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.
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.
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.
Governments and some religious nutjobs.
They only pretend to care about children. It is about power and control. Always has been, always will.
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.
“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
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
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Yet 1000 weirdos in Australia will have more sway, curiously.
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
The Mastercard/Visa monopoly (or duopoly) is bad for consumers. It should be broken up.
We should hope digital euro breaks this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro
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.
As long as it is legal CC companies should be barred from dictating what products and services their systems cover.
“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!
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.
100’s ??? no no,no,no last I checked it was in the tens of thousands of nsfw games on itch.io
When is the European alternative to these coming?
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.
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)
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.
Wow, people start caring when they come for their porn. These duopolies should be broken up, people should adopt crypto payments.
Which one. Is there a valid one? BTC is not has high fees slow and to volatile.
Monero. No question.
Yep definitely, it is amazing. It is what BTC should have been.
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.
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.
To clarify against what many people jump to assume: Collective Shout is not a religious organization. Its stated goal is protecting children against content they believe may help form dangerous and abusive behaviors in real life. (Needless to say, science does not seem to back these claims)
This doesn’t make them right by any means at all, but we need to understand our enemy if we want to be productive in fighting it.
Um, the founder of Collective Shout, Melinda Tankard Reist, absolutely identifies as a pro-life Christian who has said that her faith 100% influences her activism.
So it’s absolutely hilarious that you believe we need to “understand our enemy”, when you’ve failed to identify the faith and influence of the founder and primary force behind it.
I don’t think this is entirely true. They’re not overtly religious, but there’s a lot of ostensibly “feminist” groups in many countries that are being funded by US religious groups. Someone posted their financials the other day, and they are simply not plausible for a random “we don’t like porn” activist group. There’s a lot of astroterfing going on, and the worst part is that everyone seems to just be accepting it.
