{"id":97441,"date":"2025-07-27T04:47:39","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T04:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/27\/automata-dev-warned-about-credit-card-company-censorship\/"},"modified":"2025-07-27T04:47:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T04:47:39","slug":"automata-dev-warned-about-credit-card-company-censorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/27\/automata-dev-warned-about-credit-card-company-censorship\/","title":{"rendered":"Automata Dev Warned About Credit Card Company Censorship"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Image: Square Enix<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a fight with credit card companies over adult games leads to renewed concerns about censorship on Steam and even on indie platforms like itch.io, a recent warning<\/a><\/span> by Nier: Automata<\/em> director Yoko Taro calling censorship a \u201csecurity hole that endangers democracy itself\u201d has become relevant again.<\/p>\n

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I Hate This FF7 Rebirth Character\u2019s Whole Vibe<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The comments came last November when the Manga Library Z online repository for digital downloads of out-of-print manga was forced to shut down. The group blamed international credit card companies, presumably Visa and Mastercard, who wanted the site to censor certain words<\/a><\/span> from its copies of adult manga. <\/p>\n

\u201cPublishing and similar fields have always faced regulations that go beyond the law, but the fact that a payment processor, which is involved in the entire infrastructure of content distribution, can do such things at its own discretion seems to me to be dangerous on a whole new level,\u201d Taro wrote in a thread at the time, according to a translation by Automaton<\/em><\/a><\/span>. <\/p>\n

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It implies that by controlling payment processing companies, you can even censor another country\u2019s free speech. I feel like it\u2019s not just a matter of censoring adult content or jeopardizing freedom of expression, but rather a security hole that endangers democracy itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Manga Library Z was eventually able to come back online thanks to a crowdfunding campaign earlier this year<\/a><\/span>, but now video game developers behind adult games with controversial themes are facing similar issues on Steam and itch.io due to recent boycott campaigns. Some artists and fans have been organizing reverse boycotts calling for Visa, Mastercard, and others to end their \u201cmoral panic.\u201d One such petition has nearly 100,000 signatures so far<\/a><\/span>. <\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the games that have been caught up in the last day\u2019s changes on Itch are games that up-and-coming creators have made about their own experiences in abusive relationships, or dealing with trauma, or coming out of the closet and finding their first romance as an LGBTQ person,\u201d NYU Game Center chair Naomi Clark told 404 Media<\/em><\/a><\/span> this week. She mentioned Jenny Jiao Hsia\u2019s autobiographical Consume Me<\/em><\/a><\/span> as one example of the type of work that could be censored under the platform\u2019s shifting definitions of what\u2019s acceptable.<\/p>\n

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Image: Square Enix As a fight with credit card companies over adult games leads to renewed concerns about censorship on Steam and even on indie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}