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Blanchimont
Joined: 25 Feb 2012
Posts: 3561
Location: Finland
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 Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 1:41 pm
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Anyone have any idea what the issues with the payment services were?
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Greed1914
Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 4614
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 1:50 pm
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| Blanchimont wrote: | | Anyone have any idea what the issues with the payment services were? |
It's a good question. The closest comparison I can think of would be things like Manga Gamer having to pause business for awhile to sort out credit card processing, or Fakku not being able to use Apple Pay because, apparently, Apple is that worried about being even tangentially associated with erotic content.
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WANNFH
Joined: 13 Mar 2011
Posts: 1806
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 2:05 pm
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| Blanchimont wrote: | | Anyone have any idea what the issues with the payment services were? |
Honestly, the only possible thing that come to mind is the payment service is strictly tied to credit cards such as Visa/Mastercard as way to pay - especially considering a lot of japanese service sites with adult content on it like Fantia or Skeb ditched or suspended the usage of them recently at some capacity as way of payment - and it's most likely all started to happen because of this controversial censorship, considering the Akamatsu tweet explanation.
Last edited by WANNFH on Tue Nov 05, 2024 2:15 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Koroto
Joined: 16 Jun 2024
Posts: 16
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 2:13 pm
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| Blanchimont wrote: | | Anyone have any idea what the issues with the payment services were? |
The same that every Japanese site is having. There's definitely some kind of pressure to remove certain "questionable" content (see the problems DLsite, Pixiv, Nico Nico, Melonbooks etc. are facing.) and not only from the payment processors.
Akamatsu (I think it was him, didn't check the account name) on X said that for example Love Hina was removed from an app on the Apple Store and later reinstated - I think it wasn't a recent event, but I think he mentioned to give an example of what kind of things are happening.
In fact another victim - and I'm surprised no one reported it - is Nico Nico itself, which from Oct 30th closed off an entire section of the site (the illustration portal, Seiga) from overseas access, as well as blocking Follow notifications, removing certain type of videos and livestreams, and crippling other various parts of its site.
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Kougeru
Joined: 13 May 2008
Posts: 5577
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 2:47 pm
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| Quote: | | the website had issues with credit card companies and a termination of all payment services |
Credit card companies are ruining everything wtf. Why are they even mad? money is money
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Koroto
Joined: 16 Jun 2024
Posts: 16
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 2:59 pm
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| Kougeru wrote: | |
Credit card companies are ruining everything wtf. Why are they even mad? money is money |
For some, the negative publicity associated to the perception of doing the wrong thing is way worse than losing money.
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WANNFH
Joined: 13 Mar 2011
Posts: 1806
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 3:24 pm
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| Kougeru wrote: |
| Quote: | | the website had issues with credit card companies and a termination of all payment services |
Credit card companies are ruining everything wtf. Why are they even mad? money is money |
Sometimes people want to see the world burn with only their own colors while doing nothing but pushing out creators out of the business by literally cutting their supplies to live - especially when they cannot do anything otherwise because of the legality of their business.
Though it's also very possible in this case that it's not the credit card processors (though again, considering the other Japanese site services, it's not out of reach to put the finger on them) - but the payment provider itself that site contracted, considering Akamatsu tweet.
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FishLion
Joined: 24 Jan 2024
Posts: 216
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 4:01 pm
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| Kougeru wrote: | |
Credit card companies are ruining everything wtf. Why are they even mad? money is money |
There are very powerful and wealthy anti-pornography groups that do their damnedest to get things banned. A recent example of what goes on behind the scenes is a spokesperson for Project 2025 was caught admitting on hidden camera that all of the ID age gating of pornography sites that some politicians have been pushing as a way to protect children is a trojan horse to limit as much access to porn as possible because they find it morally reprehensible. Then you have at least one powerful lobbying group, NCOSE, pushing to criminalize sex work and pornography for "safety" of the people involved, that is at least their current stated message. They were originally founded by three clergymen worried about "salacious" magazines, renamed to Morality in Media and as recently as 2010 Morality in Media was saying adult stores and sex toys were a "cancer" and they released a fun 2009 piece titled "Connecting the Dots: The Line Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders" according to Wikipedia, so I will let y'all make up your own minds on if they are actually concerned about safety or if they just hate pornography and invent problems that make it destructive retroactively.
The TLDR though, is that people with too much money are trying to harm something they dislike and are trying to punish credit card companies for not fixing a something that money isn't causing. So now that the internet is making the world a lot smaller it is easy to point to companies with different ideas about appropriateness from another country and claim that whatever fetish people are posting about there is even more destructive than the porn people are familiar with.
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Nate148
Joined: 24 May 2012
Posts: 507
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 4:07 pm
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because no one wants to be enabling pedo or illegal sex stuff and ken when to the 3rd rail with the 2nd thing he put on the site and said in his action "fight me" this is not shock.
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Koroto
Joined: 16 Jun 2024
Posts: 16
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 4:07 pm
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| FishLion wrote: | |
There are very powerful and wealthy anti-pornography groups that do their damnedest to get things banned. |
I'm not entirely convinced this is the case. Japan media (as in anime, manga, etc) has been on the sights of several people of all political spectrum due to its "controversial" depictions since a long time.
But there's no single unified movement wanting to get rid of it, IMO.
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Nate148
Joined: 24 May 2012
Posts: 507
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 4:22 pm
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Underage chars have been in the spotlight
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WANNFH
Joined: 13 Mar 2011
Posts: 1806
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 4:26 pm
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| FishLion wrote: | | There are very powerful and wealthy anti-pornography groups that do their damnedest to get things banned.
The TLDR though, is that people with too much money are trying to harm something they dislike and are trying to punish credit card companies for not fixing a something that money isn't causing. So now that the internet is making the world a lot smaller it is easy to point to companies with different ideas about appropriateness from another country and claim that whatever fetish people are posting about there is even more destructive than the porn people are familiar with. |
Honestly, the real problem isn't the lobbying against the adult content (especially when the anti-pornography groups mostly belong to other countries such as US) - but solely the fact that big international processor companies like Visa/Mastercard get way too much free control of what they actually can do while bypassing the laws in the country where they provide the services (and we're speaking about the legal adult content by Japanese laws, of course) with their own induced policies, no matter from whomst that policies come out - and because they are such a big deal with their grasp of the international financial operations, the adult content legal business in Japan have no way to fight against them but basically restrict the access of customers.
And that ability to overrule the actual laws of the freedom of expression in Japan through the loophole need to be stroke down first - by legal meanings.
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FishLion
Joined: 24 Jan 2024
Posts: 216
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 4:34 pm
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| Koroto wrote: | | I'm not entirely convinced this is the case. Japan media (as in anime, manga, etc) has been on the sights of several people of all political spectrum due to its "controversial" depictions since a long time.
But there's no single unified movement wanting to get rid of it, IMO. |
I think it's more that these people despise all sexual content and that makes the controversies surrounding Japanese media good targets of opportunity. They will go after everything outside of their norms and the most popular targets are wide spread practices (like adult toy stores) and extreme content. Make no mistake, these groups want to make it nigh impossible to access any sexual content, there is no standard that will make these people stop. They just want the small victory of going after niche fetish content while they work to get all porn off the internet, and right now their strategy is bullying payment processors because they are so universal and so beholden to so many interests.
Like I can't blame credit card companies for not wanting to be blamed for what everyone is doing with their services, but it is also such a leap of logic to ask the people who control electronic payments to keep track of and ban anything. Like I still think what happened with Denpasoft is unfair, but at least it was targeted to people decided to publish stuff they found broke rules. Blocking payments from an entire website because of a subset of users like with pixiv is completely ridiculous to me though. Or the fact the Apple app store banned participating in adult discord servers altogether to keep discord family friendly for the app store. At least they didn't ban it altogether, but dear god do I hate the day that large hosting and processing companies became part of deciding what art is allowed to be seen and sold.
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Koroto
Joined: 16 Jun 2024
Posts: 16
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 4:54 pm
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| FishLion wrote: | |
Like I can't blame credit card companies for not wanting to be blamed for what everyone is doing with their services, but it is also such a leap of logic to ask the people who control electronic payments to keep track of and ban anything. |
Well, for Nico Nico which I mentioned earlier it's less about the payment processors (you can still pay Premium via Paypal and credit card and purchase points for advertising with VISA and Mastercard) but more about the fact that its servers are now hosted on AWS (after the outage caused by the cyberattack this summer), which makes it more "vulnerable" to external pressures. The revised terms of service which basically justify the block of overseas access clearly mention "societal norms" along laws and international laws.
So I think it's more of a combination of indipendent factors not necessarily related to each other, rather than a single, unified force.
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FishLion
Joined: 24 Jan 2024
Posts: 216
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 5:40 pm
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[quote="WANNFH"]
| FishLion wrote: | | Honestly, the real problem isn't the lobbying against the adult content (especially when the anti-pornography groups mostly belong to other countries such as US) - but solely the fact that big international processor companies like Visa/Mastercard get way too much free control of what they actually can do while bypassing the laws in the country where they provide the services (and we're speaking about the legal adult content by Japanese laws, of course) with their own induced policies, no matter from whomst that policies come out - and because they are such a big deal with their grasp of the international financial operations, the adult content legal business in Japan have no way to fight against them but basically restrict the access of customers. |
I should have specified they lobby while harassing companies a lot. They are a US-based lobbying organization that harasses the US companies the entire world relies on for payments so that those US companies can ban things through extra legal means. They actually switched to these methods because trying to ban adult content just for existing is extremely unpopular nowadays, so on the legal front they push for ID laws to supposedly protect children and on the law suit and publicity side they harass companies. This is an excerpt from one article
| NCOSE wrote: | | NCOSE, along with interdisciplinary survivors and advocates, has been advocating for improved responsibility and increased oversight by the financial industry regarding pornographic content since early 2020. |
So you can see here that they are clearly proud of the fact they are pushing companies like this. In fact, they publish a yearly list of companies called their "dirty dozen" which highlights a list "of mainstream contributors to sexual exploitation." They will often note how rife pornography sites are with abusive practices (very true criticisms) but their solution for the company is always to add intense rules or cut business with the websites altogether.
I guess to be completely honest the group may not care about niche content specifically on an organizational level, but they are certainly the biggest player that pushed for an environment where these things are getting harshly regulated. It could be that the financial companies are trying to point these Japanese sites out as small wins to get some credit with these people, but what's certain is that without them pushing and suing financial companies over and over and over again there would not be this ban happy environment to begin with.
I'm completely with you on needing to stop companies from overruling actual laws also, people should be able to protect their businesses but once you have become a global force of financial infrastructure with almost no alternative it should be on local governments to regulate.
@Koroto
That makes a lot of sense, I was trying to specifically talk on payment processing as that was the subject of this article and the incident I am most familiar with. I didn't think about how server hosting rules would have similar clauses to take down content, but I can almost guarantee the reason the server owners are feeling that pressure is either this organization or one similar. I don't know if Nico Nico is on Cloudflare now, but they are specifically calling for the people who read them to take action against Cloudflare because they host websites like OnlyFans. I also wouldn't be surprised if there were other groups with narrower focus, like NCOSE for Otaku or something, but all these campaigns come back to anti-sex organizations. NCOSE are definitely the ones applying the most pressure to payment processors, content hosters, and the legal system in general to cause these changes across all the biggest companies. It is impossible to attribute exactly, because it is always in a business's interest to ignore the campaign so they don't accidentally admit they were enabling abuse and just change the rules. Thus we will likely never know which group causes what changes, just what groups are pushing people to block content or payments as they often brag when changes are made. NCOSE simply has the most outsize influence in the US and encourages people to harass a very broad range of companies for them, which leads me to believe when changes come from US companies NCOSE often had something to do with the pressure campaign. As an example, their list of targets for 2024 was Apple, Github, Cash App, Reddit, Cloudflare, Roblox, Discord, LinkedIn, Spotify, Telegram, Meta, and the Communications Decency Act Section 230 (the one that makes websites not personally responsible for content shared on their website), so they may not be specifically to blame for the rash of companies from Japan being scrutinized, but they at the very least made the blueprint for this plan of pushing companies to have strictly enforced rules that harm the entire website in order to get at a smaller subset of material they view as especially harmful.
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