NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Blog » A quick note to our queer members

We saw the recent news about Steam and Itch.io being forced to restrict legal adult content by Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. As usual, plenty of creators guilty of existing while queer are getting caught in the crossfire.* We’ve also seen a bunch of recent signups from affected folks looking for a safe online place.

However, we highly value transparently. We’ve had our own issues with that type of pressure in the past. In addition to payment processing, our refusal to prohibit legal adult content makes it incredibly difficult for us to get certain types of insurance. (Like, more than one carrier has literally told us “we can’t write insurance for somebody falling and hurting themselves in your office because you won’t prohibit adult content on your servers.” Oh, fuck off!) We’ve been able to navigate that successfully thus far, but it’s a fine line. Steam and Itch also navigated it successfully, likely with the best of intentions, right up until they didn’t!

We cannot promise that we (and by extension, our members) won’t ever run into similar problems in the future. But we can promise that we will always fight. We can’t promise that we will win. But we can promise that if we fail, we died trying. (And even if we did somehow get forced into banning adult content, adult content != queer content!)

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