Tens of thousands of notes on a post claiming a bill introduced by the Republicans will make credit card companies support NSFW content, and only a handful going "hey maybe don't support this".
Let's look into how the bill is being reported elsewhere - in fact, from the Senator who introduced the Senate version of the Fair Access to Banking Act
"In recent years, prominent American banks have engaged in a discriminatory practice, referred to as debanking. Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them."
Hmm. What industries could he mean?
"This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers."
Wow. Who could've guessed that's what he meant
“When progressives failed at banning these entire industries, what they did instead is they turned to weaponizing banks as sort of a backdoor to carry out their activist goals..."
So it is, in fact, a bill around trying to stop left-wing activists from, say, going after oil and gas companies or private prisons or the arms industry
But - surely it would include NSFW bans too, right? It would overturn them, right? If you read the text of the bill, which is deliberately vague as you'd expect, it explicitly allows banks to deny payment based on "quantitative, impartial risk-based standards" - it only bans it for "political" or "reputational risk" considerations. And claims that the adult media industry is "high risk" is why payment processors drop it
But let's see who supports it!
"The Fair Access to Banking Act is endorsed by several organizations, including the National Shooting Sports Foundation, National Rifle Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Online Lenders Alliance, Day 1 Alliance, GEO Group, Lignite Energy Council, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, National Mining Association, CoreCivic, and the National ATM Council."
Private prison companies, fossil fuel companies, blockchain companies, and the NRA. But surely...? SURELY a bill we're explicitly told again and again is about preventing left-wing activism against private industry, that's co-sponsored by fucking Lindsey Graham, and that certainly seems to include a carve-out specifically to let payment processors continue to deny adult content, but not deny conservative political causes...would secretly be pro-NSFW content?
This bill is all over the internet now, with viral pleas to GET IT PASSED and shutdowns of any criticism of a bill whose real intent is extremely overt. All of this is a simple search away and straight from the horse's mouth, and nobody wants to do even that modicum of research because they would prefer to take someone's word for it that a magic panacea is just a few phone calls away. If you make phone calls asking for this to pass, you're being played: tricked into supporting a bill crafted by the people leading the moral panic that harassed Itch into oblivion that would do nothing to help that, but that would ban any activism against payments for destructive fossil fuel extraction or gun lobbying. The guy who made it just told everyone that's what it's for! Does no one care to look? To read the bill? You can be the one to read it and say it's bad (being the only person to actually read an odious bill is called "Russ Feingold-ing")
Looking up the talk about this bill one theme I saw a lot was people dismissing anyone pointing out a Republican introduced it by saying "I don't care who introduced it! AS LONG AS SOMEBODY DOES SOMETHING!!!!" But you know what? If you saw that a Republican introduced the bill, and your reaction was to go "wow, so a Republican introduced a bill to protect adult content?" without even a pang of skepticism...I have no words tbh
