Structured rambling on the history of advocacy groups and payment processor pressure on internet platforms.
A growing pattern of financial deplatforming is reshaping the creative economy. While the First Amendment protects against governmental censorship, it offers no such shield against private actors, particularly payment processors Visa and Mastercard. This madness-induced assortment of words outlines the mechanisms, historical precedent, and emerging consequences of financial infrastructure being used as a de facto content moderator.
The Current Flashpoint
In July 2025, platforms like Steam and Itch.io quietly removed or deindexed vast swaths of NSFW content. This wasn’t triggered by government regulation or new law. It was triggered by Collective Shout, an Australian pressure group that claims to have influenced Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal through coordinated email campaigns.
Collective Shout has a history of leveraging coordinated pressure campaigns to influence tech policy and corporate behavior. In the past, the group has successfully lobbied Apple to remove sexually suggestive apps, campaigned against major retailers for stocking “pornified” magazine covers, and petitioned the Australian government to tighten content restrictions for films and video games featuring BDSM, sex work, or “objectifying” portrayals of women. Their consistent tactic has been to reframe adult content as a public health or child safety threat, which then justifies pressuring advertisers, hosts, and infrastructure providers to withdraw support or access.
Their targets included adult games that allegedly featured rape and incest themes. But the pressure campaign resulted in broad platform purges, affecting games with queer narratives, stylized horror, and coming-of-age erotica. The result, primarily, was that legal content produced by marginalized creators was removed or hidden without clear explanation or appeal.
For further context on how these events first unfolded, see Death by Payment Processor, which examined the early stages of platform erasure and the financial levers behind it.
History of Infrastructure as Censor
This incident is not unprecedented. Visa and Mastercard have a documented history of preemptive content restrictions in response to public pressure and reputational concerns. In 2020, they suspended services to Pornhub following allegations of child exploitation content, despite the absence of a legal ruling. The platform responded by deleting millions of videos, most of which were unrelated to the allegations. A decade earlier, in 2010, they cut off donations to WikiLeaks during the diplomatic cable fallout, again without any court directive. In 2021, Mastercard introduced a new set of strict compliance requirements for adult content platforms. The ACLU and others warned that these changes would disproportionately harm queer creators and sex workers by making their livelihoods contingent on corporate risk assessments rather than legal standards. Each of these moments illustrates the expanding role of financial institutions as arbiters of acceptable expression. This occurs because payment networks are not bound by First Amendment scrutiny and are instead governed by internal risk frameworks shaped by brand reputation and regulatory posture.
In each case, the platforms and payment providers responded not with transparency, but with preemptive overreach. Pornhub deleted millions of videos to regain processing capabilities. WikiLeaks found itself blocked from receiving donations, only restored through court action years later. OnlyFans briefly announced a full ban on sexually explicit content before public backlash forced a reversal. These responses share a pattern in which platforms move quickly to appease financial partners and only later attempt to justify the resulting damage. This dynamic persists because platforms are not required to justify moderation decisions when enforcement stems from external financial pressure rather than internal policy violation.
Groups like the ACLU and the Free Speech Coalition have pushed back, filing formal complaints with the FTC and calling for legislative scrutiny of opaque financial censorship. Their proposed solutions include greater transparency obligations for payment processors, mandated appeals processes for flagged creators, and the establishment of statutory protections for legal expression disrupted by non-governmental infrastructure. Still, as of this writing, no enforceable regulations constrain these companies from acting as moral adjudicators with economic weapons.
Legal Status vs. Platform Risk Models
Visa and Mastercard maintain they don’t make moral judgments, stating that “if a transaction is legal, our policy is to process the transaction.” Yet developers continue to report deplatforming, visibility suppression, and frozen payments for content that is entirely legal.
This rhetorical line, “we process legal transactions,” has become a predictable ward, used to deflects liability while allowing processors to continue exerting quiet influence via risk scores and merchant category constraints. This processor talisman, anointed and invoked even when internal standards or opaque risk scoring systems trigger restrictions. And yet, public reaction can move them. In the case of OnlyFans, Mastercard’s new adult content compliance rules nearly led to a full platform purge, but an overwhelming backlash from creators, sex worker advocates, and even fintech commentators forced a reversal within a week. In that case, Mastercard never acknowledged policy retreat; they simply “clarified expectations” and let the company reverse its ban.
Now, following the gamer-led countercampaign against recent purges, we’re observing a recurring enforcement cycle in which public-facing statements deny moral judgment, even as internal directives continue to shape platform behavior behind the scenes. Visa’s July 2025 public response again claimed neutrality, but only after days of sustained pushback by players, developers, and free speech advocates. The playbook is becoming recognizable, beginning with initial silence, followed by deflection to “risk management,” and ultimately ending in carefully worded PR adjustments if external pressure escalates.
Games on Steam have been shadowbanned not through official policy, but by vague new content guidelines driven by payment risk. Yoko Taro warned in 2024 that financial censorship would escalate, not by targeting clearly illegal content, but by preemptively suppressing content deemed reputationally uncomfortable for processors or platforms to host.
Meanwhile, Itch.io stripped NSFW content from its browse and search functions entirely. No explicit policy shift. Just quiet disappearance.
The Fallout on Steam and Itch.io
As of late July 2025, both Steam and Itch.io remain in a state of quiet compliance. Steam has not issued any formal policy statement clarifying the removals, but multiple developers report that games flagged as NSFW are now invisible in search, with payment processing delays or outright freezes. Tags like “ecchi,” “BL,” and “NSFW” now trigger shadowbans in the backend, even for titles that were previously approved.
Itch.io, once a bastion for adult and experimental games, has removed all NSFW content from its search and browsing features. While games are technically still hosted, they are undiscoverable unless directly linked. Some creators have confirmed that their payout accounts have been throttled or paused, pending additional review-a process not publicly documented.
Developers impacted by these changes report no notification, no appeals channel, and no indication of what policy was violated. The platforms remain publicly silent, while payment providers like Visa issue neutral-sounding reassurances that they do not police content.
This is the current enforcement model because visibility suppression achieves risk mitigation without legal exposure, as platforms quietly adjust under pressure from financial intermediaries and content risk protocols. A content ecosystem scrubbed clean through financial chilling and corporate vagueness. A storefront that appears open, until you know what not to ask for.
This Grimoire of Many Musings is for entertainment, education, and the occasional act of legal autopsy. It is analysis, not legal advice; if you want that, hire counsel. It reflects no one’s views in real life except the voices rattling around Inverlyst’s head. No past, present, or future employer has signed off on any of this.
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