Free speech is taking another massive hit as game distribution site, Itch.io has begun removing and hiding games.
It seems that the campaign to massively censor video games is continuing. Last year, Australian law makers began pushing for an age verification law for video games. Unfortunately, anti-free speech organizations aren’t waiting around for a law to push for the massive censorship of games.
More recently, Steam threw game developers under the bus by caving to pressure and censored a bunch of games. While anti-speech organization, Collective Shout claimed responsibility, it wasn’t clear if they were the ultimate reason Steam started zapping games down the memory hole. What is clear is that the pressure came from payment processors who are seemingly getting veto powers over what is and isn’t allowed in a game.
Today, we are learning that payment processors are further flexing their censorship powers over companies by also targeting itch.io. Reports are suggesting that itch.io is now censoring games as well at the behest of payment processors. From Arstechnica:
Indie game clearinghouse itch.io is the latest online gaming storefront to take action to remove or limit the availability of some adult content, bowing to pressure from payment processors spurred by an Australian grassroots group’s campaign against certain sexualized content.
Wednesday night, itch.io creators and users began noticing that many adult-oriented games and content were no longer appearing in search results on the platform. Other creators reported that their adult-focused titles had been removed from the platform entirely, without any advance warning.
By early Thursday morning, itch.io had confirmed in a blog post that it had “‘deindexed’ all adult NSFW content from our browser and search pages.” Itch said the move—which it admitted was “sudden and disruptive”—came in response to a pressure campaign from Collective Shout, an Australian nonprofit that describes itself as “a grassroots movement challenging the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising, and popular culture.”
In an open letter to payment processors earlier this month, Collective Shout called out Steam and Itch.io specifically for briefly hosting controversial “sexual assault simulator” No Mercy as well as currently hosting “hundreds of other games featuring rape, incest, and child sexual abuse.” The group claims to have “documented content including violent sexual torture of women and children, including incest related abuse involving family members” on both platforms, and took companies like Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to task for “facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games” through those stores.
Users are noting that games dealing with LGBTQ+ content also got hit in all of this. This isn’t entirely surprising since these censorship campaigns are frequently driven by bigotry and harassment. The bad part about all of this is the fact that these decisions are destroying people’s livelihoods with little to no oversight. You might be developing a game that happens to deal with themes of sexual identity only to one day have your game deindexed and nuked off the face of the internet because it was classified as “pornographic” – a term that is often used as cover to oppress the LGBTQ+ community. This to appease some fascist pro-censorship group that seeks to come in from behind and force their morality up your backside without your permission.
The precedent this all sets is absolutely awful. There are those that consider that no amount of gaming is healthy at all. Others consider violence of any kind to be intolerable. If this is the kind of content being removed already, then it is clearly only a matter of time before other censorship groups start demanding payment processors compel game fronts to remove an additional swath of games as well. That would mean more job creators are affected and the gaming community takes further hits. No game is truly safe from any of this as some note that this is likely only the beginning of this latest wave of censorship.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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looks like there are a few petitions to stop this, one on the ACLU which blown up quickly to the point it went from less than 10k people signing to currently 117k people signing in the span of 2 days. Also one on change.org.
Meanwhile governments seem to be aware and against it, as a Japanese head politician spoke out against Visa and mentioned that censorship group claiming responsibility for the Visa/paypal censorship push by name. and are in the process of litigation against Visa for something else but apparently they are planning on expanding. I heard rumours of a few other government agencies going against this too but nothing concrete yet on that front I can dig up.
While governments have been pushing for “think of the children!” initiatives, they do seem to be very against the idea of citizens being prevented from spending their own money to buy completely legal things.
Payment processors, ISPs, social media platforms, anything or any service necessary for modern internet use (or life in general) need to made into de-facto neutral utilities. And by extension no government tweaking that balance either.
As in government intervention is needed, but mustn’t turn into censorship nor agenda driven, like industry capture of regulatory body like visa exec being appointed to payment processor regulator.