Bc Collective Shout's gag has been to report violations to Visa/MC. Visa and MC do have these policies, and websites such as Itch.IO are in true violation not fully in line w/all the strict compliance monitoring rules these processors have for adult merchants.

The issue is their rules about adult materials are completely designed for Real-Person pornography not fictional character art.

And the compliance requirements are completely nonsensical. Explain to me what practice a merchant is supposed to follow to secure the documentation proving the Age and a Model release/Verifiable consent to appear in the content of fictional characte arts such as Samus Aran, Lara Croft, Darth Vader, Cloud Strife or Tifa lockhart.

In No free country is the artistic (drawn) content subject to a prohibition on sale. But for the rare case where the Art is used as a method to depict something like an actual chart. But the so-called appropriate controls they are talking about are likely the exact the controls which don't make sense and are unreasonably expensive. But as long as they can complain to Visa, and the controls are not in place - the merchant can be shut down every time. And not for violations of the law - violation for not having "appropriate" measures to ensure no violations of the law according to Visa/MC policies.

My guess is that the payment processor (stripe) got spooked, escalated that to Visa and Mastercard, and they basically have no clue what they are doing and they

reacted in the usual cowardly way of many businesses without actually checking how serious the threat was. They will now have learned something and hopefully see the real threat (their customers leaving or reducing use of their services).

It's more like Visa and Mastercard being able to tolerate things as long as they don't know. But if Collective Shout would tell loudly as they are "Visa and Mastercard are IGNORING our reports and now we're absolutely triggered!" People would start asking why Visa and Mastercard are enforcing it at some places and not enforcing it in others, so they need to act as soon as they are publicly told there is a violation.

You are claiming they care about Collective Shout, they don't care any more about them than the local police care about the the nosy nextdoor neighbour complaining that you left your bins out past 8pm. The interests are aligned here. MasterCard and Visa have a long history of playing the morality police, much longer than Collective Shout has been in existence, and they have flexed their muscles repeatedly against the point industry blocking perfectly legal content from perfectly legal businesses for the best part of 50 years now. MasterCard literally has maintaining human dignity in its mission statement, or at least it did a while back, I'm not in a position to look up now.

we need immediately legislation that keeps payment processors from any and all of these interferences.

It doesn't work in the US, because the courts have found corporations such as Visa have 1st Amendment free speech rights; which includes the right to deny service to people whose speech they disagree with or find objectionable.

They do not care. All they are doing here is virtue-signaling because they thought that would be the most profitable thing. Looks like they never expected the backlash. That is pretty incompetent in its own way.

It's illegal activity in basically fraud. Adult oriented things have, unfortunately, a higher risk of fraud. Either true credit card fraud where people use someone else's card without authorization, or fraud in where they consume the content, but then deny it later on.

That's the illegal activity they care about because chargebacks and such are bad.

Buying gift cards, well, there's a legitimate case for that, and if you're being scammed to pay your taxes with iTunes gift cards, that's a matter between you and