#Pornocalypse Comes To FetLife

It’s time for another timely reminder that the credit card companies are why we can’t have nice adult things online. Well, to be fair, I suppose it’s the credit card companies and their shadowy political masters. Like that makes it better?

Start with some background. This post is about FetLife, a famous social media platform for kinky people that (despite its reputation for having some serious flaws) leveraged its early-mover status into a lock on its market segment. FetLife is by all accounts the place for kinky people to congregate online.

You’ve never seen much on ErosBlog about FetLife or about the goings-on there, because nothing that happens on Fetlife is visible on the open web. You have to join up and be logged in to see anything there, which makes the site not part of the internet as far as I’m concerned. As I explained more than seven years ago:

When I’m blogging, I’m swimming in an ocean of material, trying not to drown in it. There’s more published every minute than I could read in a month – and that’s just on the “open” internet, the part where the links work for everyone and there aren’t any passwords or secret knocks.

By policy, I don’t even try to read or look at anything that’s friendslocked or passworded or semi-private. Anything like that is symbolically flagged “this is not for the whole world to see.” And I’m a blogger who can’t even manage to skim all the public stuff that’s out there. Why would I waste my time getting permission to look at controlled stuff, and then actually looking at that stuff, when I don’t even have time to look at all the open stuff that I need to see every day?

I conceptualize anything that’s behind an access control as being dead information, not part of the live internet and thus not part of my conceptual realm. I don’t have time for it and I don’t have room for it in my head. It might as well not exist for me, because knowing stuff I can’t blog about is only going to make my blogging life more difficult, never richer or easier.

It turns out there was a #Pornocalypse-inspired massacre at FetLife recently, with thousands of fetish categories deleted without notice and without (at first) any explanation. Violet Blue explains it this way:

Recent censorship enacted at FetLife is the result of financial discrimination by multiple credit card processors who have ceased business with FetLife for what the processors claim are “Illegal or Immoral” reasons. It began for users one week ago when FetLife announced changes to content guidelines, stating “We can no longer allow FetLifers to publicly share sexual pics and vids containing blood visible in them.” Then without warning, Fetlife deleted hundreds of groups and literally thousands of fetish categories that represented a range of kinky communities (like ones with hypnosis, blood, and humiliation in the name). This was in response to to significant pressure from FetLife’s credit card processor.

Although I try to reserve the word “censorship” for situations when the government attacks our speech freedoms, it’s not clear that Violet’s word choice isn’t correct in this case. The lame explanations allegedly provided by the credit card company to FetLife’s processing bank have the stench of Operation Choke Point about them. That’s the secretive program run by the US Department of Justice to deny banking services to (among others) adult businesses. Although Operation Choke Point was supposed to have been officially terminated in 2015, there’s serious reason to doubt that it ever actually stopped.

Among those reasons, I now feel that we have to include FetLife’s current banking difficulties. FetLife has finally gotten around to posting an explanation for its members, and someone has helpfully schlepped it out onto the open internet where we can see it:

That’s just the first part; there’s more.

FetLife received the same sort of vague and conflicting excuses from its card processor that the victims of Operation Choke Point typically reported hearing. I’m not sure how far we should credit the story of Operation Choke Point’s alleged demise.

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Banks And The #Pornocalypse: Operation Choke Point

Back in 2014, I wrote a little bit about Operation Choke Point, the US Department of Justice effort to intimidate banks into refusing to handle the banking business of a wide variety of politically-disfavored industries, including the adult industry. Facts on the ground were, and are, few.

I’m not sure Franklin Veaux’s recent experiences with mysteriously losing his credit card processing for the Onyx sex game he sells (which looks like a fun way to loosen up a nerdy party and at least encourage it in the direction of a friendly orgy) can count as confirmation of the Operation Choke Point story, but he’s correct that his experience perfectly matches the profile:

This past April, I received notification from Best Payment Solutions that they were terminating my account. They gave no reason, other than they “sometimes terminate accounts for risk reasons.” In the thirteen years I’d been with them, I’d only had one chargeback–a rather remarkable record I doubt few businesses can match. Didn’t matter.

I was told that BPS would no longer work with me, but their parent company, Vantiv, would be happy to give me a merchant account. Vantiv’s underwriters, I was told, had looked at my Web site and had no problem with its contents.

So I did the requisite paperwork, turned it all in, and…nothing. For weeks, during which time I was effectively out of business.

Then, four weeks later, I heard back from Vantiv. We’re so sorry, they said, we thought we could give you a merchant account, but we can’t. When I asked why, the only thing they would say was “risk reasons.”

Thus ensued a mad scramble to find a new merchant account underwriter, a process that’s normally very time-consuming and tedious. I finally found another underwriter, which I will decline to name for reasons that will become obvious once you read the rest of this post, and I’m back up and running again…but not before I was out of business for over a month.

The rest of Franklin’s article reports on a backlash against Operation Choke Point, spearheaded (ironically) by the conservative media after reports that small retailers of guns and ammo were among the thirty or so disfavored groups targeted. According to Wikipedia, Operation Choke Point has been more-or-less terminated in response to the backlash:

On January 29, 2015, the FDIC issued a Financial Institution Letter that states “The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued a Financial Institution Letter today encouraging supervised institutions to take a risk-based approach in assessing individual customer relationships, rather than declining to provide banking services to entire categories of customers without regard to the risks presented by an individual customer or the financial institution’s ability to manage the risk.

The Washington Times says this letter “effectively ends Operation Choke Point.” As reported by Forbes, “a change in the political landscape, many businesses threatening legal action and a congressman with a background in banking [forced] the bureaucracy to admit to misconduct and to stop financial attacks on legal businesses that the Obama administration deems to be politically incorrect.” Reports of continued termination of services to legitimate businesses, however, continue.

They do indeed continue, as witnessed by Franklin’s recent loss of processing. The people he dealt with were pretty clear that the “risk reasons” for not doing business with him didn’t have anything to do with the actual risks posed by his business. Whatever the official status of Operation Choke Point, it sounds as if the banks are still terminating banking relationships with adult-industry businesses to avoid official disapproval, however informal.

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The Pornocalypse, The Banks, And The Department Of Justice

There have been reports for quite some time about porn stars having their bank accounts cancelled for no good reason that their banks would admit. Now comes word — in the form of an extended speculation at Vice.com — that the driving force behind this banking crackdown on adult customers is in fact the Department of Justice:

News is slowly surfacing that shows the US Department of Justice may be strong-arming banks into banning porn stars.

It’s called Operation Choke Point, and it has nothing to do with deep-throating.

Instead, it’s a targeted effort to shut down as many as 30 separate industries by making it impossible for them to access banking services.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, American Bankers Association CEO Frank Keating wrote that the Justice Department is “telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges.”

“Operation Choke Point is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don’t like,” Keating wrote. “Banks must then ‘choke off’ those customers’ access to financial services, shutting down their accounts.”

Keating said the highly secretive operation was launched in early 2013. That’s when porn stars started to complain to the media that their bank accounts were being shut down without explanation.

And while the actors are quick to blame banks like Chase and Bank of America for discrimination, those institutions may in fact have no choice.

“If a bank doesn’t shut down a questionable account when directed to do so, Justice slaps the institution with a penalty for wrongdoing that may or may not have happened,” Keating wrote.

Reading between the lines, there seems to be (as yet) no solid evidence that the porn industry is among the 30 separate industries that’s being secretly targeted by “Operation Choke Point”. But it does offer a better explanation than corporate prurience for the banking difficulties adult performers have been routinely encountering of late.

Thanks to Violet Blue for the link.

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