Collective Shout, a small but vocal lobby group, has long called for a mandatory internet filter that would prevent access to adult content for everyone in Australia. Its director, Melinda Tankard Reist, was recently appointed to the stakeholder advisory board for the government’s age assurance technology trial before the under-16s social media ban comes into effect in Australia in December.
While Collective Shout solely targeted games it said violated policies held by payment platforms, Itch.io’s move to temporarily remove all NSFW content resulted in games with LGBTQ+ themes being removed.
One petition signer who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community said they were concerned that banning sexual-based games would be the start of cracking down on LGBTQ+ content.
There it is.
if the LGBTQ+ games were not sexual in nature (why does it not say?), then that is quite damning and I approve of this conspiracy theory.
If you google Tankard-Reist you’ll find it’s not a conspiracy theory - she has actively tried to block queer representation at every level in every way for decades
Fair enough
It’s not all that much of a conspiracy theory as those pushing this line at the payment processoers openly advocate that since LGBTQ+ references sex by way of sexuality and gender, then that is sexual content, and is therefore inappropriate for children. This, of course, completely ignores heterosexuality and cisgender because they consider queer people existing to be harmful to children. And trying to get through to them about how important age-appropriate sexual education is in combating child abuse is an exercise in frustration.
politicians have literally said that the reason for censorship bills about the internet are specifically to go after lgbtq spaces.
How can you know a game is LGBTQ+ if they don’t talk about sex/gender? They look like normal humans to me, which differ in sexual preferences only? Example: How can you say this guy is gay without knowing his sexual preferences?
And how is casually referring to heterosexual relationships then not sexual?
Cognitive dissonance, naturally.
It is, did I write something wrong which negates that?
There is a difference between talking about sex and gender and something being sexual. If a shopkeeper mentions his husband, I can extrapolate that he’s at least bi, but that doesn’t mean the game is sexual.
In some jurisdictions, something being LGBTQ+ is inherently sexual. Places like Florida have a very psychotic view of what makes something sexual, and bans media for containing LGBTQ+ themes.
While that makes sense to logical people, there is a rabid right-wing movement in the US that in intent on defining any acknowledgment of LGBTQ+ is inherently “sexual”.
LGBTQ games love to tag themselves as such even when there’s no talk of gender sexuality or relationship.
The number of times iv seen the LGBTQ tag on a game just because the dev is gay or trans or something is absolutely fucking absurdly high.
Honestly it’s a huge pet peeve of mine. I don’t give a single flying fuck what you are as a dev. I care what’s in the god damn game. The tags ARE FOR THE GAME NOT YOU. stop making tags fucking useless by adding worthless tags.
Joke tags can ALSO fuck off.
I assume it doesn’t say because there are games with LGBTQ+ content that is sexual and ones where it is not.
So sick of conservatives forcing their beliefs on others. Filter your own content, use parents controls, don’t ban everything you don’t like because of your arrogant belief in made up morality. Morality is relative and religion does not give your opinions weight.
Yeah but Jesus definitely preached love thy neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and also, ew gay people not in my back yard.
I’m pretty confident on two of those anyway
everything you don’t like
On issues like these, conservatives will discover the magic of actual reasons. It’s only “things you don’t like” when we’re talking about banning hate speech or something.
Who’s behind this sudden wave of age verification bullshit, Schrödinger’s parents? The ones who shove an iPad in front of their 2 year old and berate school teachers for not being poorly paid babysitters who raise their kids for them? And yet they claim to care SO MUCH about the well being of children that they push these obscene and draconian policies on the rest of us? What a bunch of fucking hypocrites, but that’s typical for conservatives.
Governments and some religious nutjobs.
They only pretend to care about children. It is about power and control. Always has been, always will.
Don’t be fooled, that’s not the real reason. Parents that shove iPads in front of their children are not even remotely worried about what their kids are watching online. This is purely about control, has nothing to do with children.
The Mastercard/Visa monopoly (or duopoly) is bad for consumers. It should be broken up.
And hypothetically if it won’t get broken up because the government works for them and not for us, then we can break the monopoly ourselves.
We should hope digital euro breaks this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro
Discover was just acquired by Capital One, so one less viable competitor too.
“Face backlash” = about 160,000 people signed a petition saying they disagreed with it, then went about their daily lives and totally, 100% without a doubt continued using their Visa or Mastercard credit cards.
They don’t care, there are no alternatives. They can do whatever they want.
I switched all my master and visa cards to amex, canceled a visa card and the only have my debit as visa now because my credit union ONLY offers visa for debit
Exactly. We need thousands of people calling them non stop disturbing them for hours on end, not just signing petitions.
You mean like exactly what’s been happening over the past few days?
Right, the actual solution is everyone taking their money out of the bank on the same day
As long as it is legal CC companies should be barred from dictating what products and services their systems cover.
deleted by creator
“The internet has no borders. Women and girls everywhere are impacted by male violence against women and misogyny in general which we believed these games perpetuated,” she said.
Yet the fictional violence against men and boys is A-Ok!
deleted by creator
Yet 1000 weirdos in Australia will have more sway, curiously.
When is the European alternative to these coming?
An alternative to PayPal, called WERO is currently in it’s rollout process in Germany, Belgium and France. In October the next step will be activated, allowing payments in e-commerce. Later down the road, you’ll be able to pay in real shops. Luxembourg and Netherlands are to join in next. More and more banks start to adopt WERO.
I urge everyone to use WERO as much as you can. It’s flying a bit under the radar at the moment and this must be a success. Hopefully more EU members will join soon.
I would prefer if the EU/Swiss backed project based on GNU Taler makes it instead: https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
True but 2 > 1
Sounds great, but as with so many of these projects, they sound overly complicated for the masses. Wero is already a thing and it’s straight forward. Even that is too complicated for many people, but it’s gaining traction at least.
Anywho, I’m rooting for both!
an eu alternative would be just as susceptible to hate campaigns by bigots censoring content… look at the uk and the terfs (i know technically the uk isn’t the eu but they’re still europe)
shiiiit I wouldn’t count on that anymore. With the age verification and ID stuff they would honestly at this point probably make it worse.
I used to be an advocate for European alternatives for US based tech companies but now? no way, started self hosting everything. it sucks.
Do you mean digital euro? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro
This would be the only thing that could break visa mastercard duopol. Hopefully 2028
Let’s say it like it is: after the world of hundreds of developers is undermined, and the property of thousands of customers is compromised.
100’s ??? no no,no,no last I checked it was in the tens of thousands of nsfw games on itch.io
While the pressure on the credit card companies should still work due to conversations behind closed doors, my understanding is that those companies are not actually payment processors. Payment processors are a bunch of companies/banks, some you likely haven’t heard of (one is PayPal though, feel free to make your voice heard to them), and they are taking legal responsibility for the transactions themselves, and thus actually have incentive to police transactions. Credit card companies themselves, not having those legal liabilities, would much rather people just spent their money everywhere as long as there was low risk of cards being stolen or misused.
Bring back Chargex! Where is Diner’s Club when you need them?
Diner card is fortune 500 company cards only at this point they don’t do normal consumer or even small business cards anymore.
Discover replaced thoses with the mergers.
Wow, people start caring when they come for their porn. These duopolies should be broken up, people should adopt crypto payments.
Nhaa fuck crypto. At least the crypto that are actually popular. Shit like bitcoin and ethereum are deflationary. And why the fuck would you spend money if there’s a good chance your money is worth more tomorrow?
I believe monero has protections to prevent this. All transactions are secret.
How would secret transactions make a the coin not deflate? The issue is control of the production of the currency. If you can’t control it, it’s a cointoss wether it’ll be infaltionary or deflationary. A lot of inflation is bad, and any deflation is catastrophic, so I’d really rather not leave the economy up to random chance and private entities’ willingness to control the production of their shitcoins.
It wouldn’t help much with inflation, but it wouldn’t fluctuate as much as bitcoin due to all transactions being secret It is relatively stable. With monero you wouldn’t have to worry about the value changing a lot in the span of a couple of hours.
So basically it could help combat our blatant consumerism as well? Seems like a win to me
I’m sorry, but that is just a blatant misunderstanding of how economics work. It wouldn’t combat blatant consumerism, it would literally destroy the economy. Not to be replaced by something better, but just destroy it. There would be no reason to invest in literally anything, including people, no reason to repair your house or feed the poor, because the money it would cost, would be worth more tomorrow.
Why would I buy a car, or bike, or proper nutritional food, if I could save that money for tomorrow, and buy more? Only tomorrow it’s the same thing, so I’ll live like shit until the next day, then the next day, and then the next…
The only people who would have any quality of life, would be the rich cunts. They’d live like the do now, because they don’t actually need more money.
Deflation is never a good thing, I’m saying this as a socialist.
They’re not misunderstanding; you’re using Keynesian economics. “The economy” as described today is rich people’s wealth, not the wellbeing of the poor.
If people saved instead of building up credit scores, it would be much easier to strike. We don’t need to be forced to invest somehow or become even poorer (which is what actually happened). You’ll repair your house because you need a house and buy food because you need food. You’re more likely to participate in mutual aid with savings than with credit.
if we’re talking one-off transactions, this is no problem. You simply get enough crypto for your purchase and spend it. You don’t invest all of your money in it and you can circumvent the Visa/Mastercard garbage.
Which one. Is there a valid one? BTC is not has high fees slow and to volatile.
I would be for a state owned chain, does not have to be completely decentralized, it’s just good tech that can make the payment processors of today obselete.
Basically require each bank to run nodes, while letting the central bank of the country hold the keys to mint new coins.
I mean one could also have verifying nodes run independent.
The tech is there, doesn’t have to mean use anarchy moneys, it just means an overhaul of our ways of transferring value around.
Monero. No question.
Yep definitely, it is amazing. It is what BTC should have been.
Lightning
I feel like a dipshit for not participating.
