Business Steam rules updated to prohibit content that violates rules set forth by payment processors and banks - Valve's rules regarding what developers "shouldn't publish on Steam" have a new clause regarding standards set forth by payment processors.

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Valve's rules regarding what developers "shouldn't publish on Steam" have a new clause regarding standards set forth by payment processors.

2025-07-16 17:17
Amber V

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Valve has updated its rules regarding content that developers aren’t allowed to publish on Steam (as reported by Game*Spark [archive]). The “Rules and Guidelines” section of Steamworks Documentation now has an extra clause, and it suggests that publishers are required to comply with rules and standards set forth by various third parties involved in processing electronic payments. The rule seems to be predominantly related to adult content.

What you shouldn’t publish on Steam:
15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.

Prior to the update, the list included 14 clauses, prohibiting things like hate speech, malware, sexual content depicting real people and any form of exploitation of children. The new 15th clause suggests that Steam may additionally have to crack down on specific types of adult content in response to the requirements of payment processors and banks. There are currently no specific examples of what this may entail.

Update (2025/07/15 at 18:30 JST): According to SteamDB [wayback], a large number of games has been removed from the platform in the past 16 hours. Judging rom the list, it appears “sex simulator” type games with keywords such as “incest” and “slavery” make up the majority. There are some confusing cases like the removal of the Ace Attorney-inspired investigation game Trails of Innocence, although this could be a coincidental deletion.

On a related note, various video game and manga hosting platforms in Japan have in recent years run into trouble with payment processors and credit card networks. Due to certain content on the platforms going against the (often undisclosed) rules and standards of third parties handling payments, the platforms ended up without support for credit card payment. This has led to loss of revenue and even the closure of platforms like Manga Library Z. It is possible that Steam’s new rule is a means to prevent such complications from arising, however, as the specific “rules and standards” of the payment processors are also unclear, publishers might need to be extra cautious with releasing their games on the platform.

Related articles: “It’s a security hole that endangers democracy itself.” NieR creator speaks out against payment processors pressuring Japanese adult content platforms

Visa Japan’s CEO says disabling card payment for legal adult content is “necessary to protect the brand”



Niche Gamer: Steam updates rules to comply with payment processor censorship (archive)
Wccftech: Steam Publishing Guidelines Updated With Clause Prohibiting Content That Violates Payment Processor and Bank Rules (archive)

Rock Paper Shotgun: Valve change Steam's rules to let banks and credit card firms prohibit "certain kinds of adult only content" (archive)
In particular, this could lead to a stifling of games that are in any way non-conforming, particularly given the current climate of repression in Valve's home country, the USA. I know about the rule change thanks to Youtuber and self-described former game developer NoahFuel Gaming, who has posted on Bluesky about the potential fallout for projects the banks and financial corporations consider "adult" because they deviate from reactionary framings of sex and gender. As the Youtuber writes: "Queer content gets flagged as 'explicit' even when it's PG. A trans dev making a personal story? 'Too controversial.' A surreal queer VN? 'Sexualized.' Financial deplatforming in action."

GamesRadar: Steam now prohibits games that violate the "rules and standards" of payment processors, banks, and more, and users are worried it might affect more than just "certain kinds of adult-only content" (archive)
"Yeah... this is something that looks innocuous at first glance but it's a trojan horse," another believes. "LGBTQ+ has a habit of being mysteriously flagged as 'adult only.'" On ResetEra, similar points are being shared, as one writes: "Today it's porn games, tomorrow any game with LGBTQ+ content because it ends up labelled as 'adult.'"

Notebookcheck: Steam tightens adult content rules after pressure from payment giants (archive)
As spotted [archive] by TheGamer, this triggered a mini-purge according to the Steam Database, with many problematic games such as "Incest Tales", "Wolf on Rail", "Sex Village", "Slave of the Police Officer", and many more, being delisted from the storefront.

GamingOnLinux: Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed (archive)
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I have no idea what side of the fence I'm on when it comes to this and I'm not typically a person content with fence sitting either. I think that this debanking-tier shit is bullshit and there's no telling where it will end, porn stuff is just always a conveniently easy target to stretch boundaries on stuff like this because who's going to want to be known for defending that stuff? These processors are effectively monopolies that can impose their will on others by doing stuff like this and I'm fairly certain that our politics do not align on most issues unlike this one, what they ultimately want is likely to be something which is very anti-me (And likely anti-anyone that doesn't share their exact agenda, too) and this is just their method of tricking us into lowering our guard with regards to them. Naturally, I'm pro-me.

At the same time, steam shouldn't have all this porn to begin with and I detested it since the day they started giving in to this market, which resulted in the spawning of horrific games like Changed which would go on to result in absurd amounts of furry fetish child grooming. I'm still not sure if that game will even be hit by this rule change, since jannies are very bad at catching out the more crazy fetish stuff when they avoid illustrating cocks outright.

As well as this I know that there can be a prohibition-type scenario where attempting to ban all forms of pornography outright is a bad play because there will always be a market for this, especially as so much of the recent generations are addicted to it to the point where it's unrecoverable.

But I've seen the kind of mentally ill hordes that this age of porn addiction has greatly helped to create and I'm sure everyone wants to see them gone. But I'm not sure if I would like to see them gone in a way which results in us getting severely screwed over in the long run, there IS an upward limit to what cost I would take for wiping out the super gooner trooners.
 
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Like I'm sure has been said earlier in the thread.

They aren't exactly going after porn.

They're using that as cover. They've started, like SJWs do, with hitting what they feel many would support getting rid of. Games with incest, rape, violence and sexual violence against women and children.

But they the expand it.

You can expect to see Kingdom Come II hit.

They also mentioned a few historical games they want taken down.

Their list keeps getting longer and longer with each victory.

This is the group that got GTA-5 banned in Down Under.

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Is there a list somewhere I can read of shit they are targeting?
 
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Reactions: Mike Matei's Penis
The leader of this gaggle of old cunts is now faking death threats sent from comically fake domains.

This really is Gloobergate 2.0
Based on the appearance, it looks like one of those Google forms that you can put on your website to have it email you the responses. So it's probably "real" in the sense that some chud typed that.

It probably came from this page here, which also calls it a "survey" at the bottom: https://www.collectiveshout.org/request_a_speaker (archive)
 
The leader of this gaggle of old cunts is now faking death threats sent from comically fake domains.

This really is Gloobergate 2.0
Please, god, let there be a second HWNDU too, it would be really funny. Everything's lining up for it to happen. The new generation needs a flag to claim.
It's like this new gloobergate is a mixture of the pissed off Brianna Wu types meeting the real classic "video games are satanic" types.
 
Notebookcheck (Adam Corsetti): After payment processors prompt removal of Steam games, journalists investigating the censorship resign (archive)
Many critics believe that the payment processors have too much say over how Valve moderates Steam content. Other critics object to groups like Collective Shout lobbying these banks based on political agendas. The upheaval at Vice brings up issues that extend beyond the banning of games with adult themes. It also raises questions about the freedom of journalists to express their opinions on censorship.

PC Gamer (Ted Litchfield): 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 (archive)
The articles remain available on the Wayback Machine, and I have reached out for comment from Savage Ventures regarding their deletion. Ana Valens and two other Waypoint writers, Shaun Cichacki and Matt Vatankhah, have all resigned from the site. "I stand by all of my retracted articles, especially the Collective Shout ones," Valens said in a statement to PC Gamer.

Two writers have come out in support of Ana Valens.
 
The leader of this gaggle of old cunts is now faking death threats sent from comically fake domains.
Hysterical women responsible? Not surprised. I vaguely recall predicting this being the case before. In that case, I think it's a guarantee that the boundaries will be pushed even further past porn and into the suppression of all kinds of crap. I suppose if I ever had any way of pushing back against payment processors doing this crap I would inevitably pick that side. I just know for sure a woman like this isn't going to stop at just that, I've seen what kind of crap feminist activists would complain about in video gaming. Gamers rise up.
 
Please, god, let there be a second HWNDU too, it would be really funny. Everything's lining up for it to happen. The new generation needs a flag to claim.
It's like this new gloobergate is a mixture of the pissed off Brianna Wu types meeting the real classic "video games are satanic" types.
Look, if Zoe Quinn was born 30 years ago, she'd be one of those violent video games calls violence Democrats or those. They give the children type Republicans. She'd probably be saying video games caused me to be a Satanist or something.
 
Lunatics run the asylum
She wrote the linked article:

ABC Australia (Melinda Tankard Reist): “More girls in hell …”: The ethics of Maïmouna Doucouré’s film ‘Cuties’ (archive)
When I first noticed my social media feeds exploding over Netflix’s advertisement for the French film MignonnesCuties, in the English version — followed by #CancelNetflix trending on Twitter after the film’s 9 September release, I assumed it would be a 1-hour-and-36-minute pre-pubescent twerking frenzy. Or “Tweens Gone Wild Twerking for Freedom,” as Radical Girlsss put it.

The film was condemned as “sick and demonic”; the director was characterised as “another Hollywood pedo” (even though Cuties is not a Hollywood film); and Texas Senator Ted Cruz called for a judicial investigation.

Understandably, I assumed the worst. Then I watched it.

I was unexpectedly moved. More nuanced than I anticipated, the film was one more cultural artefact in a long line of “Exhibit A’s” demonstrating that girls are under siege. Beyond outrage, I just felt sad, overwhelmed by what girls are up against as they are rushed down a steel-jaw trapped path on their way to “womanhood.”

Cuties is essentially a warning about what happens when we throw girls to the Big Tech/Big Porn/Big Pop Culture wolves: abandoning them to porn-inspired prescriptions about how they should act and be in the world. It is a social critique of what follows when we dismantle the guardrails and allow a misogynistic, violent, exhibitionist, internet culture to ravage girls — a culture that trains them to wield their immature bodies as currency; a culture that encourages girls on the outskirts of sexual maturity to present themselves as sexually mature and knowing; a culture that urges them to weaponise the limited tools at their disposal.

The experiences of African immigrant girls transplanted into French society is the basis for the film made in 2017 and screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where Senegalese-French director Maïmouna Doucouré (now on the receiving end of death threats) won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award.

Starring 14-year-old Fathia Youssouf as Amy, Cuties explores the lives of young girls growing up in the middle of two cultures — one demonising female sexuality, the other exploiting it and calling it freedom — and the oppression inherent in both. Rolling Stone’s characterisation of the film as “closer at times to a nature documentary than a handwringing melodrama” is right.

The film juxtaposes the teachings of Amy’s strict Senegalese-Muslim community (“Do you know where the devil is? In those naked women”) with the praise of the girl gang whose validation she yearns for (“They loved you! See how many likes we have?”) Having newly moved into a Parisian banlieue housing estate, with its poverty, overcrowding, and deprivation, it is not difficult to understand how our young protagonist might be tempted by the apparent freedom of her peers. In a jarring physical, mental, spiritual thunderclap at film’s end, she discovers the emancipation on offer is a delusion.

Those engaging with the film’s multiple layers were labelled child abusers and paedophiles; those expressing reservations were, at the other extreme, “terrified of child sexuality.” Wherever one lands, it is important to consider Maïmouna Doucouré’s motivations.

In her film, she determined to capture the experiences of girls from immigrant families living in Paris after witnessing a group of adolescents twerking publicly. She felt they were being robbed of their youth. Doucouré explained that she “recreated the little girl who I was at that age. Growing up in two cultures is what gave me the strength and the values I have today.” Adding, “As a child, that question of how to become a woman was my obsession.” She told a panel of film makers in Toronto that “the idea for the film came to her after she attended a neighbourhood gathering in Paris where she saw a group of 11-year-olds performing a ‘very sexual, very sensual’ dance. She said she spent a year and a half doing research and meeting with hundreds of preteens to prepare for the film. ‘I needed to know how they felt about their own femininity in today's society and how they dealt with their self-image at a time when social media is so important …’.” She said that, “The more sexualized a woman appears on social media, the more girls will perceive her as successful … Children just imitate what they see to achieve the same result without understanding the meaning … And yeah, it's dangerous.”

In another interview, Doucouré spoke more specifically about social media’s power:

I saw that some very young girls were followed by 400,000 people on social media and I tried to understand why. There were no particular reasons, besides the fact that they had posted sexy or at least revealing pictures: that is what had brought them this “fame.” Today, the sexier and the more objectified a woman is, the more value she has in the eyes of social media. And when you’re 11, you don’t really understand all these mechanisms, but you tend to mimic, to do the same thing as others in order to get a similar result. I think it is urgent that we talk about it, that a debate be had on the subject.

How to become a woman … in Senegal and Europe​

In their country of origin, 31 per cent of Senegalese girls are married before their eighteenth birthday, and 9 per cent before they are 15. The prevalence of female genital mutilation (FGM) in women aged 15–49 is 22.7 per cent (as high as 77.8 per cent in the south). Some Senegalese women believe that FGM enhances marriage prospects. This often takes place during puberty, when many girls are considered ready to marry.

A 2015 report from the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) identifies the increase in the rate of sexual violence against women — including rape, the persistence of domestic violence, legal illiteracy, stigmatisation of victims and of women fighting for their rights, fear of reprisals, difficulties in accessing justice infrastructures, and lack of female police and women’s shelters — as among the problems facing women and girls in Senegal. From this victim-blaming and cultural-silencing of women, Senegalese immigrant women find that not only do harmful cultural ideas and practices follow them, but now they are also confronted by new ones. Imagine the confusion, the disorientation.

In this new world, girls hate their bodies. They suffer anxiety and depression, eating disorders and self-harm, taking their own barely-lived lives at increasing rates. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adolescent girls between the ages of 10 and 19. A common factor given for such a dire situation is the negative effects of social media — especially in relation to body image. Add to this the experiences of sexual harassment and abuse, domestic violence, and poverty faced by girls, which have significant effects on mental health.

Research conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) has also found an increase in post-traumatic stress disorder in this demographic. Refugees and migrants find themselves at particular risk.

It is between these worlds that Amy is learning how to become a woman. The film demonstrates Amy’s limited “choices”: conform to the rigid requirements of her family’s beliefs, accept that her father has taken a second wife, be silent in the face of the obvious torment of her mother, abide by the teachings of her religious elders to cover herself, and accept that she will go to hell if she doesn’t (“In hell, there will be many more women than men”); or conform to the culture around her, in which she longs to be accepted by her peers, to be liked by boys, to be physically attractive, and to use her budding body to secure a tiny bit of “power” — which none of the girls really have.

Amy watches pornified music videos under a black veil during a prayer meeting. That is her choice: wear a veil or be publicly sexual. From repression to hypersexualised. Two sides, same coin; the same lack of choice. Similarly, I have had stories of Muslim girls relayed to me of boys trying to pull off their veils at school: “We are objectified at home by our fathers and brothers. We come to school where we are objectified in other ways by the boys.”

Cuties lays bare the pressure to perform a copycat “sexuality” presented to them, especially online. Rather than exploring their own emerging sexuality, the girls (depicted as 11, the actual ages of the actresses are 13-14) are imitating or role-playing a normative, stereotyped pop-culture version of sexuality. When the girls practise their dance routine, they are merely simulating their wealthy and popular female hip hop idols.

These girls don’t even know what sex is. They don’t know how you get pregnant. One picks up a discarded condom and blows it up like a balloon — she really does not know what it is. Amy has not been prepared for her period. It seems there are no attentive parents to help them. Amy is the victim of a crisis — her father is more interested in his new wife, and her mother is paralysed by distress and the need to survive.

In years of this work, I have met hundreds of girls who have felt the same pressures, who have taken inappropriate pics and shared them, who have sexualised themselves because that’s what they believe they are supposed to do. It’s “empowering” and “liberating” to self-objectify — the younger girls see an older girl in an opposing troupe flash a breast. A couple of weeks ago, our WAP post, which dared to critique this false version of empowerment, attracted a 5,000-strong troll attack on our social media pages.

Scenes designed to make us uncomfortable​

The roughly five minutes of the dance routines (less, in actuality, given the use of compositing for these scenes — an editing technique to limit how much the girls actually danced) in which the girls are shown twerking and grinding, fingers in mouths, the camera zooming into the crotch region, hands in fake stimulation are troubling. They should be. We have a visceral response. These scenes are designed to make us very uncomfortable. We are outraged, as we should be. As my friend, the actor Anna McGahan, said to me, “[Amy is] using the same medium all the video clips use to make us compare the naïve children we’re journeying with to the suddenly adult/dressed up/sexualised ‘teens’ we watch every day without thinking. It’s supposed to make us uncomfortable.” Contrary to the massive stockpile of depersonalised representations of women, perhaps these scenes are all the more shocking for the opposite reason — because the girls have become personal to us before these jarring scenes.

Still, there is an ethical principle at stake: do we treat human beings as means or ends? And the complexity here is that in trying to make a serious ethical point about girls and sexuality, the girls may have been used unwittingly — but still inappropriately — to a noble end. The scene could have been filmed differently, from a greater distance, certainly not panning to their small arching backsides and crotches. While we appreciate the intention of the director in confronting us with the reality of life for an 11-year-old, these are real children. Yes, the young actors matter.

Poor filming choices and the ensuing backlash has, in a whirlwind of accusations, collapsed what was intended as a work of protest into classification as a “porn” production. But do these questionable filming choices make Cuties a film that “promotes paedophilia”? I am not persuaded.

There are other scenes which have been given less attention, which I experienced as similarly disconcerting. Amy and her friends sneak into a laser tag venue without paying. A male security guard threatens to call their parents. The manager approaches. They have just qualified for the dance contest final and are desperate to get there. To secure their freedom, Amy dances provocatively for the men. The manager’s leering gaze leads to the result of letting the girls go free.

At another point, after her older male cousin discovers she has stolen his mobile phone, Amy starts removing her clothes in an effort to try to keep it (with great relief, he expresses shock and turns away). The scene where she photographs her genitals is also an extreme attempt at acceptance and to appear as woman not child (her genitals are not shown). None of this is uncommon — which is the point. While no one is standing over her or bullying or blackmailing her into it with threats, the culture again has done the grooming. Without the guidance and protection of caring, wise, responsible adults, girls like this become easy pickings because of their emotional immaturity.

The ritual “exorcism” scene, in which Amy’s mother and aunt attempt to purify her by dousing her with water, is profoundly distressing. The drenched child, in singlet and underwear, trembles violently — I read this as a trauma response. Her convulsing body was, perhaps deliberately, reminiscent of the bodily contortions of her dance routine.

Social media hellscape​

My interpretation of Cuties is that the film asks us to consider: Where do the real “demons” manifest in the life of this child? Does the reference to there being “more women in hell than men” suggest that the world Amy and her friends are trying to survive is, in fact, a hellscape, whose online demons are intent on consuming them alive? From selfies, perfect-bodied (read: surgically altered) “Instagram influencers,” OnlyFans, Twitter, and Snapchat Premium where young women (including those who are underage) monetise their youth, selling explicit content of themselves for money and gifts; to predators trawling the Instagram pages of pre-pubescent girls, seeking to chat with them, describing their fantasies, capturing their images for dedicated paedophile forums, masturbating to their live chats.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more underage girls have remarked to me on the numbers of men offering to be their “sugar daddies.” In a world where COVID-19 has pulled the employment rug out from under them and made them even more vulnerable, such offers can begin to look attractive.

Girls share their black and blue bodies as part of TikTok’s #365days challenge, thereby imitating the sexual injury seen on a trending film on Netflix — what has been described as the “memeification of violent sex.” The #WAPChallenge on TikTok — to re-create the twerk moves in a music video featuring Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion — has attracted 2.6 billion views. Cancel Netflix if you like, but, in the interests of consistency, you might want to add these platforms to the delete list while you’re at it.

Cuties has been condemned as eroding boundaries. In fact, the boundaries were dismantled a long time ago. The normalisation of a paedophilic aesthetic in products and advertising has not received a fraction of the outrage that has been directed at this film.

So, for examples, “Toddlers & Tiaras” child beauty pageants arguably constitute a form child abuse, with three-year-olds dressed as Dolly Parton (complete with fake breasts) and Julia Robert’s “Pretty Woman” in grotesque pantomimes, strutting and preening before the judges.

As I was writing this article, I came across Dance Moms, screening right now on Nine. I was confronted with what I consider to be a prosti-tot horror show. These girls — far younger than the Cuties actors — dance provocatively and slap their backsides while wearing costumes almost identical to those in the film, though often with the addition of fishnet stockings. (Some have multiple Instagram “fan” pages populated by thousands of older men.) Coach Abby Lee barks at them: “You have to be hot and sexy — make it like you’re 17 years old … more butt, it’s all about the butt!” Not only have I not seen any mass movement mobilised against this abomination (#CancelDanceMoms or even #Boycottchannel9), but there is even a petition to get the show onto Netflix. All 212 episodes of it.

A moment of grace​

The end of Cuties is deeply affecting, arriving as a brief moment of grace. On stage, in the midst of her sexualised routine, Amy has an awakening. In tears, she rushes from the stage before the end of the performance and into the arms of her mother. Her aunt and purity enforcer calls her niece a “whore.” For the first time, her mother defends and protects her.

In an act of radical defiance, Amy’s mother tells her daughter she doesn’t have to attend her father’s wedding. Amy, now smiling, puts on jeans and a shirt, leaving her “Cuties” outfit and traditional gown on her bed, and walks into the sunshine where she jumps rope — a symbolic return to normal childhood. It is an evocative glimpse, in the film’s final seconds, of what freedom to be a child looks like.

Unfortunately, a few minutes of inappropriate, ethically problematic filming has buried the broader, urgent message at a time when we need it most. But maybe these parting moments could be taken as a redeeming element and firm us in our resolve to defend our girls and stop betraying them, given this is the world we have created for them.

Melinda Tankard Reist is author/editor of six books, including Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls and Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry. She is also Movement Director of Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation. The views expressed here are her own.
 
Drawing a line at pornographic content depicting incest etc. doesn't necessarily mean they'll go full race-swapped Snape and push some woke agenda. Their desire for shekels will always take priority.
Yeah, that's why disney stopped releasing woke movies after the first big flop.
 
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Not satisfied with going after such dangerous games as Detroit: Beyond Human, the collective of Australian Karen Whores have targeted on of the most horrific and henious games out there.


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This is after they got outed for shielded and hiring pedophiles.

They pressured Vice into taking down the expose on them. I guess Vice is hoping that this group of over-acting Down Under Nannies will eat them last.

So, if you thought they'd stop at incest games, you have another thing coming.

Ana Valens has left Vice over Vice censoring her articles on collective Shout.

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The fact that Valens got shit-canned not for libel, not for making up random shit, not for twisting the facts, but for actual reporting, is goddamn ironic champagne.

It is rather frightening though that organizations like Collective Shout and the other signatories have this much sway over the payment processing companies to be able spike the stories.

Then again, I have heard that it's a byproduct of FOSTA/SESTA's vague wording on what defines 'Trafficking' and 'prostitution', because this is scarily reminiscent of what happened to Onlyfans a few years back.
 
It is rather frightening though that organizations like Collective Shout and the other signatories have this much sway over the payment processing companies to be able spike the stories.
It's not a real NGO, it's the Australian Government itself and they have more than enough power to. This isn't completely new, it's just the new form of a 30+ year problem.


Then again, I have heard that it's a byproduct of FOSTA/SESTA's vague wording on what defines 'Trafficking' and 'prostitution', because this is scarily reminiscent of what happened to Onlyfans a few years back.
Actually it's based on the United Nations definitions of child prostitution where they recently extended it to include fictional characters. This is 100% deliberate to be easily trespassable with the slightest of implications.


Also amazing that this entire thing got the attention of Mainstream Outlets to actually speak out how insane it is. When Vice says you are insane then you need to stop. It needs to be fanned up as big as possible before something notable bites the dust over the most petty of reasons possible.
 
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