Censorship: Collectively Telling Shout to Go Away

 If there's one thing people who play games, people who read book, or, well, people who do almost anything hate, it's censorship.  That idea that someone else can tell you what you can or can't play or read something tends to not go over well.  Enter the group Collective Shout: an Australian "activist" group formed by Melissa Tankard Reist.  Melissa being a pro-life, anti-porn activist, it was only a matter of time before she and her group eventually came after video games like they have this year.

Not long ago now, Collective Shout decried that game stores were selling games that encouraged violence and/or were sexually explicit.  While some games that have made it to the stores, like the ever baffling No Mercy (one wonders how that even passed a sniff test, given its content), definitely needed to be reviewed and taken off the storefronts, Collective Shout wasn't happy with just removing the actually weird games.  They sensed blood in the water, and they were coming for every explicit game or game they felt promoted violence or themes they didn't like.

After announcing they were going to be campaigning against Steam and indie storefront Itch.io, rather than take their grievances to the stores directly, they aimed higher: The payment processors.  Mellissa and her group applied pressure to Mastercard, Visa, and Stripe, attempting to get them to make Steam and Itch.io take the games they wanted down ofc the storefront or risk customers not having a way to pay for games at all.  Sadly, it worked, and Steam and Itch.io took many games down off the storefront, leading gamers to get rather pissed off.  But while Collective Shout began declaring victory (despite the group's campaign manager, Caitlin Roper, saying they were not looking to ban "any instances of explicit or adult content"), gaming enthusiasts started planning a counter.

People weren't exactly about to let Melissa and her group dictate what they were and weren't allowed to play, and so a campaign has begun to reverse Steam and Itch.io's capitulation (especially since Itch.io included many games that simply had the tag of LGBTQ+ associated with them).  Rather than message the storefronts, this campaign targets the same people Collective Shout did: The payment processors.  Across social media, calls rang out to contact Mastercard and Visa, and not just to call, but to really gum up their works and waste their time.  People have begun calling in droves, playing dumb on the phone just to waste more of the processors' time and make it very clear to these people that this censorship will not be tolerated.

It's just starting to potentially work- Steam and Itch.io have both made recent statements laying the issue at the payment processors' feet and the amount of calls is clearly getting to the processors.  They now expect that a call is about this issue, and are desperately trying to cut things short, begging callers to just email so that they can likely file the complaints away where no one will read them.  It's not working and calls are still being made, but there are claims by the companies that the volume is decreasing.  They could be lying about that in an attempt to trick people and stave this off, but the work still remains to be done-people have got to continue to call and make it more than clear to these companies-This censorship will not be tolerated.  We must continue to fight back against groups like this who use lies (they claimed Detroit: Become Human encouraged Child Abuse and violence against women in 2018) to pressure people into doing what they want.  We must keep fighting back.

Addendum:  It looks like Mastercard is trying to shove this under the table-telling Riot and Riot content creators to report any messages about this and report them.  Keep fighting!  They can't just sweep this under the rug!