Censorship is coming for us all.

I've been meaning to write this for a few days now, but both because of time and because stuff just keeps happening I decided to wait. Now since this is about censorship this is very much relevant to the work we have here, so let's talk about it.

I pressume most if not all here know a lot of, if not most or all of what's going on. But in a few words, there's a very very heavy push of censorship happening now in the world that has bloomed in the spawn of less than a week.

There's 2 fronts for this, one is guvermental, spearheaded by the UK's Online Safety act which aims to "protect the children" from "dangerous" content. This implies, among many ambits, porn, and is the most disucssed topic and the most relevant in this page, but not even near the end of it. Truth is this is a very transparent intent by the UK government to maintain control of their population online for various reasons. Things like Encyclopedias, horror games, music, and videos that denounce police brutality among others have been reported to be censored, and this isn't even exhaustive.

Now of course these aren't outright "blocked" but one needs to verify their identity through cameras and ID to confirm one's an adult to access these topics but most pages can't afford that technology so they are just not going to work in the UK no matter what, and even if one's comfortable giving out this details, that's just giving the government a lot of private information to say the least. And they are banning VPNs.

Sucks for the brits sure, but the EU is basically pushing for the same as a whole, in fact giving Elon an ultimatum to censor X now before their own act passes. Australia is reportedly going to do the same, and the US also has similar bills, plural, in drafts. If/Once the US does it, it's pretty much over, that's most of the internet and latam will likely just copy what the US is doing, as usual.

Which means, not just the brits, we are all fucked.

Now the other front is payment facilitators. Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. Basically the credit card duopoli and the biggest payment processor in the world. They have decided to pressure online companies to ban all sorts of material, to the point realistically speaking only the most basic vanilla porn would be accepted.

But it goes way beyond that, horror games being delisted, games that speak about sexual assault from a feminist perspective, games that just have guys wearing women's clothes or furries. Things that aren't inherently sexual and could even be educational but touch on "hard" topics are being delisted and brought down. Some of the biggest indie games are being deindexed and more.

Itch io, the page where I host my store has caved not just completely but going above and beyond. Steam and others have caved in as well because of course Mastercard and Visa control basically the financial world. Think Patreon will resist forever?

Right now, I'm not sure. Fanbox has decided to increase the share they take from NSFW creators to least cover the cost of keeping mastercard and visa happy. Of the three services I use, I'd say the most protected is Subscribestar Adult but even then I don't know if it will always be up.

So what does that mean for us NSFW creators, for me and this place we have here?

Well, I'm NOT closing my page now but, this whole thing...it means it could be over, the golden age of R34 certainly is. Without being able to host stores and with more services closing to us I'm sure many creators will have no option but to abandon this line of work. Personally I will continue until it's financially unviable and then..., well, I'll let you know when that happens, of course, you won't lose anything.

But this goes beyond me, if it's financially unviable for me, it will be even more so for creators who live in more financially demanding countries, even if they are bigger than me. This means we could lose a lot of what we love, from R34 to simply other types of fan creations.

So what can we do?

There's been efforts done by people to contact Visa and Mastercard to complain and express concerns about their policies.

As for countries, there's some who have been contacting their state representatives to voice their concerns as well. Personally I can't do anything, mu country right now has nothing to do with this.

What about online petitions? those are pretty useless, the UK government basically repplied to one laughing their asses off, so not really interested in those.

On a personal level now I can only ask you to keep supporting me, if you want to see work done in the future it's really the only way this can continue.

I think a lot of NSFW creators right now are still taking things with humor and some are literally just finding about this somehow, but I feel it's important we speak up. Not just because it personally and directly affect us but because it affects this entire line of work we love, beyond just Rule 34, content creation in itself, from games, to music (spotify is getting censored), to who knows what else.

Now this isn't a doompost, this is a notice. Both to say what could happen in the future of this page and what is needed, but also hoping you'd take note of everything happen and help in every way you can so censorship like the UKs does not envelop the entire world. From speaking up, to sharing resources to perhaps contacting authorities and even Visa and Mastercard. We are possibly in the hardest time the internet as a whole is facing.

Soon things like rap battles with people insulting each other, true crime, horror videos, crunchyroll, etc... could just be outright banned or simply not be produced anymore because of the cost of maintaining and producing such themes without the possibility of a payout, and it's important to know that.

To Help!:

@Chibireviews on twitter has been compiling all global censorship news so you can keep up and understand the true extend of all this.

I can't link to this on Patreon but Search on twitter "Visa and Mastercard" there's a lot of accounts showing the numbers and other contact information for Visa, Mastercard, Paypal etc one can contact. There's an "anti censorship clean sheet" with all the talking points and more that will appear all over.

So with that, hope to keep seeing you around here, also hope in general the internet manages to get through this and acts like this can be repelled and most important not pass in the US on the first place. At any rate, thanks for reading.