Payment Processors: Surveillance, Chokepoints, and Kill Switches

If you’ve been out of the loop, Collective Shout, the Australian activist group that proudly bills itself as a haven “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture,” has now upgraded from shaking fists at billboards to strong-arming some of the biggest payment processors in the world.

They are taking credit for a recent corporate exorcism of NSFW content from Steam and Itch.io, two of the most popular game marketplaces on the planet. The group insists they are saving the world from “rape and incest games,” a claim built almost entirely on the notoriously inaccurate science of user-generated Steam tags, which is resulting in a whole host of legal games being removed from the platform.

The campaign reads like a familiar story for anyone who has studied internet moral panics: start with a frightening claim, keep the details murky, find corporate partners skittish about bad PR, and apply steady pressure until the fear trickles down into policy.

In this case, the partners were Visa, PayPal, MasterCard, and friends, companies that have never met a reputational risk they would not solve by banning something.

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