Porn, Mastercard Moderation, and How Bitcoin Isn't Fixing It

As giant financial intermediaries increasingly censor online content providers, decentralized technology is censoring them. It's not always clear which side you should recover from.

Ali Yves Knox, a sex-worker who specializes in financial fetishes, woke up on October 15 to find one of the thousands of videos she had uploaded to iWantClips, a website that allows models to sell only adult-oriented content. A week later there were only a handful of people left. Reason for this sudden arrest? iWantClips should now display any videos uploaded to its website. The new policy comes from Mastercard, which, in the name of "protecting its network", now requires websites that host pornography to review material for illegal and trademark violating content. Non-compliant websites will be excluded from the Mastercard network. (For those who follow, this will be the first time the map network has had moderation requirements on certain groups of internet content providers.)

The challenges facing streaming sites like Chaturbate and MyFreeCams are even more intimidating. Mastercard now requires them to control content in real time. In addition, Mastercard also intends to remove all anonymous adult content. The new rules require adult sites to prove to Mastercard that they verify the identity and age of each model and co-model. Mastercard's pressure to protect its network is twofold. Content censorship has its advantages. It does not allow child pornography and other porn makers to generate revenue from the material they create without their consent.

But Mastercard's rule has also ruined the financial lives of legal sex-workers like Knox. Overwhelmed by the additional problems and burdens of meeting requirements, many of them will stop producing content. Modelling partners who help create legal material but aren't comfortable with the idea of video or camera sites that store their personal information can also fail. Foreign material will also shrink in volume. BDSM and other fetishes are legal, but MasterCard's sophisticated filters definitely flag it as a brand destroyer and thus disappear from the big credit card internet.

In its first announcement of the new rules, Mastercard said it wanted to make the internet a safer place. However, without access to the Mastercard economy, some models may migrate to more dangerous alternatives, such as money-based private sex work. In other words, by censoring the bad, Mastercard also diminishes the good, although that's not the company's intention.

When it comes to tight control of their network, card companies don't have much choice. Money laundering is a crime. That said, it is in itself illegal to facilitate payments for illegal goods and services such as child pornography. If financial institutions like Mastercard want to avoid criminal prosecution, they must use good faith efforts to screen for illegal activity. Therefore, it is necessary to control the content of adult websites.

Some have complained about the double standard. Why does Mastercard require content moderation and universal identification requirements from porn sites but not from other online content providers? After all, both Facebook and YouTube host their share of illegal content. If Mastercard believes that content moderation and authentication is necessary to rid your network of illegal payments, it should definitely apply to these sites.

Bitcoin corrects this, say members of the cryptocurrency community. For any content provider Mastercard censors, Crypto can reconnect it. And for that there are several attempts. In response to Mastercard's new rules, PocketStars - the adult subscription site founded by adult star El Brook - is launching a new Mastercard resistant sub-platform called Rocketstars. Rocketstars relies entirely on crypto payments, which saves having to comply with Mastercard standards.

Odd stuff like ABDL (Adult Baby/Paaper Lovers) and "water sports", which thanks to Mastercard's stricter moderation requirements probably wouldn't last on PocketStars, have found a home on RocketStars. While ABDL is not for everyone, it is legal content produced and consumed by adults with consent. RocketStars initially relied on Dai Stablecoin MakerDAO, which uses the Ethereum blockchain, for payments. While many cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, stablecoins are pegged to a fiat currency, usually the US dollar. The problem, however, is Ethereum's high fees, and last week RocketStars launched its own cryptocurrency SIMP, embedded in the Binance Smart Chain.

Unfortunately, asking sex-workers and their customers to make transactions with highly volatile tokens like SIMP can only result in a poor user experience. Cheap stablecoins may be a better choice for RocketStars. Even with stable coins, it's hard to replace the ever-present presence of credit cards. If Mastercard censorship is a double-edged sword, then the cryptocurrency's ability to censor in both directions is also affected.

In the same week that new Mastercard rules wiped-out iWantClips, I discovered DeepSukebe, a website that allows people to post photos of fully clothed women and girls and "lift" those photos with artificial intelligence without their consent. Wrong naked in the hands, bad actors can blackmail and harass their innocent targets. According to a recent article in the Huffington Post by Jesseline Cook, DeepSukebe has received millions of hits since its debut in October 2020.

DeepSukebe cannot accept credit cards. "Our project has a lot of risks that a typical project shouldn't be interested in," said the site administrator. In terms of deplatforming potential, they are "determined not to rely on traditional payment systems or other platforms [sic]". So DeepSukebe turned to cryptocurrency to generate revenue from its content.

Since Bitcoin and Ethereum have caused "a lot of trouble" with high transaction fees, DeepSukebe relies on Bitcoin Cache and Lightcoin. Coinbase Commerce, a tool offered by crypto giant Coinbase to companies to easily accept cryptocurrencies, processes DeepSukebe payments. However, the terms of service prohibit the use of anything that is "illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, intimidating, harassing". I tried to find out if using Coinbase Commerce DeepSukebe violates the Terms of Use. A spokesperson for Coinbase replied: "As long as Coinbase is not discussing individual cases, we will take appropriate action if we find that customers and partners violate the terms of use and the law." It didn't take long for DeepSukebe's payment server to stop, indicating that Coinbase had shut it down.

Without Coinbase Commerce, DeepSukebe would still find a way to accept cryptocurrency, albeit in a less convenient way. He can dial his own Bitcoin address or access services like BTCPay servers without intermediaries. All of this illustrates the dark side of crypto's ability to reverse censorship. While cryptocurrency could help reorganize Mastercard's censored legal aid, it also brings back some pretty gruesome content, including what many of us welcome to centralized Mastercard and Coinbase Commerce payments, such as the DeepSukebe forger.

Crypto's radical openness and Mastercard content moderation have supporters. But in the end, nothing is as clear and obvious as it seems on both sides. We can only hope the sensor does a good job. This means carefully limiting censorship to those who really deserve it. It also means ensuring that innocent victims like Ali Yves Knox don't get caught up in the bureaucratic boom of bureaucracy.  And as the cryptocurrency reconnects processed by Mastercard, we can only hope that for every lousy DeepSukebe that takes advantage of this advantage, there will be a worthy ABDL star that does better too.