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Please note that the following articles have been automatically translated by Notion (probably by its AI) and may contain errors. The images may contain text in Spanish. If you have any questions about what is written in any of them, you can ask your trusted AI.
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Article in CC BY license (Attribution only)
Reading time: Probably more than 1 hour (It's extensive research)
"Financial censorship is the perfect weapon: it leaves no traces, no judges to stop it."
"Every time Mastercard or Visa forces a website like DLsite to delete a Yuri genre game for including a non-normative character, not only does what for Visa and Mastercard is a 'disgusting fetish' disappear. Gone is the story of a queer artist from Osaka who took 3 years to create it. Gone is her only economic livelihood, her Western support, her traction as a creator, gone is all the money she invested in creating it, and all the time she spent on improving her programming or drawing. and all because? Why did she grow up and move in a culture where the use of such 'polemic' clichés was normalized? Is this really justified that we are somehow living through?"
In this article we are going to address how a generalized hysteria (Which we still don't know if it is provoked or just coincidence) has led to the biggest massacre of artistic content in the history of the internet. Grab some popcorn, do some meditation before reading this article (I even recommend you to pause from time to time while you read it) because what I am about to describe is strong, contains a multitude of sources, resources, real testimonies... And without a doubt it fulfills ****(at least under my criteria) as the best guide currently available on this case. I have not wanted to leave any nuance, any point untouched. Of course I warn that some parts of this article will not be 100% objective and will be fed by various assumptions, we believe that ****this is necessary. The hypotheses should bring us closer to the truth, and this truth should be utilitarian for the defense of digital rights: (Privacy, anonymity, freedom, net neutrality ...) It is not convenient to feed a partial discourse of half-truths, but to expose a utilitarian open debate and let the pieces of the puzzle will fit as we increase in complexity and more critical actors join the equation to correct us.
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This article will not touch on the escalation of totalitarian laws in the UK, Australia, the EU or the USA (Nor any other attack on privacy or anonymity on the net, which occurs in these weeks) We find them equally or even more worrying than what we are about to narrate, but we wanted to isolate both events even though it may seem that they are related. I want to make it clear that we are not conspiracy theorists, we are aware that parts of this article make us sound like that, so we strive to be self-critical with ourselves. But we also see that this is something very serious and that it is increasing in intensity day by day, so we have not cut ourselves off from assumptions either.
This article will include plenty of memes, even if it takes away from the seriousness of the matter.
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Summary of the situation in 1 paragraph in case you haven't heard about it yet:
Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on global finance, which gives them the ability to censor content they feel is "unethical" to their brand image. They have been doing this for several years, and have recently increased in intensity and breadth of content. All this is real and is happening in fully democratic countries.
Summary of the impact in 1 paragraph:
Thousands of developers, artists and small studios DEPEND on adult content markets. This is not a minor change that may not affect them, or that they can adapt to. This change directly puts their livelihood and stability in check, there is no escape and no possibility of democratic recourse. It is blackmail through and through.