Remember back in the early part of the year when our legislature took a bold step forward to prevent sex-trafficking? No, I didn't think you did. We were busy being good citizens and making empty declarations about how Sex Trafficking was bad. Or we simply didn't pay attention at all.
The combined legislation of "Stop Enabling Sex Trafickers Act" (SESTA) and "Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act" (FOSTA) was passed and signed into law by POTUS on April 11, 2018 in spite of warnings of how this ill-defined legislation would be used to shut down sex workers and to limit the ability for customers to pay for legitimate porn. The broad terms of the acts have now reached into the written word as banks and other venues are using the legislation to restrict what you can pay for online.
This month, that is being felt by providers of adult content on Patreon. In the name of preventing sex trafficking, US banks are automatically denying payment to websites providing adult content because they might be sex traffickers. The following notice to providers of adult content on Patreon was received today.
You may be aware that last month there were some issues with declined payments, and confusion caused by patrons seeing a new descriptor on their bank account. We've been working hard to limit the amount of disturbance you might experience this month, and for a full recap of what we've been up to with payment processors and you can read a blog post from Tyler, our VP of Operations.
To give you more info, we've started working with multiple payment processors to be able to continue successfully processing adult content creators. As a result, we moved the processing for adult creators to the UK. Unfortunately, this means some of your patrons may see a 3% international processing fee for their pledge. This is determined by their bank, not by Patreon, and every bank treats these things differently which makes it hard for us to assess who will be affected.
Here's some information to share with your patrons in case an issue arises.
If your patrons are having any trouble, here's what they can do:
1. If their bank suspects that the Patreon payment is fraudulent, a patron can call up their bank to confirm the payment is theirs and genuine.
2. If their payment failed, they can follow these steps or switch to a different payment method.
3. If they are seeing an international processing fee, they can switch their pledge to a different bank that doesn't charge for international payments.
4. They can reach out to the Patreon support team to get account specific help.
Here's what we'll be doing:
1. We'll reach out via email to any patron who receives a "declined" payment with info on what they can do and how.
2. We will continue Patreon's proactive practice of retrying payments throughout the month.
The simple fact is that US banks are using SESTA-FOSTA to decline payment for any adult content. It is worth noting that when I searched SESTA-FOSTA online, my Verizon Internet connection immediately slowed to a crawl.
This bill, which sounds good on the surface was passed by both parties with only two Senators voting against it and only twenty-five congress-dweebs opposed. Yet we are seeing how banks, service providers, and websites are using this as a means of censoring content all the way down to the written word.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/what-is-sesta-fosta-bill/
I just want you to know that we are under attack for even providing words that contain sexual situations. I expect the announcement from Patreon to be only a taste of what is to come. Keep in mind that Craigslist, Reddit, and many independent sites have already shut down rather than risk the penalties this Act has prescribed. I expect that Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Lulu, and other publishing sites will also start censoring our words.
None of us are safe from censorship!