Mastercard Lays Down New Rules For Streaming Sites That Require Them To Review Content Before Publication
from the war-on-porn-continues dept
Mastercard is in the process of killing off another way for sex workers to make money. Its updated policy on "illegal adult content" takes aim at a bunch of adult content that isn't actually illegal. What the new policy does is make it impossible for streaming platforms to comply with the new rules. Since they're not able to prescreen streamed content, they're just going to start blocking anything that seems like it might lead to Mastercard pulling the plug.
This will hit sites like OnlyFans and MyFreeCams the hardest, as sex worker/advocate Mary Moody points out. But it will also cause collateral damage at streaming sites that aren't able to comply with Mastercard's new demands and may start banning accounts and blocking streams if they suspect (without verifying) "adult content" might be offered.
Here's what Mastercard is requiring from sites hosting content:
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Documented age and identity verification for all people depicted and those uploading the content
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Content review process prior to publication
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Complaint resolution process that addresses illegal or nonconsensual content within seven business days
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Appeals process allowing for any person depicted to request their content be removed
Some of these are steps that platforms should be taking already. But the second bullet point poses significant challenges. This "for the children" effort will harm adults who produce adult content -- many who have never produced any content considered "illegal" under the First Amendment. Mastercard cites its partnership with several law enforcement agencies (as well as child porn clearinghouses like NCMEC) but doesn't say why it feels all adult content should be subject to rules meant to prevent the streaming of illegal content.
In the absence of any meaningful efforts on Mastercard's part (this puts the onus on everyone else but the credit card company), a statement like this is meaningless:
We’re committed to doing everything in our power to ensure only lawful activity takes place on our network.
But Mastercard isn't actually doing anything. It's handing out more requirements for platforms that accept Mastercard payments, but that's not actually doing something. That's making a bunch of other people jump through impossible hoops under the threat of defunding. And it will cause damage to plenty of lawful activity.
Mastercard is free to choose who it does business with. But if it just wants to dump cam sites used by sex workers, it could at least come out and say that, rather than hide behind "for the children" platitudes as it makes it impossible for sites like this to host actually legal content. This is just more anti-porn crusading that willfully lumps child porn and revenge porn in with legal content created by adults. Then Mastercard makes it impossible for platforms to comply without cutting off a majority of their user base.
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Filed Under: infrastructure, payments, sex work, streaming sites
Companies: mastercard, onlyfans
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Cool. Now do elected officials who knowingly spew rhetoric that leads to an insurrection.
Still seeing that Mastercard logo on www dot tedcruz dot org slash contribute
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Next people on this bandwagon with respect to all sites will be the MPAA/RIAA if they can't keep infringing material off of the site.
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Mastercard, not big fans of honesty
'We want to kill off porn but we aren't honest enough to actually admit that, suggestions?'
'We could require pre-screening of live content?'
'So, require that the one perk of live content, that it's live, be instead used against it and remove the entire purpose? Brilliant, get on it.'
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Bitcoin fixes this
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Re: Bitcoin fixes this
Maybe if you're dropping hundreds of dollars on content it might be okay. The last time I made a purchase with Bitcoin about a month ago I made the mistake of sending it to my wallet instead of directly to the receiving address. When I tried to send it, it wouldn't let me because the network fees were going to be around $15 on a $30 purchase.
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Re: Bitcoin fixes this
Bitcoin has to go through regular banks at some point. Bitcoin is used only by pirates, drug addicts, child porn downloaders, and other criminals, will soon too be blocked.
You cannot escape the invasive system of corporate control that you've been advocating, kids. It's not just for "conservatives"! It's GLOBAL and they have ALL the dodges long since figured out.
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Re: Re: Bitcoin fixes this
It's amazing how little you actually know how current technology works. Tell me, why would a bitcoin pass through a bank? At all?
Anyway, here's some of the "pirates, drug addicts, child porn downloaders, and other criminals" that use bitcoins:
Btw, did you know that US dollars are used by "pirates, drug addicts, child porn downloaders, and other criminals". You better open your wallet and burn the money you have in it, you wouldn't want to be associated with those kind of people, right?
As usual, your arguments are so incredible stupid I do wonder how you manage to provide for yourself.
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Re: Re: Bitcoin fixes this
"Bitcoin has to go through regular banks at some point. Bitcoin is used only by pirates, drug addicts, child porn downloaders, and other criminals, will soon too be blocked."
I'm sure that Elon Musk will be shocked to find that buying a Tesla is considered illegal activity and that he has to use a bank to invest the income he gets from those.
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Re: Re: Bitcoin fixes this
Do you actually practice at being wrong or is it just a natural talent?
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Re: Re: Re: Bitcoin fixes this
He just seems to be repeating some very outdated talking points that people used to used on the subject, only even he's not dumb enough to go for the "worthless" meme given the massive rise in value and mainstream adoption. That does appear to be part of his shtick - pick up some false narratives from right-wing echo chambers, repeat them even after they stop making any sense in relation to the real world.
Wait till he finds out about NFTs and the value of alt coins like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum and how they're being used for all sorts of perfectly legal activity. The gymnastics involved in maintaining the fictions he's trying to spread should be quite entertaining, unless he just defaults to the "fad" argument.
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Re: Re: Bitcoin fixes this
Oh do tell, how exactly will that be accomplished?
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Re: Bitcoin fixes this
Well, yea. If there's anything which will eventually propel bitcoin over the treshold required to make it a genuine currency it will be shit like this; forcing a substantial portion of the monetized internet to leave the currently accepted currencies.
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Paypal???
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Re:
Paypal doesn't allow their service to be used for any adult content or items.
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Re: Re:
... and PayPal reserves to its own, idiosyncratic, opaque, non-accountable and distinctly... {ahem} "conservative"... decision-making apparatus what may or may not be deemed to be "adult" content or items.
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Considering the western world's hard on for banning and criminalizing fictional artwork - Australia is a good example of this - because it doesn't fit with their perceived utopia of what artwork and literature should be, I can't help wonder how this will effect Japanese artists...
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innocuous leader
'cause evidently okaying each again...
Techdirt always supports prostitutes, I mean "sex workers".
WHY is that? What's in it for you? Prostitution is degrading and dehumanizing, but you supposedly educated / civilized people keep supporting using teh internets to lower humanity.
Of course the reason is easy MONEY. That's Techdirt's only morality, utterly oblivious to human wreckage, especially to women, 'cause you're all misogynists, born rich, don't worry that YOUR children will be forced to this. -- By the way, WHERE are your re-writers of color or different gender, Maz? All you ever show is the patriarchal male white supremacist money-focused view, explicitly here wanting to see degradation.
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Re: innocuous leader -- and worked again
It is a bit funny to see you kids get your nose flattened by oft-repeated "corporations have (absolute) right of association" asertion. THAT is going to redound on you. What this (along w Tumbler getting rid of porn) presages is the kind of social control that intuitively appeals to most people, especially women, been well-defined for over a thousand years. "Libertinism" cannot sustain order, as the rulers know full well.
See Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100" for how ends up a religious tyranny, not the "free as in hippies" one you expect.
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Re: Re: innocuous leader -- and worked again
Actually, Heinlein would be soundly pissed off (but hardly surprised) to know that people like you still have the chutzpah to reference his work as allegedly supporting their "arguments".
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Re: innocuous leader
again consistent with LOCKED until I'm persistent, then like a switch is clicked, I'm IN.
My advice, Maz, is run in the usual prior state of accepting all, then toss the little actual commercial spam that got through. This present way, you're surely losing new commentors, and few as they are, you can't afford.
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Re: innocuous leader
Oh, God, where do I start? The patronizing attitude that sex workers need to be "saved" by you, the absurd idea that just because someone has the right to associate or disassociate with whoever they want means that they're immune to criticism for that action, the absolutely disgusting conclusion (on the scale of cartoon supervillain) that people want to be ruled over, that their autonomy must be taken from them for their own good? This whole rant is rotten, from top to bottom.
By the way, "sex workers" isn't a euphemism for "prostitutes". I see this point of confusion surprisingly frequently — sex work includes prostitution, of course, but also pornography in all its myriad forms. Adult streamers, phone sex workers, pornographic artists and actors, are all sex workers.
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Re: Re: innocuous leader
"The patronizing attitude that sex workers need to be "saved" by you, the absurd idea that just because someone has the right to associate or disassociate with whoever they want means that they're immune to criticism for that action..."
Baghdad Bob has been like this for ten years. You should have read his ghoulish depiction of prison rape for all the 'aspies' who kept refuting his pretzel logic with facts.
I'd like to say he's a troll but unfortunately with him it's more of a religious belief in hatred.
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Re: innocuous leader
"WHY is that? What's in it for you? Prostitution is degrading and dehumanizing, but you supposedly educated / civilized people keep supporting using teh internets to lower humanity."
Only you, Baghdad Bob, would call supporting other peoples freedom of choice a "lowering of humanity". I'm none too surprised at that though, given the times in your past around here where you were all too clear that 'bigotry' might as well be your middle name.
Nor am I surprised to read your assumption that in your mind people need a profit motive to support other people's freedoms. Right up your alley, Baghdad 'Bigotry' Bob.
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and just to use my screen name
Think on that -- how can you determine are "equitable" without the very *mathematical" notion of it? This Idiocracy will crash of its own and SOON. Again, a strict religious ORDER is most likely outcome of all this.
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Re: and just to use my screen name
Unlikely, but if it happens, women will most likely be even worse off as religious extremists are also the worse misogynists on the planet.
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Re: and just to use my screen name
im not sure where your argument about equitable comes from, its not in the article. That said, you mention equitable and seem to conflate it with equal, which is not accurate.
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Re: and just to use my screen name
a strict religious ORDER is most likely outcome of all this
We await the next illegal attempt to subvert this country and its Constitution with bated breath.
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Re: and just to use my screen name
"Again, a strict religious ORDER is most likely outcome of all this."
I guess you finally went total religious nutcase from just being laity within the copyright cult, eh? You always DID come off as someone in the mental state likely to sign up with Daesch or other doom cult.
And your tendency to freak out over women, sexuality and gender issues alone has always been like that of a brimstone preacher compensating for his repression by screaming bile and envy at anyone not similarly bound to a creed of malice.
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Re:
Not surprising when your boy Trump had four years at the helm and spent his time by running the fucking country into the ground.
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Seems to be very poorly thought out...
"The banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content."
I don't disagree with the intent, but the approach is rather heavy-handed and almost impossible to implement. How is a "seller of adult content" defined? Can a bank accurately determine that? What about a site that isn't primarily a seller of adult content by may end up hosting an adult content video, e.g, Vimeo or YouTube?
I have a much larger concern with the precedent. It's not a big step to repression of other content.
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Re: Seems to be very poorly thought out...
Yeah but it is an actual area of antitrust concern so politicians will pretend it doesn't exist and you are crazy for pointing out the fucking obvious.
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Re: Seems to be very poorly thought out...
It doesn't matter, since the large financial transaction houses launder billions of dollars every year for the big players. They don't mind a little performative repression.
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Re: Seems to be very poorly thought out...
So you agree with a private entity (a bank in this case) conducting what amounts to a police investigation against all of it's business partners (it's depositors in this case) and refusing service based on the private entity's (bank's) completely unaccountable definition of "illegal material"?
And they wonder why workers are forbidden from suing their employers for grievances or why consumers are forbidden from suing companies for illegal business practices. Well when you allow private entities to dictate the law through binding contracts, that's exactly what you get: A bunch of corporate interests who wield all of the power. The country's laws be damned.
Enjoy your serfdom, and yes, the next step is to enforce copyright filters this way.
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Re: Seems to be very poorly thought out...
I'm peddling Geritol[tm]. Does that qualify as adult content?
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Re: Seems to be very poorly thought out...
"How is a "seller of adult content" defined?"
Easy. it'll be the lowest criteria required to make any living person claim some item of the merchant's stock is "adults only".
"What about a site that isn't primarily a seller of adult content by may end up hosting an adult content video..."
Same as online vendors selling "fetish gear" - like rope, vaseline, shoes, swimwear riding crops, etc - the sites will be blocked when someone at the bank determines that part of their stock is highly suggestive and unsuitable for children.
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Buy tokens with MasterCard
Spend tokens on adult content.
What could these tokens be ....
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Well maybe switch to visa or other credit cards ,
The war on porn is continuing, make it difficult to pay sex workers, maybe they, ll stop working.
Is work legal if there's no way of getting paid for it.
Meanwhile a 16 year old can buy a gun or a rifle using a credit card.
Was it designed to put cam girls out of business?
There's no way to screen a live show that accepts donations
Maybe most sex workers will end on twitch
Doing non adult content
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crypto tokens
Bitcoin (and its relatives) are too expensive for things like MyFreeCams and OnlyFans. What's needed is a new cryptocurrency with a fixed value, 1 token = US$1.00, and a third-party service to sell and redeem them. But such a service would probably be blocked by MasterCard, plus is probably a form of money laundering.
Maybe these services should just move to cash-only via USPS.
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Re: crypto tokens
There are already a few fixed coins with values that are 1-to-1 with the US Dollar. If a cam site decides to go all-in on one of them, it'll probably work.
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Re: Re: crypto tokens
Its only useful if you can cash out the tokens.
If Dollar Coin gets picked up by Only Fans, then any transaction with Dollar Coin will be suspect. Banks and Payment networks will have to block its use making it very hard to actully use. The entire network could get banned by a rule like this because some people use it for this function.
Our payment networks love the concept of corrupt money since it makes it super easy to ban all of coinbase or whatever flavor of new coin exchange comes out for being corrupt money laundering systems.
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Re: Re: Re: crypto tokens
"Its only useful if you can cash out the tokens. "
No, not really. What is important is that they can be used. If enough people begin to use bitcoin for the currency to become the basis of an actual market then there is no need to ever cash your bitcoin into dollars.
This is why it's such a moron move to incentivize the creation of such a market by making yet another segment of popular vice unable to properly use normal currency.
"If Dollar Coin gets picked up by Only Fans, then any transaction with Dollar Coin will be suspect. Banks and Payment networks will have to block its use making it very hard to actully use."
...which means there's a massive incentive for a lot of people to create products and services for a bitcoin-only market.
In the end people tend to forget that the object of "money" isn't to have an arbitrary number of digits on your bank account - it's how many working hours of services, how many meals, how many months of paying rent, etc - which indicates the purchasing power of a currency.
Bitcoin is currently an unstable novelty currency. Give it a sufficiently big market segment where it's the only viable currency however, and it will become a viable alternative to the US dollar, Euro, or RMB.
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Re: Re: crypto tokens
The other problem with the fixed coins is that they look to be a replay of financial history. Specifically the 'unbacked banknote' issue of effectively printing money or in this case taking the money that is supposed to be backing it and running off with it in part or in whole with disastrous consequences. Which is why issuing banknotes is restricted to just government backed central banks because while there are no guarantees 'must topple a nation first/have massive internal change in status quo' is far better than 'trivial set up for a scam'.
Really anything which promises to be safe and liquid very large reserves of money should be looked at with a jaundiced eye. Money in motion may be at risk but it can grow. A big flat cash reserve is basically a big 'embezzle me' sign.
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Shareholder lawsuit
What I don't get about this is why they haven't received even the grumblings of a shareholder lawsuit over Mastercard pissing away money to appease the imaginary friends of top management. Just ruthless capitalism would qualify as an improvement over this bullshit.
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Something something last I checked they were still clearing donations to white nationalist groups...
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Re:
Of course they are clearing donations to white nationalist groups. To do otherwise would be...censorship.
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It is probably not coincidental that this announcement comes on the same day that the New York Times publishes an article, "Why do we let corporations profit from rape videos?" The story is about underage girls who are filmed and posted, primarily on xvideos.com, identified publicly and forever tainted by a youthful mistake.
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Re:
Is that hack, Kristof, still in bed with Exodus Cry?
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Re: Re:
yes
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I freaked when Paypal refused to serve Asange
Hopefully Visa and Amex don't follow suit. But this is yet another example of neo-feudalism where non-state actors decide to enforce their loyalties or creeds on a society.
Maybe there needs to be a state option for cashless transactions.
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This kind of discrimination should be illegal.
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content screener
All right, I GUESS I'll help out here to screen and approve content, don't twist my arm please, I said I'll help already! Finally, a job to be proud of
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illegal business practices
big corps should not be able to dictate what other businesses do or how to run them! i can see a lawsuit in the future for unfair business practices.
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Re: illegal business practices
"big corps should not be able to dictate what other businesses do or how to run them!"
In some cases yes, in others, no. I'd argue that any business whose job is handling government-regulated currency needs to be under utility regulations when it comes to handling that specific part of their business.
Especially so given that large money handlers do indeed use their market hegemony to protect themselves from competition.
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Cash has such a bad rap
Remember this quote?
“The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.”
― William Gibson
The drug war excuse got us pretty new bills that still get faked.
The agenda is still fight crime via banking. Credit Cards = location, wire xfers = what happened history, and all that tax crime information.
This is just the next "war on" thing that mines data for law enforcement. Since the "children" are the ones saved by not handling legal "adult streaming content" there is no foul.
Just ask Federal Reserve. (shrug)
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