australia. Its director, Melinda Tankard Reist, was recently appointed to the stakeholder advisory board for the government’s age assurance technology trial before the under-16s social media ban comes into effect in Australia in December.
So what happened with that? Did things change in hindsight?
So sick of conservatives forcing their beliefs on others. Filter your own content, use parents controls, don’t ban everything you don’t like because of your arrogant belief in made up morality. Morality is relative and religion does not give your opinions weight.
Yeah but Jesus definitely preached love thy neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and also, ew gay people not in my back yard.
I’m pretty confident on two of those anyway
The Mastercard/Visa monopoly (or duopoly) is bad for consumers. It should be broken up.
Discover was just acquired by Capital One, so one less viable competitor too.
While Collective Shout solely targeted games it said violated policies held by payment platforms, Itch.io’s move to temporarily remove all NSFW content resulted in games with LGBTQ+ themes being removed.
One petition signer who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community said they were concerned that banning sexual-based games would be the start of cracking down on LGBTQ+ content.
There it is.
if the LGBTQ+ games were not sexual in nature (why does it not say?), then that is quite damning and I approve of this conspiracy theory.
If you google Tankard-Reist you’ll find it’s not a conspiracy theory - she has actively tried to block queer representation at every level in every way for decades
Fair enough
politicians have literally said that the reason for censorship bills about the internet are specifically to go after lgbtq spaces.
It’s not all that much of a conspiracy theory as those pushing this line at the payment processoers openly advocate that since LGBTQ+ references sex by way of sexuality and gender, then that is sexual content, and is therefore inappropriate for children. This, of course, completely ignores heterosexuality and cisgender because they consider queer people existing to be harmful to children. And trying to get through to them about how important age-appropriate sexual education is in combating child abuse is an exercise in frustration.
How can you know a game is LGBTQ+ if they don’t talk about sex/gender? They look like normal humans to me, which differ in sexual preferences only? Example: How can you say this guy is gay without knowing his sexual preferences?
And how is casually referring to heterosexual relationships then not sexual?
Cognitive dissonance, naturally.
What’s even the argument here? Steam already has parental control options, age gates, and content filters… if you don’t want your kids seeing that shit on steam, then, like, don’t let em?
…meanwhile, let’s just continue shoving blatant gambling down minors’ throats in the form of lootboxes.
This group isn’t interested in protecting children they’re just interested in pushing their own beliefs on everybody else. The easiest way they can do that is to pretend that they’re interested in children. Which I’m sure some of them are, but not in the capacity that anyone wants them to be.
It’s a classic right-wing tactic. Because nobody wants to be against a law that protects children.
People like them used to go after books, now games.
https://bannedbooks.library.cmu.edu/aldous-huxley-brave-new-world/
The argument is control. Religious zealots are all about controlling society and subduing people to follow their rules (that they themselves tend to break all the time)
That’s their goal for sure, what I mean is how are they pretending to justify it?
There’s usually some on-paper benevolent veneer to wrap their hateful bullshit up with.
For example, they hate trans people, but they don’t campaign on that out loud - they justify that hated under the guise of shit like protecting bathrooms.
But this is fucking Steam - access to that bathroom is already under lock and key behind an armed guard. They can’t just pull the “think of the children!” card when the children already have a myriad of protections.
…or maybe they can, considering what just happened. We live in stupid times.
They precisely can and they kinda just did. “Think of the children” is the magic phrase to shut down critical thinking and give you carte blanche to do whatever you want.
Not always. School shootings happen and suddenly crickets on gun control. “Think of the children” only applies to moral outrage, not tangible physical threat prevention. Also applies to school lunches and any other actual tangible thing to ACTUALLY benefit general child welfare.
Sure, I implied moral outrage. It’s not like they actually give a damn about the children.
Keep the pressure on.
Collective Shout got them to change their position and they’re a small group. We are legion, as the kids say
And we’re the ones spending the money
They’re the ones at risk of losing money if they get sued by reintroducing said content. You’re not going to stop using the payment processors because there’s literally no other option. This is performative.
Sued for what? They aren’t stopping illegal content from being sold. That, as is implied by the word “illegal”, was already not allowed on these stores. They’re stopping legal, but potentially (not my opinion) objectionable, content from being sold. There’s no legal risk for allowing it.
That’s really what I don’t get. Why make it impossible for people to give you money. That doesn’t seem to be the way capitalism is supposed to operate if something is popular then you should allow it.
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They got together enough people to mass email, that is all it took.
Companies tend to multiply received responses to represent the total number of people who were to lazy to complain, so Visa and MasterCard saw 1,000 emails as 10,000,000 in their risk averse actions.
Now 4chan is pissed and have started their own mass email and phonecall campaign, so we shall see where this goes…
Visa also have a fairly well documented history of kowtowing to Christian groups. The CEO of their Asian division is a right-wing religious fanatic who hates, well he’s a religious fanatic so you know what he hates, but it’s basically everything and everybody.
They don’t like Japanese anime very much as well, probably because they think it’s all pornography (anime does tend to have that bent, but it’s not all pornography).
The thing is on their website they claim not to make moral judgements about purchasers, they claim to authorise anything that isn’t actually illegal, so they should be totally fine with pornography and anime. If they are going to be right-wing religious fundamentalists at least they could be honest about it on their website.
Who do you even email for that? [email protected]?
I assume they own their own domain.
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Maybe read those two comments again, then read your response.
Your reading skills are not what you think they are.
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Mate you didn’t read the comment right. You might want to check yourself while you reck yourself.
Urghs, you are really aggressive and kind of pathetic so thank you for blocking me.
You need a hug or something?
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This is some low effort trolling, isn’t it?
Fuck Collective Shout, or anyone spreading censorship!
Somebody should check their PCs and internet history; after all, name a better duo than Conservatives and Projection.
Batman and Robin are a way better duo.
I mean, they actually try to do good and oppose nazis instead of be them.
I’d bet real money that the CEO of Collective Shout has CSAM on one or more of their computers.
I would put ten dollars on it.
I’m all in! Three fiddy for the pool
“The internet has no borders. Women and girls everywhere are impacted by male violence against women and misogyny in general which we believed these games perpetuated,” she said.
Yet the fictional violence against men and boys is A-Ok!
100’s ??? no no,no,no last I checked it was in the tens of thousands of nsfw games on itch.io
“[Elon Musk] said he wanted to get his own X payments platform «going soon»”.
Surely that’s going to solve the problem. There’s absolutely no censorship on Twitter. /s
When there are enough competing parties, the argument of “I live in country A and I don’t care about B’s special services reading my messages”, where A and B are in a state of adversity, starts working.
By competing parties I mean not just A and B, but a plethora of snakes in that pit.
So - do it Elon. It’s fine.
When is the European alternative to these coming?
An alternative to PayPal, called WERO is currently in it’s rollout process in Germany, Belgium and France. In October the next step will be activated, allowing payments in e-commerce. Later down the road, you’ll be able to pay in real shops. Luxembourg and Netherlands are to join in next. More and more banks start to adopt WERO.
I urge everyone to use WERO as much as you can. It’s flying a bit under the radar at the moment and this must be a success. Hopefully more EU members will join soon.
an eu alternative would be just as susceptible to hate campaigns by bigots censoring content… look at the uk and the terfs (i know technically the uk isn’t the eu but they’re still europe)
Feels like we’re going back to the 90s/00s “Christian parents against video games” moral panic era. But this time, they’re being appeased more heavily.
I despise conservatism. It destroys everything it touches.
And there’s way fewer Christians nowadays
But more fascists
It’s amazing how they have a book that tells them to love everybody and somehow they’ve taken that, and turned it into oppress everybody.
Ugh… This shit again…
The fucking Bible is FULL OF FUCKING HATE. Hate for women, hate for blacks, hate for gays, hate for the “other”.
I’m really sick of people trotting out two lines from that book of fairytales and doing a pikachu face “how could people read this and be evil?!?”
Easily, because the Bible is filled with vile shit. Because it’s made up bullshit that let’s you argue every side of every point because it’s a amalgam of garbage written by idiots with the occasional line of wisdom sprinkled in.
Kind of like how we love watching old Tom and Jerry cartoons, but would generally prefer to lightly forget how those cartoons contained frequent racist caricatures towards indians, island natives, black people, etc.
Who’s behind this sudden wave of age verification bullshit, Schrödinger’s parents? The ones who shove an iPad in front of their 2 year old and berate school teachers for not being poorly paid babysitters who raise their kids for them? And yet they claim to care SO MUCH about the well being of children that they push these obscene and draconian policies on the rest of us? What a bunch of fucking hypocrites, but that’s typical for conservatives.
Governments and some religious nutjobs.
They only pretend to care about children. It is about power and control. Always has been, always will.
Don’t be fooled, that’s not the real reason. Parents that shove iPads in front of their children are not even remotely worried about what their kids are watching online. This is purely about control, has nothing to do with children.
