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.
Feels like we’re going back to the 90s/00s “Christian parents against video games” moral panic era. But this time, they’re being appeased more heavily.
I despise conservatism. It destroys everything it touches.
It’s another Satanic Panic.
Maybe it’s just because I’m so focused on my own issues as a US citizen… But how the hell did some Australian Christofascist group get this powerful? Like, the RIAA and MPAA combined couldn’t get the United States government to make this much movement on “objectionable content” (piracy at the time, and also now, and all of the time between then and now), but even the crypto fascists of yesterday year couldn’t get this much traction. Probably because people like Frank Zappa and Fred Rogers came forth to criticize the ridiculousness and the consequences of such a position and search policies.
May 1, 1969: Fred Rogers testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications
And 16 years later:
Frank Zappa at PMRC Senate Hearing on Rock Lyrics
STAND UP!!! FIGHT BACK!! Citizen complacency is the most powerful weapon the fascist have – – relying on that you will be paralyzed with fear and do nothing to stop them.
RISE UP! RESIST! REVOLT!!
And show us the fucking Epstein files already, you fucking rapist, con man, felon, pedo, traitor!
They got together enough people to mass email, that is all it took.
Companies tend to multiply received responses to represent the total number of people who were to lazy to complain, so Visa and MasterCard saw 1,000 emails as 10,000,000 in their risk averse actions.
Now 4chan is pissed and have started their own mass email and phonecall campaign, so we shall see where this goes…
Sounds like we’re fighting back with the same technique! Good enough for me!
Who do you even email for that? mastercard@gmail.com?
Probably because they didnt go throught the government, which takes a long time to move on anything, and just put pressure on some profit seeking corporations that just want to get a bother to go away, but which also unfortunately have been put in a position of practical power equal to some types of legislation.
But how the hell did some Australian Christofascist group get this powerful?
It’s Australia, we only laugh when China does it, otherwise it must be good if we’re doing it.
Want to have backdoors to chat apps, done, allow the siezure and forced unlocking of computers and phones at the border, done. Inter refigees in our own offshore concentrarion camps for decades until they suicide and make it illegal to report on, done. Regularly kill our first nations peoples amd have the jailed ? Done. We’re a fucken’ embarrassment!
Keep the pressure on.
Collective Shout got them to change their position and they’re a small group. We are legion, as the kids say
And we’re the ones spending the money
We are legion, as the kids say
God I’m old lmao
What’s even the argument here? Steam already has parental control options, age gates, and content filters… if you don’t want your kids seeing that shit on steam, then, like, don’t let em?
…meanwhile, let’s just continue shoving blatant gambling down minors’ throats in the form of lootboxes.
The argument is control. Religious zealots are all about controlling society and subduing people to follow their rules (that they themselves tend to break all the time)
That’s their goal for sure, what I mean is how are they pretending to justify it?
There’s usually some on-paper benevolent veneer to wrap their hateful bullshit up with.
For example, they hate trans people, but they don’t campaign on that out loud - they justify that hated under the guise of shit like protecting bathrooms.
But this is fucking Steam - access to that bathroom is already under lock and key behind an armed guard. They can’t just pull the “think of the children!” card when the children already have a myriad of protections.
…or maybe they can, considering what just happened. We live in stupid times.
They want a nanny state to do their parenting for them, cus they are shit parents who spend their time petitioning the government about things they could just fucking unplug.
This group isn’t interested in protecting children they’re just interested in pushing their own beliefs on everybody else. The easiest way they can do that is to pretend that they’re interested in children. Which I’m sure some of them are, but not in the capacity that anyone wants them to be.
It’s a classic right-wing tactic. Because nobody wants to be against a law that protects children.
Somebody should check their PCs and internet history; after all, name a better duo than Conservatives and Projection.
I’d bet real money that the CEO of Collective Shout has CSAM on one or more of their computers.
I would put ten dollars on it.
I’m all in! Three fiddy for the pool
Batman and Robin are a way better duo.
I mean, they actually try to do good and oppose nazis instead of be them.
Tired of this story. The fucking prudes need to give up and stop already. Shit
What are the alternatives to Visa/Mastercard?
Discover, American Express, Diner’s Club, and the one that still rules them all, Cash. There are probably others, but Visa and Mastercard are the two largest.
Discover and Diners Club merged a few years ago btw. Discover also has an alliance with JCB.
So Discover network is actually really, really big.
Diners Club is Discover, and they got bought up by Capital One a couple months ago. So you’ll only really have Amex left.
What’s wrong with Capital One? I feel like Discover/Capital One / Diner’s Club network is a good thing for Discover customers.
There are a lot of places going cashless these days. Heck some of my kids friend went to target and couldn’t buy anything because target didn’t have the staff to run anything but the self checkout, which at this place didn’t accept cash. They had to leave empty-handed.
How do I transfer my cash to online stores?
You can in Japan apparently. They have a system where you can go to convenience store and pay by scanning a code
You can also sorta use zelle, but the technical integration is not great. It’s a very manual process as it is
Ultimately, the problem is we let two companies dominate commerce itself. We just need to let the governmet do payment processing, and require compatibility
Japan also accepts bank transfer for online payments. So you don’t even need to leave your house.
Interac if you’re Canadian, and if the store accepts e-transfers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac
At the cost of a less stable value, you can convert your currency to BTC, store it on a physical wallet like those made by Ledger and self-host BTCPay Server to make receiving money easier (alt cryptocurrency available via integrations). As for spending, that depends entirely on the recipient cooperating and accepting BTC. There are also ‘payment gateways’ that should help, including self-hosting a verifiable debit card. I’m still looking into it.
How is an even more niche process that involves having to go to an exchange to buy crypto then safe guard it and it being a taxable event when buying goods with it in some countries a solution?
People are wanting a mainstream alternative that the companies that they buy from use, and if the companies don’t care to use it then it doesn’t matter for the average person.
Even people actually into crypto are less interested in spending it because it exposes their balance if they aren’t using coin mixers or monero which can make them a target. Not to mention most just see it as stock they hope goes to the moon as opposed to going through the cumbersome process of buying for the purpose of spending it like a depreciating asset.
No thanks. It’s not for me.
“[Elon Musk] said he wanted to get his own X payments platform «going soon»”.
Surely that’s going to solve the problem. There’s absolutely no censorship on Twitter. /s
I’d love to boycott them, but literally everything I do uses one of those 2.
Fuck Collective Shout, or anyone spreading censorship!
“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.
Exactly. We need thousands of people calling them non stop disturbing them for hours on end, not just signing petitions.
Yet 1000 weirdos in Australia will have more sway, curiously.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
politicians have literally said that the reason for censorship bills about the internet are specifically to go after lgbtq spaces.
Good on her parents for putting Tankard in her name since you need at least one to deal with her bullshit. Bad on them for releasing her into the world instead of into a rectum where she belongs.
