![]() Without further details of what exactly happened at FetLife, it’s hard to tell if he’s right. In his post, Kopanas says there was nothing he could do to fight back. Why did FetLife lose its credit card services but keep its merchant accounts? What negotiations did Kopanas have with his bank, and what part did the bank play in crafting the new content rules? How easily did Kopanas give up the fight? Is there anything that could have been done? No other way of moving money through the internet can yet compete with credit cards bank transfers are complicated and expensive across national boundaries, and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are yet unrealistic for large-scale commerce.īut there are a lot of unanswered questions about the FetLife story. ![]() Whatever users may think, if financial companies call the shots on what kind of content can be bought with their services, sites like FetLife may have little choice but to either comply or fold. And if at the end of the day, certain pictures, posts, writings, names, whatever have to be removed, sanitized, etc to keep FetLife on the map, we can do it.” “Do what you have do to keep FetLife running,” another user countered. “It is obvious to me that Fetlife is no longer the welcoming and accepting place it once was,” one longtime user wrote, bemoaning what he sees as an inevitable slide into the vanilla mainstream. Others, such as hypnotism fetishists who saw their groups and content wiped out because they fall on the hazy line of “non-consent,” posted angry comments demanding an explanation. Some users say they support his attempt to save the community. The FetLife community has reacted with a combination of rage and sympathy to Kopanas’ announcement. Some users have also been critical of Kopanas’ failure to kick abusers or pedophilia groups off the site fast enough. The site was inundated with new users during the Fifty Shades of Grey frenzy of the early 2010s causing an identity crisis and temporary restrictions on new signups, and was rocked last year by rape allegations against an Australian man who police say used FetLife to find victims. FetLife’s Vancouver-based parent company Bitlove Inc has no listed office address, and Kopanas has not responded to repeated requests for an interview.ĭespite the content crackdown, FetLife seems to have lost the ability to process credit cards, though the site is still accepting bank transfer payments.įetLife has had a rocky history since it launched in 2008. Kopanas has stayed conspicuously silent since his announcement. ![]() The upshot is that credit card companies may have unprecedented power to pick and choose what content can be paid for on the web. Financial companies therefore very likely aren’t censoring FetLife because they have to they’re doing it because they want to, or because they don’t want to be associated with its content. It doesn’t even line up particularly well with the UK’s new and puritanical web censorship rules. Much of the material that Kopanas was forced to delete isn’t illegal, at least in Canada and the United States. The company’s bank, he said, threatened to shut down FetLife’s merchant account at the request of credit card companies that objected to the site for “illegal or immoral” reasons. In an apologetic post to the FetLife community, founder John Kopanas - better known on the site by his username JohnBaku - said the restrictions were the only way out of an existential threat. Last month, the millions-strong kink social network announced it was tightening community guidelines to ban depictions or discussion of edgier kinks, including blood, non-consent, alcohol, cutting, and the vaguely defined “obscenity.” At the same time, the network deleted thousands of photographs, groups and fetish categories without warning. Without the freedom to exchange money, artists flounder, companies fail and communities grind to a halt. Who gets to decide what’s bought and sold on the internet? In the digital age, the answer to that question is critically important for sexual minorities.
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