This is a furry blog, where I write about whatever interests me and sign it with my fursona’s name. I sometimes talk about furry fandom topics, but I sometimes also talk about applied cryptography.
If you got a mild bit of emotional whiplash from that sentence, the best list of posts to start reading to get a feel for my usual fare is here.
When one of my more technical blog posts makes it to Hacker News or Reddit, I will inevitably read some pearl-clutching comment declaring the inclusion of furry art on my furry blog as somehow “pornographic” (as absurd as that really is).
Considering the recent action taken against games with NSFW content on Steam and itch.io, it’s high time we really talked about the threat of payment processors being weaponized against free expression online.
How We Got Here
The weaponization of payment processors to enact target censorship is not a new tactic. It was famously used by the US government against Wikileaks in 2010, and more recently against SciHub (for daring to make academic papers freely available online).
This is a problem that technologists have been acutely aware of for decades.
Separately, organizations like Collective Shout (the one behind the recent Steam and itch.io censorship waves) and Exodus Cry (who went after Pornhub) have adopted the tactic of targeting payment processors to enforce their weird brand of Christianity onto the rest of us.
On Queerphobia in “Christian Activism”
While researching this topic, I came across many Internet comments that claimed that Collective Shout has anti-LGBTQ motives. However, I could not find any evidence to substantiate this claim.
... continue reading