Censorship Campaign Harms Queer Livelihood
After Australian TERF group Collective Shout waged a censorship campaign against payment processors like Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, popular platforms for hosting queer video games Itch and Steam began delisting queer content without warning.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Censorship of queer media has begun in earnest, and it’s all thanks to… Visa and MasterCard?
On July 23, independent digital creators’ marketplace Itch.io started deindexing not safe for work material uploaded to their website. As a result, many products hosted on Itch stopped appearing in search results, and in some cases became completely inaccessible. While the bulk of content uploaded to Itch is video games, you can upload just about any kind of creative work to the website, including comics and whole novels.
The delisting of NSFW content has disproportionately affected trans and otherwise queer artists who, thanks to rampant discrimination in hiring practices and workplace environments, often find it difficult to maintain gainful employment or achieve commercial success with their creative endeavors.
Some on social media have even suggested Itch is withholding payments from creators whose content has been delisted, though they have denied doing so. In fact, Itch’s Bluesky account spent much of the weekend addressing complaints directly and putting out fires as quickly as they could, though that hardly helps creators whose income may have been neutered overnight without any advance warning.
Why was such a drastic change undertaken so suddenly? Itch is pointing the finger at their payment processors like Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, who may have made some noise about NSFW content on the internet following a deliberate censorship campaign waged by a group of Aussies called Collective Shout, who describe themselves as “a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls.”
Considering they think a grown woman can’t consent to rough sex (or even practice it safely), I would argue their motivations may be rooted more in protecting conservative values than women and girls.
Content policy changes took place on video game distribution platform Steam first, as reported by Ana Valens, whose articles about censorship and Collective Shout’s campaign were almost immediately depublished thanks to pressure from VICE’s owner, Savage Ventures. This is an act nearly unheard of in professional journalism; edits and addendums happen all the time, and pieces are sometimes killed before they’re run, but the outright deletion of an approved and published article is frankly anathema to editorial integrity.
Valens announced that she would no longer contribute to Waypoint as a result.
In the wake of all this censorship of games and other art, both Valve (owners of Steam) and Itch insist they had no say in the matter. Both platforms released statements saying that failing to comply with their payment processors’ demands would mean nobody could get paid for their work, NSFW content or not. Itch even says they’re reaching out to other payment processors who might be more comfortable handling risqué content.
Whether or not you want to be mad at Valve and Itch, it’s clear that yelling at CSRs working for either platform won’t solve this problem. So, what’s a gal (or whatever) to do? Well, why not take a page out of Collective Shout’s book and start yelling at the payment processors?
Okay, don’t actually yell, because you’re still just getting Customer Service on the phone… but you can call these hotlines and calmly explain that you, as an adult with money, want to know why you can’t purchase perfectly legal products. You could even suggest that you’ll have to take your business elsewhere if they’re not willing to compromise.
You could also sign petitions like these ones, if you’re feeling extra motivated.
I understand if you’re feeling demotivated and frightened. I don’t know how many times I’ve said it over the last seven months, but we’re living in scary times. Censorship like this is serious, and it affects queer artists more than anybody else, and it can easily get out of hand if we don’t act quickly to stop it.
Collective Shout’s lame vanilla asses managed to censor countless game developers, artists, and writers with a thousand phone calls. Imagine what we can do if we make a hundred thousand phone calls.
Alyssa Steinsiek (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
