How much of a role did these groups play in anyone’s decision making here? I’ve never gotten the impression that either of these groups to be especially influential outside of getting congressional reps to occasionally sponsor symbolic legislative fights. Like you can run all the media that you want but ultimately banning porn from the internet is a pretty quixotic endeavor and the stakeholders in OF know this. Where’s the leverage?

I think what the sibling to this comment has brought up is important to understand.

These groups are entirely trying to alter the definition of “sex trafficking.” Or rather, attempting to make the phrase so broad as to be meaningless.

Sex trafficking brings in images of humans being thrown into a container against their will, shipped overseas in darkness, and then maybe drugged up and pimped out in hidden shady backstreet houses.

These groups like Exodus Cry and NCOSE are attempting to conflate that above image with grown and often well educated people who are choosing to be their own bosses.

You can see this conflation all over their websites and in many of their press releases.

How much of an influence did they have in this and the pornhub debacle? I mean, i don’t know how we could accurately measure this. But it would appear their pressure campaigns are heavily funded, very active, and then during those campaigns many of their goals were met. So I guess it’s up to you to decide how much influence they really played.

My point is simply for us to notice this now.

Wrt influence, much of it comes from the association that these groups have worked hard to build between porn and sex trafficking. Simply disliking porn because of religious and/or conservative values is easy to dismiss for a large majority of people.

However, if "sinful" adult content and sex work becomes synonymous with non-consent, hurting children, etc, their arguments become far more difficult to dismiss without looking badly in the public eye. Especially for our politicians where discourse is limited to extended soundbytes and debates that leave no room for nuance or deeper discussion.

I thought the main cause of this was a recent law change regarding liability around sex trafficking: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...

Rather than risk this liability it's easier for payment processors to just not work with high risk sites.

NCOSE pressure campaign was heavily directed against payment companies. They're quite open about it. [0]

The first link is directly to NCOSE (Morality in Media) but heres a few other articles with quite a bit more information. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

[0] https://ncose.salsalabs.org/thankyou_mastercard_visa/index.h...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being-blamed-on...

[2] https://knock-la.com/onlyfans-bans-sex-work/

[3] https://reason.com/2021/08/20/why-onlyfans-is-double-crossin...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52543508

[5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reasons-why-onlyfans-...

[6] https://avn.com/business/articles/legal/mastercard-visa-ban-...

[7] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pornhub-policy/pornhub-pu...

I thought Pornhub banned unverified content because MasterCard added them to a blacklist over them repeatedly not deleting illegal content?

My understanding is that these action committees are the ones that pressured the banks and payment processors (whose partial functions are shielding their partner banks from bad PR) to do so.

I didn't read anything about those organizations being involved in any of the stories about the Pornhub thing. Do you have any evidence of them being involved or are you just speculating?

According to wikipedia, the Traffickinghub campaign, created by Exodus Cry's Director of Abolition, resulted on the credit cards ban.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry#Traffickinghub_camp...

I don't like copy and pasting my other comments directly, so ill just link to it [0] but the short answer is, they're pretty open about their pressure campaigns towards payment processors. There was also quite a lot of exposing during the PornHub debacle.

the linked comment has quite a few links attached.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304164

This seems somewhat plausible, but how do you know these organizations have anything to do with OnlyFans?

They're open about it, but its been written about pretty extensively. One of my other comments [0] has a number of links. Including a couple which discuss their involvement in PornHub takedown as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304164

Whether they did or not, it is encouraged to be aware of them and to seek ways to weaken their efforts to impose their beliefs upon non-believers.

Sigh

Why can't these cults just follow their own rules, why the hell are you trying to take ME to your miserable heaven.

Fighting an outside "other" simplifies maintaining social cohesion within the cult, therefore sustaining exploitation of cultists.

This needs to be more widely understood.

Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons don't just go door-to-door to spread their word. They know that the extreme majority of people they ring are going to just shut the door in their face. Leadership knows this, and it's a tool. After they get repeatedly rejected, church leadership can say "They don't love you, but WE do!" and it further solidifies their belief in their religion.

It's all about creating another "us vs them" scenario.

Because like all churches, they make money from it.

Anecdote: I went to a charismatic non-denominational new wave evangelical thing in Maui, for reasons I will not explain, call it amusement. I paid particular attention to the pastor before and after the collection plate, and it amused me so much that I went back to confirm what I had first seen: that every ounce of his charisma (and boy was he loaded in that dept.) drained from his Animus as soon as the collection plate was full. He would disappear into the background to suffer the remaining service until which time he could count his winnings.

>I think they'll probably try to grab momentum from some of the other more ... conpsiratorial(?) groups that have some popularity currently.

if they do as you say, which i think is quite plausible, it'll be interesting to see how they fit in the more anti-semetic and end-of-days thoughts that are foundational to those groups.

Im sure we'll see the end-of-days stuff a bit--a lot of the "this degeneracy, this porn, it is proof that civilization is falling apart and the end is near." only packaged in a way that will resonate with the puritanical types.

i was not aware of these pressures, but on the other not surprised.

i do fully agree with you, and even perhaps think in a broader sense, that we must watch these extreme religious/ extreme nationalist movements, from a sharper eye.

also, as climate change will proceed by cutting ressources, food and water from the poorest, as well as causing wars and possibly massive migration, these groups will only become stronger.

Nah its just the payment processors

Its only a matter of time before a service relying on a Metamask extension on a cheap Layer2 is extremely popular

This will be much much harder to police so its kinda of counterproductive to go after permissioned centralized services as it accelerates the inevitable

I was under the impression that this was a matter of pragmatism by the payment processors to avoid the chargebacks that adult-oriented industries are known for. I haven’t heard any source say that this was for Puritanical reasons at all.

If it was just about chargebacks, they’d just raise fees to cover them, which they’ve already done (with approximately 10x higher fees in sex industry card processing).

The momentum from these groups against OnlyFans (and others) started last year when covid hit and porn consumption in general "went up".

https://reason.com/2020/04/24/people-stuck-at-home-are-makin...

This is looking like a failed mission from my perspective. If anything I think today people in general are more understanding and accepting of sex work and sex workers.

If anything Christianity is on the decline due to mass hypocrisy.

Interesting, I did not know about the NCOSE or Exodus Cry.

> similar to the Moral Majority's push from previous decades to remove sexuality or "objectional content" from the public sphere.

"History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” – Mark Twain

On the one hand I love the spirit of this quote, but on the other, it's pretty solidly not a Twain quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

I was going to mention that but I went for a more laconic approach. I didn't want it to appear like I had written it, but a long explanation about how it's commonly attributed to Mark Twain but may not be him seemed to make the comment worse.