Mastercard’s ties to the esports world have led to more evidence of censorship. A source leaked messages from the Riot Games sponsor to livestream channels during the Valorant Champions Tour. The payment processor asked moderators to delete messages accusing it of forcing the ban of Steam games.
Gamers who care about this are a much smaller group than American regressive religious zealots.
Australian religious zealots are the ones taking credit for the steam & itch.io censorship.
*TERFs
The hypothesis I’ve heard is that the zealots have deep enough ties to the Australian government to be pains in the ass for MasterCard and Visa. Though I can’t imagine Australia is a big enough demographic to really matter meaningfully, also if you are any type of international entity you should have Australia marked as fuck ass stupid place is the Idaho of the Anglosphere shitty government but with lots of decent folks about.
Uh. No.
Do you seriously think Australia is a big enough player for mastercard and visa to kowtow despite building pressure planetwide? We’re fucking small potatoes and we’ve always known it.
Payment processors own upper echelons are full of weird religious fundamentalists, and that’s where a lot of this is coming from. Don’t give collective shout any credit, very few people in Australia even knew who the fuck they were before they started claiming shit. They’re the online version of that weird proselytiser outside st paul’s.
(And if you think Conroy is a tie, lemme describe in detail how much people want to barbecue that idiot…)
Fair enough, though them being stupid greedy bastards is also an element to the why in such a situation. Regardless Visa and MasterCard need to pushed out of the financial system and forcibly dissolved.
Straight up its like the shithole of western countries.
Although UK and USA are catching up