Freedom of Speech Threatened by Financial Censorship
The Silent Killer to Online Freedom of Expression
What is Financial Censorship?
The term "financial censorship" may be unfamiliar to some, but in recent years it has gained attention as a problem for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and Internet freedom in general. Financial censorship refers to the practice by financial institutions, such as banks, payment processors, and credit card companies, of preventing customers from making deposits or withdrawals, or closing their accounts, based on the actions of their customers, actions that are often unrelated to the financial institution itself.
The reason why financial censorship is "censorship" is that it has a very significant impact on expressive activity on the Internet. Many online activists/artists rely on donations and online sales for their income, and use online payments for deposits and withdrawals. If they were restricted in this way by financial institutions, their activities would quickly come to a halt.
The Financial Censorship that Stopped WikiLeaks from Breathing
I first witnessed the power of financial censorship 14 years ago during the WikiLeaks affair. WikiLeaks, which exposed a series of US secrets, was not beaten even by the US government, a superpower. However, when payment processors like PayPal and credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard stopped accepting payments (although there must have been, of course, unofficial pressure from the US), the organization was forced to simply raise the white flag, since WikiLeaks' reliance on online donations and credit cards for expenses like web hosting fees meant that it quickly came to a standstill in terms of both deposits and withdrawals.
The Limitations of the State, the Power of Corporations
Censorship usually refers to the control of speech by a state or other public authority. Unlike in a tyrannical authoritarian state like China, it is difficult to suppress speech directly in a democracy like the United States or Japan. Furthermore, the Internet has no national borders, which makes it difficult for any single nation to control it, even though there is an international framework in place to some extent. Private companies, on the other hand, are not subject to the same democratic and judicial control by citizens as public institutions (well, at least theoretically...). They can act freely because they only have to consider their business interests. In recent years, large corporations, especially digital platform companies, have become more powerful than the state. In short, the retreat of the state has made effective censorship easier to enact.
Online Sexual Expressions and Financial Censorship
It is clear that financial censorship is a major problem in the area of online pornography sites and other sex-related activities. Globally, sites such as Pornhub and OnlyFans have been targeted. In Japan, publishers which handle adult content, such as DMM(Fanza), pixiv, and DLsite, have been forced to revise their terms of service, suspend payments, and terminate agreements with credit card companies.
Mastercard has created a blacklist called MATCH, which is shared with other credit card companies such as Visa. Originally, this was designed to remove high-risk merchants where card fraud occurs. However, the criteria for inclusion on the list are rather vague. This allows them to actively exclude merchants that engage in transactions that are deemed offensive or inappropriate to public order and morals under the guise of "damaging the brand" or other similar reasons. Recently, prohibited words (such as "bestiality") related to product names and categories are sometimes presented directly by credit card companies, which is almost blatant word-hunting and expression control.
Some may object to pornography and sexual exploitation, but it is wrong to entrust such moral judgment and censorship to financial institutions, since they are merely one of those private companies. Japan has more lax regulations on anime and manga than other countries, so there is a possibility of being targeted by foreign actors. There have been cases of conservative and religious anti-pornography groups exerting pressure on credit card companies.
Future Prospects
The main problem is that the financial industry is dominated by a few big companies, like Visa and Mastercard. However, It's hard to change this. Another way to solve this would be to make sure that customers are treated fairly, no matter what their political beliefs are. But this might not work because it might upset law enforcement.
For this reason, I think policy solutions are unlikely to work, so we should look at technology instead. Cryptocurrencies were originally created to give users more control over their payments, in a decentralized way. But now, transactions of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are mainly at exchanges, so making them easier to regulate. We need to develop and promote more privacy-savvy cryptocurrencies like Monero or SkebCoin, or decentralized exchange systems like Bisq, and open payment systems like GNU Taler. These have been called "solutions without problems" because there isn't much demand for them. But maybe it's time for them to be reconsidered.