Forum - View topicNEWS: Melonbooks Dōjinshi Store Chain to Halt Visa/Mastercard Payments on December 19
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Juno016
 Posts: 2423 |
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What in the frick is even going on? Visa/Mastercard seems behind a huge swath of consistent controversies with Japanese sites that display or sell NSFW content. Whenever I look up information online, I get a mix of people saying it's about anti-sex trafficking efforts, or about some phantom woke efforts to censor stuff some people don't like, or about some rich religious bozos out there trying to ban porn, and so on and so forth. Clearly, something is going on, but is this a deep dive that requires some kind of Answerman-level inquiry, or is it something someone here could clarify without devolving into baseless conspiracy theory level nonsense?
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BalmungHHQ
Posts: 444 |
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Payment processors have always had a bizarre bone to pick with adult material, but it's seriously gotten out of control in recent years...
Something needs to be done about this sooner or later. |
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Koroto
Posts: 18 |
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I feel the explanation is quite simple, IMO. There has been a huge pressure for Japan to "conform", and it has been like that since quite a bit of time. There's no conspiracy like some people say, just indipendent pressure from several (and different) parties. Melonbooks had cut off its access from several countries since at least three years (mostly EU states I think), to avoid problems I guess, but it didn't work. Nico Nico cut off its access to part of its site for similar reasons (and for reasons I can't comprehend - even if the site is not as influential as before - no one reported it).
Well for example you can still pay Nico Nico premium with Paypal or use their point system with VISA/Mastercard - only the subscription is disabled. DLsite got around the ban with an affiliated site that sells "points" that can be used to purchase products. So it's just to "save face" I guess. |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4597 Location: New York |
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You’re going to see a massive uptick in PayPal and Vinmo as proxies for this stuff. Granted any kind of censorship like this is ridiculous but this is getting downright Puritanical.
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harminia
 Posts: 2048 Location: australia |
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When I first heard this I thought "how the hell is anyone meant to buy stuff now?", but I see where this came from now. I guess it's like what happened with.. What was it? Pixiv? Where they stopped one payment method (Paypal?) because of the buying porn risks.
I wonder if Paypal, Visa etc realise how many people would be buying sex toys and general porn stuff with them... |
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Juno016
Posts: 2423 |
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A lot of the sites targeted that have reacted with selective censorship have limited the censorship to "immoral" content, such as loli stuff, sexual violence against women, tentacles, bestiality, etc. (though most appear to have tried finding loopholes around this by changing specific tags, or region blocking foreigners, possibly to avoid getting tripped with google searches). I don't know if this is because the payment processors specified that kind of content to those sites or if the sites themselves were guessing at what the payment processors were objecting to. |
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Cryten
 Posts: 1136 |
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Transaction services do have a responsibility to ensure that local country laws prohibiting certain transactions related to banned material do not take place through their services. But such things where largely unenforceable given encrypted websites and the ease of applying nested services. But the big 2 have been on quite a effort of pressuring hosting companies and local financial institutions far beyond their normal scope of operation. Effectively targeting the services that enable the websites and companies they dislike.
Similar to how the MPAA and associated groups managed to shutdown most easily accessible piracy services for people not tech savy enough to search deeper. By targetting the hosts and what ever networking providers allow individual owners to act like they are buying hosting locally. |
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SinisterOracle
Posts: 380 |
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What a shame. I abhor censorship.
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WatcherZer
Posts: 304 |
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They are financially liable in the US for knowingly facilitating the sale of child pornography and violent sexual content in Japan without age verification, so they have been telling retailers that they would only continue to provide services if those titles were removed from the store (AMEX has been doing it as well). Some Japanese retailers have been complying and removing titles and services have been restored, others like Amazon Japan have implemented age verification for adult content. Its not just Japanese sites, they have been cracking down on adult content on Patreon as well. They dont mind if these retailers sell them from brick and mortar stores where staff can verify age, they just don't want them being sold online potentially to minors.
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3564 Location: Finland |
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And? How does that relate to this thread, other than one poster making an offhand comment of Pornhub only accepting bitcoin. That's not what this thread is discussing.
A poster calling the current situation almost puritanical is nowhere the same as calling critics puritans.
No-one's here calling a conspiracy. And once again this is not about the live side of porn. One would think payment processors should discern the difference, but seems they can't. |
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WANNFH
 Posts: 1810 |
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It's not calling about criticism about real porn business - it's literally calling bullshit on any way that not distinguishing the drawn adult content that not affect the actual people and mixing it up with the actual sex crimes, especially when the international company trying to circumvent the laws of the country where they are operate by their policies and trying to shut down their living by obstructing the way of customer payments. |
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SenpaiDuckie
ANN Community Manager
 Posts: 523 Location: PH |
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Deleted off-topic comments.
At first look, this kinda sounds like the chain focusing more on exclusivity and more for their regulars. However, the other perspective is that there can be a tightening of international regulations on NSFW content. |
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FishLion
 Posts: 224 |
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My issue is that I have seen people from organization trying to ban pornography specifically say that age gating is a way to restrict access to as many people as possible, that one being Project 2025. Organizations like NCOSE talk about the sex trafficking on blogs but their solution is always to completely cut off access rather than get bad practices off of platforms. In other words, they want to cause as much harm as possible to pornography companies but have no interest in helping those companies fix the issues. It seems to me like if they were interested in harm reduction they would spend more time talking about how to identify and help victims than trying to stop the entire service. This isn't me going to bat for these porn companies by the way, they are awful, but the biggest anti-porn organization NCOSE does have a legitimate history of being critical of things like sex toys and gay marriage that are completely benign and only very recently started focusing on sex trafficking while conspicuously still trying to convince credit card and hosting companies to completely drop porn services where possible.
What are the big two? Just curious cause I mainly know about one.
Do you know why they have to wait for in-store services to be resumed then? It kind of seems like they are banning businesses completely for whatever reasons and not only blocking online services.
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Emerje
 Posts: 7406 Location: Maine |
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As long as they don't come for Mandarake I'm OK. I don't buy adult material from them, but I do order stuff from them pretty frequently so that would make things a bit difficult, especially after I finally got a card from my bank that actually works there. Sure, they take PayPal, but it's a bit of a pain to use.
Emerje |
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WANNFH
Posts: 1810 |
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