This week we talk about lobbying, Steam, and adult-themed games.
We also discuss cultural influence, extreme ideologies, and itch.io.
Recommended Book: Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns
Transcript
In mid-July of 2025, Valve, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, announced that it was tightening its adult-only content guidelines, its not-safe-for-work content, basically, following pressure by the payment processing companies it works with.
Its new policy even says that “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers” is not allowed on Steam’s network, which in practice means these games will be more difficult to find and purchase, because of Steam’s prominence in the non-console gaming space.
About a week later, the founder of Itch.io, another gaming marketplace that’s similar in some ways to Steam, as it allows creators to sell their games to folks who use the platform, but which is a bit smaller and more focused on indie games, said that itch.io would likewise be removing NSFW, adult-themed games from its catalog, due to concerns that the payment processors they work with have communicated to their company.
In no uncertain terms, he said itch.io wouldn’t be able to operate without these payment processors, so they had to “prioritize our relationships with our payment partners and take immediate steps toward compliance.”
The folks whose games were removed from itch.io as part of this purge were given no warning, and many critics of the decision have pointed to similarities between this gaming-world censorship, as they see it at least, and what happened back in 2018, when social platform Tumblr banned pornographic content, the company’s owner citing pressure from credit card companies as the rationale for that decision—a decision that led to a huge exodus of users from the platform and a whole lot of criticism from creators, users, and folks who keep tabs on censorship-related issues.
There’s been a lot of the same in response to these moves by itch.io, Steam, and similar platforms which have recently decoupled themselves from certain types of adult content, and statements from these companies seems to be illustrative of what’s happening here: they’re completely reliant on these payment processing companies to exist, because without them they can’t easily accept money for what they’re selling. Thus, they’d better comply with what these companies tell them to do, or else.
There have been claims from some folks who have watched this sort of purge occur in other corners of the web over the years that credit card companies are anti-porn and anti-anything-NSFW because the chargeback rate is huge in these spaces—something like 10-times the number of chargebacks, which is what happens when customers say they didn’t buy something, and in some cases then get their money back, after the fact, compared to the next-highest facet of the payment processing industry. And that’s both a pain and potentially expensive.
Others have pointed out that these sorts of purges tend to be political in nature: the groups that push payment processors to adopt these stances are typically vehemently anti-porn, either ultra-conservative or radical-feminist in nature—two ideologies that are oppositional in many ways, but they loop back around when it comes to some topics and have similar, burn it all down ideas about adult content; we don’t approve, so let’s get rid of all this stuff that we don’t approve of by whatever means necessary.
In most cases this means lobbying to get influence in various political spheres, including with politicians who control various governments’ relationships with these payment processors. If they can get the ear of those who make the rules to which these payment processors must adhere, they can then threaten the payment processors—who in many countries, though especially the United States, have pretty sweet deals that allow them to more or less collect a tax on every payment made for everything across every sector—saying, well, we can push our friends in the government to take those sweetheart deals away. So unless you want to suffer that consequence, push these customers of yours to take down this stuff we don’t like.
What I’d like to talk about today are some similar and overlapping movements that are beginning to see censorship-related success across these and other aspects of the web, and the seeming purpose behind these pushes to censor and purge and create the apparatuses by which censorship and purges can be more thoroughly performed.
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One of the big concerns about banning certain types of games is that games are just content, and if you’re able to find a reliable means of banning one type of content, you can then, in theory at least, using that same lever to ban other types of content, like books, articles, films, and so on. Some of the stuff banned on itch.io were essentially just books, in fact.
If you can reliably ban any type of content, you can shape the information ecosystem to reflect one world view, and that’s the sort of thing that tends to distort entire societies, creating an artificial, unreflective view of the world that adheres to the beliefs, values, and perspectives of one group while ignoring or putting down, or even outlawing the beliefs, values, and perspectives of others.
It’s easy to miss that when talking about the banning of adult-themed video games, and many of the games that were banned on Steam and itch.io contained themes like incest and rape—taboo themes that many people have ideological issues with, not just standard-fair pornography, whatever that even means these days.
That said, this same general approach has been used to great effect by interest groups using the same general language, that we need to protect women, or we need to protect the children, won’t someone think of the children, to ban books that feature any kind of queer content, or adult-adjacent themes; nothing pornographic, but themes that don’t line up, often, with a particularly conservative, Christian, no-sex-before-marriage ideology.
So if you’re in that interest group and have those beliefs, these sorts of bans make a certain kind of sense if you want to enforce those beliefs on others and ensure the media ecosystem reflects your beliefs and nothing else, but if you don’t share those beliefs, well, this lever could be used to ban all the stuff you want to see and learn about and consider, and can be very oppressive.
The group behind the recent Steam and itch.io bans, Collective Shout, is run by an Australian political activist named Melinda Tankard Reist who describes herself as an advocate for women and girls and a pro-life feminist. And she’s dedicated herself, among other things, to banning adult films, blocking musical artists from performing in Australia if their work contains lyrics she doesn’t approve of, and to removing pornographic games from platforms like Steam, alongside games that contain LGBTQ characters or have references to domestic violence, including those that present content meant to help people who have suffered domestic violence recover from that experience.
A very specific ideology, then, that she has dedicated her life to enforcing on the larger media ecosystem, and thus, society as a whole.
There’s a parallel and in some cases interrelated movement happening globally right now, especially in the UK and US, but in some other countries, too, to varying degrees, oriented around age-gating online content.
The British government, for instance, recently approved the Online Safety Act of 2023, which they’ve said is intended to protect children from pornographic content on the internet.
This law is enforced by an age-gate, which means requiring that people who want to access such content prove they are old enough to access it, usually by uploading their government issued ID, taking a selfie, which is then assessed to see if they’re obviously old enough, or uploading something like a bank card that a child wouldn’t have.
This law punishes online platforms that don’t implement these sorts of age-gate systems, though apparently they’re incredibly ineffective and easy to bypass, as all you have to do is use a VPN to make it look like you’re in another country, and the age-gates go away; that loophole might eventually disappear, as this is something that is still being rolled out, but that’s the general concept and intention here.
The problem with these sorts of age-gates, as noted by all sorts of activists across the political spectrum, is that what’s appropriate and not appropriate is often being determined by people with views and beliefs that are in some way radical and different from that of the average person where these laws are being passed—usually those with more conservative, and thus constrictive ideas about what should be allowed—and that means, again, the informational ecosystems in these places are being reshaped to match that of these extremist people, who either found themselves in the right political positions, or who have over time purchased influenced with the politicians who are helping to make these laws.
The situation is similar in some parts of the US, where age-gating laws are beginning to see implementation in conservative states like Texas, where First Amendment challenges to a recently passed age-gate law were rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of those passing the law; the US Supreme Court has a large conservative majority right now, and relationships with some of the folks pushing these laws, so this isn’t terribly surprising.
That law, HB1181, which is one of many currently in the works or recently passed in the US, 21 states have a law similar to this, as of mid-2025, and it will require websites with adult content implement age-gating filters to prove users are 18 or older, or, as in the UK, they will be punished.
Also as in the UK, there are relatively simple workarounds to all of these age verification requirements, but there are fears that these sorts of rulings will mostly fail to protect children from anything, and will predominantly be used by radicals with control over aspects of the government to reshape the media and culture in their ideological image.
The folks behind the ultra-conservative Project 2025 plan, the Heritage Foundation, for instance, have said that this is exactly what they intend; by age-gating content they don’t like, they can shape the next generation, and as a nice side benefit, these sorts of filters becoming common makes online identity verification the default, not the exception. And that means it’s easier to track everyone, adult and non-adult, online, attaching their real identity to their behaviors, which can make it easier to pressure or punish folks who do things they don’t like in the otherwise anonymized online world.
This has raised all kinds of alarm bells with First Amendment and freedom of speech activists, but it’s of-a-kind with those aforementioned efforts by folks trying to ban certain types of content in video games and books; if the idea is to reshape everything so that your views are the only ones people see, and anything else is taken down or outlawed, this is one way to accomplish that, even if at first it might simply seem like an attempt to ensure children don’t see nude bodies or sexual acts in their video games.
Similar filters are being tested, both in the practical sense and the legal and political sense, in five EU nations, and a bunch of other countries around the world right now, often by people with the same conservative political slant as in the US and UK, but in some cases by other characters who have similar ambitions with a slightly different ideological tinge.
There is some evidence that pornographic content influences children in negative ways, and there’s some evidence that porn, in general, is not super great for relationships, societies, and individuals.
That said, almost all of these cases have been brought by people or groups with larger interests in shutting down all sorts of content; so calls to protect the children, while perhaps sometimes true, also seem to almost always be a legal foot in the door that then allows for more, next-step censorship, of things and ideas they don’t like and want to ensure no else can access, in subsequent years.
Show Notes
https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bills/
https://www.theverge.com/internet-censorship/686042/supreme-court-fsc-paxton-porn-age-verification-ruling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist
https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0704/1521746-meta-eu/
https://web.archive.org/web/20250719204151/https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorship-policies-have-powerful-allies-and-targeted-popular-games-with-outlandish-claims/
https://www.readtangle.com/porn-age-verification-law-upheld-by-supreme-court/
https://archive.is/20250715004830/https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/five-eu-states-test-age-verification-app-protect-children-2025-07-14/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/enforcement-programme-to-protect-children-from-encountering-pornographic-content-through-the-use-of-age-assurance
https://archive.is/20250725221633/https://www.theverge.com/analysis/713773/uk-online-safety-act-age-verification-bypass-vpn
https://www.polygon.com/news/615910/itchio-steam-sex-adult-games-delisting-pulled-vice-controversy
https://www.theverge.com/news/712890/itch-removes-adult-nsfw-games-steam-payment-providers
https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
https://www.ign.com/articles/valve-pulls-adult-only-games-from-steam-as-it-tightens-rules-to-appease-payment-partners
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23377446/tumblr-matt-mullenweg-post-nsfw-porn-internet-service-moderation-policies
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/it-might-be-porn-games-now-but-they-wont-stop-there-game-devs-join-players-and-artists-rallying-against-credit-card-companies-after-mass-nsfw-game-delisting/
https://www.seamlesschex.com/blog/chargeback-rates-by-industry
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