> But he was friendly with Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Ackman texted Banga, providing a link to Kristof’s story with his tweet: “Amex, VISA and MasterCard should immediately withhold payments or withdraw until this is fixed. PayPal has already done so.” (Ackman was unaware that American Express already did not allow its card to be used on adult sites.)
> Banga quickly wrote back: “We’re on it.”
> Then things began to move. Within days, Mastercard announced it had “instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance” of [PH] charges, saying it had found evidence of illegal activity and was continuing to investigate.
EDIT: The antisemitism in some replies is disgusting and I reject it entirely. This post is about a specific, publicly reported action by one individual, not about any religious or ethnic group. Any attempt to turn this into conspiracy-mongering is bigotry, not analysis. I don’t want that associated with my comment.
Huh, the same person who was behind crushing the campus protests & blacklisting/cancellation of protestors at Harvard that were in opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The reply has been flagged/marked dead by HN since, and should at minimum auto-collapse (thus hiding even worse replies to it) regardless of your account's "showdead" settings. I'm not going to link to it, and it's not worth reading regardless.
If you dig, this issue has been brewing for quite some time. Long story short, its the hard-right conservatives and/or Christians who demand everybody *else* follow their recidivist ethics.
Morality in Media (renamed to "National Center on Sexual Exploitation" to deceive as federal org) - Intersection of Conservatives and Christians, wanting to ban anything their bronze age beliefs indicate are bad.
> Collective Shout was founded in 2009 by Melinda Tankard Reist, an Australian conservative political activist, writer, anti-abortion feminist and anti-pornography activist
You have a clear history of anti-Christian sentiment on this site. Your comments repeatedly go beyond criticism of specific abuses and into broad hostility toward Christianity and Catholicism as such.
To be clear, its an anti-Abrahamic sentiment. This includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We don't see much of Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism where I'm at. And none of them are forcing their own religion as state/federal bills. (Although... India has a pretty bad Hindu nationalism problem, sigh.)
At least in the USA (where I live), the Christians cant seem to follow their own rules. Instead, they seek to force their rules on everyone by subverting government by aligning with republicans and creating voting blocs. Ive even had christians in my local community publicly tell people (in service) to vote for trump going back to 2015, and later in 2022-2023. -- back when it was expressly illegal to do such as a church.
I even had christian pastors publicly attack my MiL (she was a director for a local nonprofit). Called her the antichrist and a bunch of other shit. that spillover even hit my SO when they were doing in-home healthcare. Was chased out of their house with a crucifix wall hanging.
Your characterisation is way off the mark. FiLiA is an organisation run by left-wing feminists and their conferences cover a wide range of issues affecting women and girls.
Encourages woman-based (trans-exclusive) laws that give them more "rights", rather than equal rights for everyone. We see this in countless US republican trans bills that protect "women", but not men.
Encourages separation of genders. Like how Mike Pence wouldnt be alone in a room with a woman other than his wife/daughter.
Sure, they're not a broad spectrum political org, but the areas where they speak in, is full of TERF and SWERF hatred. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.....
If you look at the details of what left-wing feminist organisations like FiLiA are advocating for and their motivations for doing so, it is very different to right-wing conservatives.
For instance, on "sex work", FiLiA favours the Nordic Model, where the punters are criminalised and prostituted women are offered support to help their exit from this abusive industry.
You generally will not find conservatives arguing for that.
Similarly for "trans", the motivation is to prevent the erasure of much-needed single-sex spaces, services and other provisions for women and girls.
Compare to conservatives who look at it mostly from the angle of men should be masculine and women should be feminine. Obviously not something that organisations like FiLiA would agree with, at all.
Stripe (their payment process) will service adult content sites. It's not actually banned, but if your business is involved in categories with high chargeback rates (travel, gambling, cryptocurrency, vaping, adult content) you have to pay higher fees to account for the higher fraud rate in those categories
Right-wing, openly evangelical groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, who have an explicit agenda to ban pornography and see this as an easy "next step" towards that end goal.
They are also the groups behind the closure of big porn sites like XTube, the short-lived purge of adult content on OnlyFans (one of the few battles they lost), and the scourge of age verification bills that are sweeping the US, UK, and Europe.
The goal with age verification laws is not to protect minors or fight CSAM (as much as they pretend it is) - it's to make it expensive and difficult to legally serve content that they disapprove of, producing a chilling effect. Note that the content they disapprove of is not limited to pornography, which is why many of these bills have such vague language that can apply to other things like information on abortion, or LGBTQ+ themed material. This is not an accident; the supporters of these policies are quite open about their intention.
Disapproval is only the first step. After that you can start looking the other way in certain cases. Not always in exchange for the money, just for public reverence and praise, i. e. the symbols of power.
What happens if the merchant folds or disappears? Stripe (or Visa or whoever) then are the bagholder. And if someone has a ton of chargebacks, it's not uncommon they're then difficult to collect from.
> I’ve heard this is apparently less about morality and more about payments getting contested by men getting caught by their spouses
This is a common myth. The concerted effort that we've seen over the last 5-10 years in particular is the direct consequence of intense lobbying from a handful of groups that are openly backed by or aligned with right-wing religious groups, especially (but not exclusively) evangelicals.
In case you have any doubts about whether "morality" is their motivation, one of the groups was literally called "Morality in Media", before renaming to the more official-sounding National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Despite the new name, they actually don't care very much about "sexual exploitation" as most reasonable people would define the term (such as child abuse) but instead consider all sex work to be "exploitation" and aim to ban legal sex work.
Yup. I forget the exact name of the campaign - it was something like "twelve pillars" - but decades ago the religious right realized that they were losing everything in court and their candidates were wildly unpopular in elections. So they shifted to just infiltrating banking and forcing their moral superiority complex on everyone else that way.
That's why porn stars can't have checking accounts (and then become targets of property theft and violent crime - because the criminals know they are unbankable, so they have piles of cash around.)
Fun fact: the most "Christian" religious states have the highest rates of teen pregnancy, rape, divorce, murder, property crime, etc. Plus christian religious leaders seem to be attracted to child sexual abuse like Elmo is to piles of cocaine.
I feel like maybe one should focus on cleaning up one's own moral house and lead by example before screeching to everyone else that they're going to hell for jerking off to a picture of a naked man or woman on the interwebs.
Banks frequently refuse to do business with, or heavily restrict, businesses that they deem risky from a financial perspective. Adult content, pharmaceuticals and travel are all industries that experience significantly higher occurrence of fraud and chargebacks than others. For example, your spouse sees a weird item on your credit card for a porn site. "Wasn't me! Must be stolen I'll report it." Sometimes it's the other direction. Travel businesses often get by on very thin margins with any significant balances due to deposits. If something happens, customers might get deposits back, or they might get chargebacks, and the business can rapidly end up deep in the red.
Often times to bank successfully you need large stagnant balances that are semi-frozen, or meaningful collateral.
This becomes problematic through payment provider platforms which other platforms build upon: it's not straightforward to manage these relationships through so many layers of abstractions. It's easier just to ban the industry.
I don't know the specifics of Kickstarter, but I've seen this happen countless times, so it's not difficult to connect the dots.
> Adult content, pharmaceuticals and travel are all industries that experience significantly higher occurrence of fraud and chargebacks than others. For example, your spouse sees a weird item on your credit card for a porn site. "Wasn't me! Must be stolen I'll report it." Sometimes it's the other direction.
No, it has nothing to do with chargebacks. It's not even presented that way in their policies when they ban it. They consider it a "brand risk", which is completely different.
I had an opportunity to see the real chargeback data for this type of content and it is not high. It's low. If any bank says they are refusing service because of chargebacks they are lying and using that as an excuse to cover some other reason.
I also remember a story from someone I worked with in the 90s. At that time there were adverts in the back of newspapers for VHS tapes, very cheap. It would say "Get these 8 HOT VHS tapes for $4.99 inc shipping." People would call up and order on their credit card. The reality was the company would only send out a handful of these packages and then claim to be out-of-stock, then they would mail a refund check out to everyone else. The check would be from BIG TITTY BUSTY WHORES LLC or something. Literally nobody would cash the check.
For some types of explicit content, sure, I don't disagree. I've seen instances where "fraud" was used as an excuse for an otherwise unpalatable brand.
There hasn't been sufficient reporting on all the lobbying and back-room dealing.
> There hasn't been sufficient reporting on all the lobbying and back-room dealing.
There has been tons of reporting on this in the industry. It is not hidden. The war on sex work is extremely well-documented, as is the explicit shift in tactics to targeting financial infrastructure as a tactic.
Every time my credit card number was stolen, it was used to buy sneakers. I think this isn't uncommon but there's no blanket rule against sneaker sales.
This hand-waving about fraud is complete nonsense.
The banking industry shrieks about fraud and chargebacks yet gyms, which are basically the scummiest retail businesses on the planet aside from payday lenders, are allowed to use the ACH system and get direct access to money, not credit - that is a royal pain in the ass to revoke?
So much so that my state has an entire set of laws devoted toward curtailing the gym industry's various shitty cancellation policies? I believe they're even prohibited from requiring ACH payment - they must offer other options.
And what about all the local newspapers that make it impossible to cancel? Or all the made-for-TV product companies?
I think the pressure is just coming from behind the scenes.
The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.
The religious right really has their claws into this administration, and the far right has a much larger say in things than it seems like they would based on their proportional representation in the population. Things like gerrymandering and closed primaries don't help.
> It's not a sudden new thing. The financial theory seems to explain all the facts.
Literally all three of the examples you list were the direct result of lobbying from groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media. These campaigns had been in the works for years, and were well-known to people in the industry, who had been sounding the alarm for years.
It's maddening that people not only refuse to listen before the actions come down, but also still refuse to connect the dots even after they happen.
OK, I've checked that claim more carefully and confirmed it to my satisfaction. Comments retracted. Left my links up in the GP comment for context for yours.
> The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.
They do act out in the open! That's why it's so maddening to see how pervasive the belief that this isn't a push from right-wing groups is. They are extremely open about their goals and about their ideological alignment, and they have been at literally every step in the process.
They're telegraphing every single move in real-time. But for some reason, people just don't really want to believe it.
It turns out, the best way to get away with a heinous agenda is not to hide it, but to be completely open and direct about it. If you tell people exactly what they want and it's horrific enough, they will refuse to believe it's true, because nobody would be that cartoonishly villainous, right?
The sex industry isn't the only area where that principle works, although (like with many "technologies") it was one of the first where it was successfully applied.
> But he was friendly with Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Ackman texted Banga, providing a link to Kristof’s story with his tweet: “Amex, VISA and MasterCard should immediately withhold payments or withdraw until this is fixed. PayPal has already done so.” (Ackman was unaware that American Express already did not allow its card to be used on adult sites.)
> Banga quickly wrote back: “We’re on it.”
> Then things began to move. Within days, Mastercard announced it had “instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance” of [PH] charges, saying it had found evidence of illegal activity and was continuing to investigate.
EDIT: The antisemitism in some replies is disgusting and I reject it entirely. This post is about a specific, publicly reported action by one individual, not about any religious or ethnic group. Any attempt to turn this into conspiracy-mongering is bigotry, not analysis. I don’t want that associated with my comment.