This meme¹ made the rounds here on Lemmy some days back.
And NSFW artists in the Furry fandom will often talk about how payment processors give them guff.
It holds true in lived memory, but like…
… Why?
I actually understand it for Google Ads and the like – Google, Metabook, Bytedance et al. are really just advertisement companies with a side-gig in providing online services, and if you’re an advertisement company, then “how other corporations perceive you” is what you live and die by, which forces the whole “corporate sanitisation” thing down on the users. – So like. It does make sense, even if it’s hateable.
But for the likes of Visa, and Master Card, and whatnot – It doesn’t? As I understand it their whole thing is they transfer money between parties and take a cut of the transactions. (and also give credit and charge interests on that and such) – Why the fuck would they care what those transactions are about, so long as people are… Transacting, and thus giving them their cut?
¹ Reuploaded as an image because I couldn’t be fucked to find it again.
PH purge was more about being unable to validate that the content was consensual/legal.
Because they were being pressured from the credit card companies to do that.
I think that’s largely for the same reason; their legal obligations to ensure they don’t facilitate illegal stuff means that the risk of working with companies that do e.g. amateur porn makes the potential consequences (financial processing ban, i.e. effectively the entire company being shut down) massively outweigh the potential benefits.
So you’re right that PH’s legal liability was part of the reasoning, but that pressure largely came from payment processors, for whom the legal consequences are more severe.