Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steam's new censorship rules in victory against 'porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists', and things only get weirder from there

Because you have allowed the social discourse to be dominated by authoritarians, and have not supported the voices of your fellows that fight against fascism, you are now being overrun by fascists.

Enjoy. You have no one to blame but yourselves.

"All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight," Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted

Ah, so this was a rational, scientific study-based campaign centered around ensuring the health and well-being of society, and not at all an emotionally-charged crusade to take material away from people you find repulsive based on content you personally object to. Got it.

Melinda speaks like she's on 4chan
- There's a lot of overlap between the most terminally online "rad"""fem""s and kiwifarmers, so there's also a nonzero chance you're right.

"All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight," Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted on July 18th.

She sounds deranged.

i wonder what her own perversion is. It's likely quite disturbing - nobody has that much anger and scorn over other people's sex lives and a healthy sex life of their own.

I think she just told us what her thing is, "rape my little sister incest games"
- I did think her use of a first person pronoun there was a bit odd, but I didn't put that together. You might be onto something.

Australia is also the same place where they had to switch the word "drugs" out with "chems" in Fallout, and video games have to have green blood. That whole place is ass backwards and upside down, as one would expect given its geographical location.

As an Australian this is accurate, remember it is illegal here to share nude photos or porn if the woman has small breasts! Because protect the children
- What in the world is the litmus test for that
- Has anyone been convicted of this?
The country started life as a prison with prison rules, seems they forgot to get rid of those rules when they became a real country
- No, they went too far in the opposite direction. "Okay we all got sent here for murder, whoring, and illicit trafficking, so let's switch to punishing those with person and fines."
  If prisoner colonists put you in prison is it double prison?
it's dumb that that's the reason for the change...but i honestly associate that kind of fantasy language with fallout in general.
makes it feel more like a parallel world, close but not quite like our own, and helps suspension of disbelief!
overall a good change, imho, for a very dumb reason...silver linings, i guess...
Morphine was switched to Med-X (worldwide) due to refusal for classification in Australia for Fallout 3 in 2008. Fallout has used the word "chems" in every country since the start I thought.
Are you claiming that all video games have to have green blood to be sold in Australia?
video games have to have green blood.
This is completely untrue.
- They might be referring to the 90s, post Mortal Kombat.
  A lot of games got blood censorship in a lot of countries.
  Even before that I know some games like Contra they replaced the infected "humans" with robots.
The US is filled with gun crazy bigoted nut bags who love to go around bathrooms for genital inspections while crying at the sight of any rainbow flag.
See how unhelpful it is to make shitty generalisations?
- Not really - seems like a pretty accurate description
- Isn't that the case though?
I think this was a ratings issue. I think you can make video games with real life drugs in them but if you don't want an +18 rating you'll have to compromise. I think Bethesda got told they could only sell the game to adults and so they changed the names to make more money. I mean I was playing GTA selling real drugs and playing fallout 4 and doping on fake drugs on the same PS4 at 15, I just couldn't walk into eb's and buy a copy of GTA without my dad there lol.
I'm all for creative freedoms but when it comes to selling games to kids that show real life drugs as giving sweet buffs, maybe a little subtlety is warranted.
Anyway obligatory ragebait dum American can't comprehend nuance comment
- Kinda correct, it was a ratings issue. The problem was that we didn't have an 18+ rating for video games - if your game was deemed 18+ then you couldn't sell it here. Sex, depictions of drug use, and a couple of other things I can't remember right now are reasons for an instant 18+ rating.
  Bethesda got told they couldn't sell it to anyone in Australia, so they compromised to drugs that didn't actually exist.
  Left 4 Dead had something similar with the gore; if I remember correctly, L4D rating submission referred to the zombies as "monsters" (or something) and passed while L4D2 referred to the zombies as "infected people".. because they were now people, our ratings board ~~shit the bed~~ protected the children and gave it 18+ until they removed the bodies and gore. It was patched back in by Valve when we got an 18+ rating.
  South Park: The Stick of Truth has/had some good censored scenes about this, graphically describing Randy being probed by an alien while the graphic of a koala sits in the background. These were patched out too I think (or I downloaded a mod).
  We still have people like these lobbying against porn on Steam, but the overall situation got a lot better when we got an 18+ rating.

"Pro life feminist"

I give my left leg if this is not another TERF group

Surprising absolutely nobody, you're spot on.
- If you can substantiate that, might be good to pass to someone in journalism... "Visa allies with TERFs" makes an epic headline ;)
Feminists are TERFs & homophobes PERIOD, the ones that aren't are in hiding.
- I study at a quite left university. Several of my lectures are about or at least cover some feminist theories. There are a lot of outspoken feminist people here, as well as quite a few queer folk. I have yet to meet a single homophobic or terf feminist.

People thinking porn addiction causes all the problems in society, must be a day ending in Y.

Porn addiction isn't even real, Christians made it up to shame people
- This is not correct.
  Contrary to the earlier notion that addiction is predominantly a substance dependency, research now suggests that any source or experience capable of stimulating an individual has addictive potential. This has led to a paradigm shift in the psychiatric understanding of behavioural addictions. These can refer to a range of behaviors such as gambling, video gaming, and sexual practices. Hypersexual behavior and pornography addiction come to the fore when the behavior becomes intensive, out of the individual’s control, and persists in that pattern despite harmful consequences and risk of harm to one’s emotional and/or physical health.
  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042

Alright, time to research and rat these idiots out. The fact that they tried to ban Detroit: Become Human is enough for me to know that they're not gamers at all and are just cookers.

I'm trying to follow the money and can't find much but there are very strong ties to the Christian/Baptist community, which means that there is an above 0% chance that Advance Australia has or is providing funding.
Their partners and partner's partners are anti-sex (such as CATWA who believe that all prostitution is not a job but is a form of sex trafficking and appears to be against the sex industry), anti-abortion, and all board members and their associated partners are very painfully white.
There's also an association with the NCJWA, whose president appears to be pro Zionist and has lauded Jillian Segal as a voice of moral clarity (anti-semetic envoy for government pushing to reduce protest rights, husband made a $50k donation to Advance Australia).
Hilariously, one of their partners is called 'Campaign Against Sex Robots'.
Anyway, in summary, this appears to be a very well funded right wing puritan religious group whose only games experiences are in the political realm rather than PC.

https://www.gameshub.com/news/article/australian-anti-porn-group-collective-shout-escalates-its-war-for-video-game-censorship-2736180

Collective Shout is a self-described feminist non-partisan organization, but has alleged ties with anti-trans and conservative organizations. The group has developed a reputation as a sort of puritan crusade that targets everything from Detroit: Become Human to Tyler, the Creator.

This one quote tells me what kind of people Collective Shout are. First, Collective Shout will go after the low hanging fruit and then will move to LGBT themed games.

It's a hate group and Valve is caving to them.
- That would mean that they actually are responsible. I don't think that's correct, at best they complained to payment processors to make them enforce their pre-existing bullshit rules. That's where the problem lies IMO, those corporations should not be allowed to ban paying for legal goods and services, especially since they have formed a cartel.
There's ample evidence that a lot of recent self-identifying "feminist" grassroots organisations worldwide are fronts for (or sponsored by) christo-fascist organisations.
After gay marriage passed to widespread popular support in multiple countries, there was a whole considered and deliberate regrouping, where they identified trans rights and porn as wedge issues that they could present their bigoted view as a progressive one. That's why we're suddenly inundated with orgs like this one; they're posing as feminists and progressives but they're actually bigots trying to occupy progressive or mainstream spaces, and give shelter to bigotry in others.
- And yet when you call them out for co-opting the feminist label, instead of being outed by actual feminists, their detractors are publicly lambasted as being anti-feminist.
  Mission accomplished

This is we can't have nice things.

Nice things like games involving incest and rape?
- Sir: If it's illegal, please notify the authorities. If it's not illegal, then I'll have to politely ask you to fuck off.

Is it projection again?

Yup something tells me they like trump
I'm sure if you dig deep enough into the people involved you'll crawl out with a couple pedos, a few rapists, and more than likely some dudes who are into some really kinky shit.
it's always the case, always. whenever there are groups like this pushing their agenda they're secretly trying to justify themselves.
- Apparently they already got caught defending a pedo staffer

https://www.collectiveshout.org/ is the group.

https://www.collectiveshout.org/our_team and https://www.collectiveshout.org/collective_shout_board_members - Ensure their names and faces haunt them for every job they go for next.

https://www.collectiveshout.org/partners - Let them know your unhappy with this group that they are supporting.

"Our (winning!) campaign calling on payment processors including Visa and Mastercard to stop processing payments for rape and incest games available on Steam and other platforms has received global media attention."
Well that is not what I was expecting to find on their site...
- Did no one play "Detroit Become Incestual Rapist"?
"Campaign Against Sex Robots"
They have sex robots down there?

Lowkey opening up a market for an adult game store that takes crypto for payment

I don't know why you couldn't just load money into your steam wallet.
- They weren't pushing for credit card processors to block payments for specific games. They were pushing for the payment processors to block money to Steam entirely, which is why Steam caved and instead removed a small list of games. It was a compromise to allow credit card companies to keep doing business with them. Overall it's pretty small potatoes--a small but vocal group, a small and worthless collection of games. People are understandably worried about the precedent of giving in to censorship at the demand of a group like this, but there are enough things to worry about right now that I'm not going to give it much thought until I hear the slope has slipped further than this.

All I wanna know is how fucked up and perverted the porn that they watch is. Anyone taking this hard of a stand against something surely must be projecting.

This group is shooting for very easy targets and they celebrate like they've won hard battles. It's self indulgent but ultimately unimportant, nothing of value was lost here. If they keep it up long enough and choose a target people are actually willing to fight for, things might turn out differently.

I'm just happy that for once it's not one of us Americans ruining things for everyone. Still part of the anglosphere, though, so not surprised.

Every accusation is a confession for these sex-negative types. The guy who shrieks the loudest about gender non-conforming people being abominable and vile is usually found 6 months later in Thailand smoking hash and hiring kathoey escorts.

Absolutely, and the scary part to me is how that projection includes LGBT folks also being child predators all the damn time.
It’s like they are a bunch of bisexual pedophiles who are repressed and angry, and they get jealous when they see other people giving in to the same desires. Or, as we see all the time, they assume somebody “giving in” to their homosexuality or gender dysphoria is also “giving in” to their pedophilia.

It'd be kind of funny if some rep from steam just came out and said, 'Wait, the Aussies wanted this? Put it all back! Add on a few more new ones even. This won't stand.'

"Australian anti-porn group has too much power."

Always has.
https://theweek.com/articles/497091/australias-small-breast-ban
- what the fuck
- Talk about braindead / misguided legislature.

Simple fix is to call in suspicion of child porn on their computers. Their statement look a lot like projection to me.

yeah it's hard to come to any other conclusion on people who constantly think and talk about pedophilia unprompted.

Anti-Porn people are fascists PERIOD, oh I heard they (as in the group) like cuties.

We need to document these low-lives & make sure they never get employed ever again. (Because it's what they'd do)

- "Porn" is extremely broad. There's plenty of perfectly ethical porn around. Most major producers have pretty strong standards these days. It's not the same industry as it was 10 years ago.
  But in this specific case they went after a porn game, not featuring real people. There's basically no real harm here. People occasionally argue that porn addiction is a problem, but that's mostly an addiction problem, which goes for most addictions. The thing addicted too isn't the problem, it's the very nature of being addicted that's causing the issue.
  It's fine of course to dislike porn, but to effectively ban people from producing and consuming it is an entirely different matter. That does seem like a massive encroachment on individual rights to me.
- TERFs are evidence in itself, the fact that they exist even all these years
- These "feminists" have connections to TERFs, anti-LGBTQ+ groups, and the same NCOSE, that when it was called Morality in Media, labeled non-sexual representation of interracial couples as "pornography".
  If we're at right-wing appropriation of leftist talking points, then you can also let chuds to call black protagonists in video-games the hard-R N-word, and let them harass indie video game devs until they remove said characters, all in the name or "being anti-corporate". Maybe even let big AI corporations to scrape intellectual property and then profit off from it, displacing millions of workers (hopefully only until the hype lasts), because "patent trolls" and "Disney has enough copyrighted material to create their own model" (that argument relies on speculation, that a future model can work off of less data, but still creating good results).
Nothing says antifa like the commercialised exploitation of women
- What exploitation ? When the same group also plays those porn games😂

I don't know how Collective Shout aren't seen as more of a pariah group here like Westboro Baptist Church are in America.

They want things to be like public restrooms in the 60-80s again.

That's a very bad and weird choice of words. Other than that, banning rape-games is not a bad idea, especially from mainstream platforms, though i guess it's not the biggest problem for women's rights right now.

So bunch of grannies are behind it. Do they even play games ?
https://www.collectiveshout.org/collective_shout_board_members

people who play games usually don't have time for shit like this and would rather play games in their free time. that's why whenever you see people shriek about "wokeness" in games it's always a bunch of incels who clearly never play them. they're posers.

People are blaming Collective Shout but crazy lobbying groups have always existed. Visa and Mastercard are solely responsible for acquiescing. Maybe it's time we stop caring so much what people on the political extremes have to say?

    
Collective shout finacials
year: 2024
revenue: 458043
employee_expenses: 107000
other_expenses: 215488
net_surplus: 135555
employees: 
  total_fte: 2
  full_time: 0
  part_time: 1
  casual: 4
volunteers: 15
donations_and_bequests: 389800
government_grants: 0
commercial_income: 0
expense_to_revenue_ratio: "70.4%"
average_expense_per_employee: 39400

Leadership
- name: Melinda Tankard Reist
  role: Founder, Movement Director
  public_socials:
    - Twitter: @MelTankardReist
    - Instagram: @collective.shout
  public_email_address: Not publicly listed
  salary: Not publicly listed

- name: Caitlin Roper
  role: Campaigns Manager
  public_socials:
    - Instagram: @collective.shout
  public_email_address: Not publicly listed
  salary: Not publicly listed

- name: Renee Chopping
  role: Campaigns Strategy
  public_socials:
    - LinkedIn
  public_email_address: r******@collectiveshout.org
  salary: Not publicly listed

- name: Lyn Swanson Kennedy
  role: Campaigns Strategy
  public_socials:
    - Instagram: @collective.shout
  public_email_address: Not publicly listed
  salary: Not publicly listed

- name: Coralie Alison
  role: Movement Operations Manager
  public_socials:
    - Twitter: @CoralieAlison
    - Instagram: @collective.shout
  public_email_address: Not publicly listed
  salary: Not publicly listed

I'm so sorry everyone

More details 𐑪 𐑞 original 🧵

Funny to see this posted by a user named "Incel migrant". 😄

EDIT: Do you guys not get a joke? Maybe it wasn't that good, but still...

inclement immigrant.
edit: guys stop downvoting him he was joking. i was being the unfunny one. 😅 I was being a "that guy"
- In Clem ent immigrant
  We got us a tree man penetrating Clem
- Sounds like a Harry Potter spell
... that's not their username though?
- Poor Clement
How did you manage to miss the other six letters?
- We see what we expect to see
I chuckled.
"Incel mint immigrant" might have worked better since it doubles down on misreading the name, but I only thought of it because yours backfired ;)

I had a look at their website.

They have campaigned against games that normalize incest and sexual abuse. The first campaign, that led to this one, was against a game called No mercy.

The description, according to their website, is:

In this game, you’ll either become every woman’s worst nightmare… or rather: the best dick they'll ever have. Your goal is simple: leave no pussy non-fucked, since that's the only thing they all want. Never take 'no' for an answer.

Fuck your mom, fuck your auntie, and even fuck your friend’s mom. Why not?

Take what’s yours and show No Mercy.

Following that they campaigned against other games promoting sexual violence and incest.

Following our successful campaign and 70k petition to get rape simulation game No Mercy pulled from gaming platform Steam, we discovered almost 500 other games depicting rape, incest, sexual torture and child abuse.

How is this a bad thing? Do you lot just hear anti-porn and start foaming around your mouth?

Targeting payment processors to force change within a business often leads to overreaction. That's how we got Onlyfans announcing that it was banning porn entirely. Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal become quite unreasonable when these groups start gaining traction.
This same group pushed to get Detroit: Become Human pulled because it has the player controlling a victim of abuse protecting another victim. There is zero nuance to their target choices. If they get pull with payment processors, they can go "this is a child abuse simulator!" and get something like that pulled with less public support behind them.
- There is zero nuance to their target choices.
  Zero nuance is what this thread is filled with.
  One does not need to agree with everything they do or did. In fact, i don't. But getting games that are clearly catering to rapist fantasies pulled off steam, is something i see as very positive.
Because letting extremely biased ideological groups dictate worldwide policy is always a bad thing that comes with negative consequences.
I'm not personally familiar with any of the games in this ban wave, but Steam's stance prior is that these games are free expression of art, made by adults and it's not Steam's job to police art. If a group does want to impose limitations on art on a worldwide storefront - that should be a national limitation performed by an appropriate body - Australia already has a stringent games rating system, and if these games do not meet any approved standards they would be hit with 'Refused Classification' and thereby restricted to be sold (banned from sale or import) to Australia and Steam would region block them for sale to Aus. As is the case for many games already.
However, this group deemed following the appropriate channels too much work, so instead went for a Karen smear campaign of the payment processors on social media - stating that they supported the sale of rape and incest games (simply by working with Steam), thereby pressuring the payment processors to put lobby Steam to remove the games entirely as the easiest path for Steam to avoid financial processing impacts.
- I see where you are coming from. I still think that it is a net positive that they got rid of those games. I quoted the description of one game above. That aint no art. That is just the glorification of rape. And i'm glad it's gone. Glad it's gone everywhere in fact, not just in Australia.
  Are these good people? Rather not. I still have to see them campaign against queer or trans folk, but seeing their connections that is a valid fear to have.
  I will fight for diversity, in any form, beeing part of gaming culture. But i won't cry a single tear about games that have a glorification of rape and incest as their main topic.
Do you have trouble differentiating between fiction and reality?
Can I demand racing games be banned because they promote CO2 emissions?
- No. Do you think fiction about rapeing women is'nt a problem? Have you considered the idea that exposing oneself to said fiction could reinforce a violent and objectifying view of womem? Or normalize rape and sexual violence?
  Can I demand racing games be banned because they promote CO2 emissions?
  No, and thankfully this is a complete strawman. If one wanted to make that analogy, it might point out how racing games might normalize speeding.

Im personally tired of all this incest shit everywhere so I'm down for it.

It's the wrong way to go about it though. Private companies should not dictate legality and morality.
- I wouldn't mind if Valve did. It's the unaccountable payment processors deciding morality that's spooky, because there's no meaningful alternative.

Looking at porn doesn't mean you have a porn addiction. It's also not unhealthy. Playing a porn game also doesn't mean you have a porn addiction. It's only an addiction if it affects your life negatively. Porn gives one pleasure and more pleasure is objectively a good thing, unless it affects you in a bad way, like certain kinds of drugs.
Porn is definitely unhealthy
No, it's not. Who told you that?
Porn is definitely unhealthy
Look at all the countries which block / ban porn.
Now look at women's rights in those same countries.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
so here's the thing:
if playing these sorts of games makes you sad and lonely, that's a problem.
but if you are already sad and lonely, and playing these sorts of games makes you feel less so, that's a good thing.
people that say things like what you said seriously underestimate how many people in the world have trouble forming (healthy) relationships, regardless of the games the play.
the internet and computers could disappear and those people still wouldn't be better off; they'd just have fewer options.
and that sort of thing affects lots of different kinds of people: those suffering from mental disorders like depression, autism, various trauma, other conditions that make forming relationships difficult. those with physical handicaps, having similar issues about finding partners. and more.
I'm lucky enough to be able to have largely normal relationships (when i want to, when I'm in good enough a place to give it an honest go), but when i was in the deepest pits of depression that just wasn't an option. and i still craved some of that...so various kinds of smut filled that need quite well, temporarily.
not a great solution long term, but it is definitely a net positive for a LOT of people!
Source?