brayinggirl said:
I don't have any inside knowledge about what happened here, but I can make a pretty good guess. I DO have a close friend in the credit card processing industry, working for one of the big credit card companies whose name you know. They can and WILL revoke a business's access to the payment portal for handling material that can even be broadly construed as CSAM, whether or not it meets any particular legal threshold or even whether the content is fictional.Same story for some other elements of the banking and finance industry.
Sure, this might be a fight with the webhost. But I think it's more likely the financial industry's bully pulpit at play here. You may or may not like it, or agree with their demands, or think their influence is insanely outsized. But none of that matters, because if you DO get blacklisted by the payment processors, that's the ballgame.
So CapitalOne's merger went through.
brayinggirl said:
So far, they've really not seemed to care about anything other than CSAM, at least as far as visual arts go. Everyone's ferals and cubs are for better or worse, safe. In other media, there have been occasional forays into punishing producers of NC and NC-adjacent material (some nontraditional payment processors have been increasingly suspicious of hypnosis content creators), but I think any direct attacks on that from the financial industry writ large are far on the horizon, if they happen at all.
PR departments and marketing firms really hate that freelance competition, huh?