My complaint:
Master Card has recently enacted new policies that put unrealistically tight restrictions on the production of adult pornographic content. While the ease of access to adult content and the prominence of content such as revenge porn is indeed an issue, Master Card’s new policies essentially go ‘scorched earth’ on all adult content unless they are within a very tight and manually reviewed restriction.
These new policies are so tight that they are made impossible to maintain, such as requiring not only content be posted by verified adults but also requiring any content to be manually reviewed and any live streams be reviewed in real-time. With hundreds of thousands of such content being uploaded each minute, these standards are unreachable for any moderately sized platform let alone any platform bigger. This pressures platforms to either end their relationship with Master Card or disallow any and all pornographic material due to their inability to keep up with these restrictions.
Due to the prominence of Master Card, losing their relationship can mean losing your business as a whole, or at the very least losing a massive chunk of your income for said business. This also created a dangerous situation for sex workers.
Sex work is legitimate work and millions of people rely on sex work for their income. Removing legitimate platforms for sex workers will only harm them by forcing them into less safe platforms and environments. Unrealistically tight bans on sex workers have even lead to the deaths of thousands of sex workers already due to being forced into unsafe environments after losing legitimate work places. These Master Card restrictions will lead to sex workers going into poverty, being forced onto the streets, and being killed. This isn’t a make-believe scenario, that WILL happen if Master Card, and other payment processors, continue to tighten the restrictions on pornographic content.
Suggested solution:
By loosening their restrictions in the right way, they can achieve to make pornographic safer while still allowing its prominence on their partnered platforms. Their policies should include things such as requiring all users that upload pornographic content be age verified. they can still require that platforms be actively monitored for illegal or harmful content without the unrealistic requirement that all content be reviewed before upload. they may still require platforms to allow people to report any illegal or dangerous content they find as a user and then require that those such reports be reviewed by a real person and have appropriate action taken. They may require strictly adult platforms age verify all users that attempt to use their platform. They need to enact realistically achievable policies that both protect people from harmful and illegal content without going so overboard that they pressure platforms to abandon adult content altogether.
