#mastercard

You are at the grocery store. You pick up a nice, girthy zucchini. You head over to the oils and pick up a thing of olive oil. Then a packet of condoms.

Satisfied with your selections, you head to the cashier. As you place the items on the conveyor, a voice shouts: "DON'T SELL THOSE! THAT'S GOING UP A BUTT!"

And then for some reason, the cashier agrees. Then the guy who shouted, this fuckass guy in a suit, marches up to the counter and starts demanding that the store never sell any vegetables that could be put up a butt. He starts out pointing at the zucchinis and cucumbers and carrots, but you heard what he said: he's effectively banning every vegetable, just enforcing it selectively.

You ask the cashier if he's corporate or something. The cashier says no. The manager? No. He works here at least? No.

Who the fuck is he, then?

Well, the cashier explains, he's the bank manager from the next street over. He's taken up a moral crusade against vegetables that might go into rectums and if they don't obey him, he won't take anyone's paychecks or any money from any store that opposes him. And his bank is the only bank in the region, so it'd be a huge hassle for the business and the employees.

Cold take: Credit card companies should not have the unilateral power to decide what is or isn't acceptable art. Also fuck weirdo puritan terfs.

Art is based off this post

Collective Shout has:

Gotten a hotel to cancel a legal-aged porn star's reservation

Gotten a venue to cancel a Playboy Bunny themed party - again, attended by only adults

Pressured the Breast Cancer Foundation to pull ads that they found too sexy

got ads for a sex doll company removed because they felt the dolls resembled children

Got a beer coozy that had pinups of adult women printed on them discontinued.

Got an H&M ad pulled for back to school clothes for saying "Turn Heads"

Got Tyler the Creator banned from performing in New Zealand

I'm still scrolling and I have yet to see a single instance of a real, living woman or girl being protected by any one of their actions. They have on multiple occasions punished real, adult women for the audacity to be naked in some capacity they find distasteful.

Adding to this that they have lobbied to get a real pedophile released AND supported Cuties, which objectified and exploited real living children.

"Mastercard has not barred any legal transaction" is, technically, a true statement – because Mastercard is not the one processing the transactions in the first place. Mastercard does not deal directly with any merchant, and in fact typically refuses to communicate with merchants at all; there's always a payment processing service sitting in between Mastercard and the merchant, whether that's Stripe or Paypal or any of dozens of other service providers.

Consequently, there are two layers of service agreements in place: the agreement between Mastercard and the payment processing service, and the agreement between the payment processing service and the merchant. That second layer of service agreements, between the payment processing service and the merchant, is where all of these content restrictions are being imposed. Mastercard can thus truthfully claim that they aren't barring legal transactions.

Now, if you've been paying attention, you've probably already spotted the issue: if the content restrictions are being imposed upon the merchants by individual payment processing services and not by Mastercard, why do all of those payment processing services seem to have exactly the same content restrictions?

That's where the critical sleight of hand comes in: while Mastercard's own terms of service do not require payment processing services to bar transactions of particular types, their ToS does require payment processors to bar transactions which could be damaging to the Mastercard brand. What constitutes damage to the Mastercard brand is not defined; it means whatever Mastercard wants it to mean. The payment processing services are thus in a position where they can be held in breach of Mastercard's terms of service for basically any reason, which gives them a strong incentive not to test any boundaries.