this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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This is kind of an intentional cognitive dissonance for Twitch due to its having a conflict of interests.
On the one hand, it wants to tell viewers and advertisers that it cracks down on adult only content.
But on the other hand, the more adult content they let through, the more money they make.
It would be very easy to either make an age restricted section where adult stuff would be allowed, or to completely banish streamers who are the modern equivalent of burlesque. But one is bad PR and the other is bad for revenue.
It's not that simple. Porn is a huge risk for a company, especially if it's user-generated content. You have to police access against underage kids who want to watch that content, and also have an enormous team devoted to immediately take down CSAM.
Lots of payment processors and advertisers do not want to associate themselves with porn because there are too many PR risks. Ask Pornhub how difficult it is to be a porn company on the internet, they've had lots of thorny problems. Or look at Reddit and how it's handling porn content before the IPO: they can't outright ban it or they'll lose users (e.g. Tumblr, another great example of what I'm talking about), so they are trying to hide it as much as possible.
Basically trying to monetize porn is not worth the headache. Last but not least, because there is so much free porn around. Risking so much to gain a few users that could go somewhere else in a whim is REALLY not worth it
I've seen the payment processor argument a lot about this regarding twitch specifically, but I really don't think it holds any weight in this one specific case. This is Amazon we are talking about. They are one of the 3 entities in the whole goddamn world who could dictate terms to Visa, not the other way around.
Some of them may not have a choice, though, if their internal rules say that they can't be associated with porn. Also it's not only payment processors, but also advertisers and, most importantly, investors. Imagine if all the stock holders, overnight, effectively found themselves investing in porn. Lots of them would be (or feel) obligated to sell their stock. Remember Amazon is an American company, and porn is not taken lightly in the US
Amazon suddenly and officially operating an "adult entertainment" site would change quite a lot for them. How many funds and asset managers would have to drop Amazon stock because their asset allocation states that they can't invest in the production of pornography.
Won't someone think of BYU's endowment!!
It's not like they don't have any age restrictions, the streamers that do that stuff have to mark their streams 18+ and add 'sexual themes' tags or they get banned. If chatters even imply their under 18 they must be banned or the streamer gets banned. Im pretty sure you cant see 18+ streams unless you tell the website you're 18, which would mean it's about as much of a gate that pornhub makes you jump through. They make gambling streams have the same rules but their tag says may contain gambling.