[mfer]

There is a subtle element here... US lawmakers have control over what is legal and illegal. US VISA won't process activities that are illegal in the particular country. It's not that religious conservatives have power over the credit card companies.

I also hope you're not saying that the US should allow child sexual assault which is the issue in this case.

[dismantlethesun]

Porn isn't illegal in the US, so I'm not sure why US VISA won't process it.

[SoSoRoCoCo]

Nothing to do with legality: as I said, christian values at high levels. I mean, contraception, and gay and interracial marriage are legal, but Christians in the US still fight it tooth and nail, like: refusing to hand out marriage certificates, or refusing to fund the pill but fund viagra, or closing down health clinics for women. I mean this can't be your first rodeo, right?

[mfer]

Child porn is. In this case the issue is one dealing with children. To understand this case we need to keep it in context.

[dismantlethesun]

I think that's mixing issues. On the one side, we have a beautiful thing memorializing the most basic, and instinctually pleasant of human activities (sex between adults).

On the other side, we have something so unequivocally and fundamentally immoral that many countries place it on the same level as murder, and even typical murderers draw their own moral line against it.

The two can't be spoken with in the same sentence.

If PornHub is complicit in child pornography, every single executive involved should go to prison. If MasterCard has evidence, or suspicion that PornHub is complicit then they must turn such evidence over to the authorities immediately, and have a moral (not legal) duty to ensure that all the PornHub executives they dealt with are prosecuted. This is a poison barrel issue from which no one must escape.

However, the way MasterCard is acting is as if they merely want to break ties with a high-fraud risk client, whose risk profile may have changed during the COVID crisis. It reeks of a company protecting profit margins, and not of a company hurriedly running away from a tarpit of felonies and turpitude.

I may be wrong, and PornHub will be destroyed within 2021 like BackPage was, but right now I doubt it. VISA was their primary payment processor, and they only cut off access after MasterCard made public allegations. VISA has their own evaluations team, and I know from experience they're quite strict. The question is how could they not catch this before MasterCard?

[true_religion]

We're talking about porn being processed by VISA in the USA vs VISA International.

CP is illegal everywhere.

VISA International isn't going to let you pay for this stuff in the EU either.