Exiern

So you may have noticed that the donation button have been taken down and you can only sign up for a membership with CCbill again.   This is because Paypay has permanently frozen my account on the basis that Exeirn is “obscene” .   Specifically I have this reason given form Mike (no last name just Mike) of Paypals Brand Risk Management:

“Your website, while a portion of it is not in  violation, there are places where nudity is present and the member’s area of your website is marketed as containing more nudity.  Nudity in any form or degree is considered obscene and our Acceptable Use Policy prohibits these products. Nudity in any form or degree is considered obscene and our Acceptable Use Policy prohibits these products.”

Now this reason gives me more questions that answers since is seems to fly in the face of paypal’s standard operating procedure and the common sense definition of obscene.  If paypal was a government I would say it violated my free speech rights but it’s a company and not required to follow the first amendment.  I can’t help but suspect that there is something else in Exiern that they have a problem with and are using this excessively broad definition of obscene as a cover.   Paypal doesn’t apply the definition of obscene uniformly across all their clients.  When you see something like this it is often a method a company uses to engage in discriminatory practices without codifying the discrimination, since codifying the discrimination would open them up to lawsuit.

Looking around I suspect the TG is the reason paypal came down so hard.  They do seem to be excessively stringent on anything that is considered “alternative lifestyle”.  In Paypals world it seems nudity is ok, LGBT as an academic subject is ok, but LGBT and nudity that is obscene.  But I can prove nothing and once you’re locked out of paypal there is no appeals process or way to get reinstated.  So the upshot is we can no longer use paypal on this site.

This is going to hurt profits and further marginalized the comic.  Not much I can do about that.  I must say whoever though up of using paypal as a weapon against exiern it was a brilliant strategy.   Except you know the real websites that suffer because of this will be Blade Bunny and Knit Princess.  And also I was in the process of moving away from the nudity towards more straight story and now I am feeling the pressure to put the nudity back to make up the loss in profits.  So it was brilliant except it produced the exact opposite result they were looking for.