[Crossposted to Red Garter Club 3.2 as well]
Since
I broke the news
(also
here) of the unfolding controversy involving cam model/porn director/sex
worker Eden Alexander and the actions of payment provider WePay and
crowdfundraising site GiveForward.com, events have been breaking early
and often. So, here's an update on what has happened and what may happen
next.
First, some wonderful news: Eden
Alexander did tweet on Saturday that she is out of surgery and now
recovering in her hospital bed; she is getting the treatment and the
rest that she needs, and she is, from every indication, in good spirits
(albeit ovewhelmed and exhausted from all the physical and emotional
strain of the past few days).
Secondly,
some more wonderful and pretty heartening news: The porn/sex work
disapora has, to say the least, responded to Eden's plight the way the
Allies responded in Normandy in World War II. Since the
alternate fundraising site was set up over at Cloudtilt.com, it has raised more
than $8,500 in all of nearly 48 hours...and is currently about to hit
$9K. Not too shabby, if I may say so. Those wanting to give their
contribution can still access Eden's page
here if they choose.
Amazingly
enough, one of the more significant contributions came from the head of
GiveForward, the crowdraising site which operated Alexander's original
fundraiser. Attached to it was a message from GiveForward representative
Michael Powell, apologizing to Eden for their role in the disaster and
contributing the equivalent of their and WePay's donation fees as an
atonement. (Screenshot of Powell's donation statement courtesy of
Chris Lowrance's Twitter page)
Unfortunately,
no such atonement has as of yet come from the actual instigators of the
whole controversy, the payment processor WePay. As of right now, they
are still sticking to their story that they were simply forced by their
regulations and rules to axe Eden's account because she allegedly
violated their Terms of Service involving using their account for
"pornographic services". They did clarify, though, that they have
released all of the funds collected from the fundraiser; funds raised
before May 14th were processed and transferred to Eden's account; while
funds raised after that were returned to their respective donors.
A
bit more clarity has now been opened on WePay's processes since this
first broke. Vice.com's Motherboard blog on yesterday posted
their perspective on the whole controversy, which opened up some new revelations about the controversy.
We
now know that WePay's backdoor processor for all its financial dealings
is a company called Vantiv, which was described as one of the largest
processers of bank card payments in the United States; as well as the
owner of nearly 12,000 ATM's (Automated Teller Machines) nationwide. No
one as of yet has asked their spokespersons whether those who take out
money at those ATM's are screened for their outside activities the same
way that Eden Alexander was screened for hers, or whether they even care
that the money pulled from ATM's or other transactions could be used
for porn or other illicit or even illegal purposes.
And that's kind of a relevant question, because, according to the Vice.com article....
On Twitter,
WePay's cofounder Bill Clerico explained a bit more. Many of things
banned in the service's terms (like porn anything) are required by
processors because "they are prone to fraud and abuse." WePay is
required by its partners (financial partners, presumably) to actively
monitor (surveill) its users for policy violations, which includes
combing through Twitter accounts, a task done by actual humans. "We must
enforce these policies or we face hefty fines or the risk of shutdown
for the many hundreds of thousands of merchants on our service," said
Rassa.
This begs some huge questions: How can private
firms and banks and other financial institutions retain the power to
sanction and fine or even shut down payment processors for the mere
"crime" of association with certain types of transactions...even if such
transactions are perfectly legal and above board? Does the mere
suspicion
of abuse or fraud warrant dropping the hammer, the anvil, the Rock of
Gibraltar, and a million gallons of genuine Niagara Falls on a woman
raising funds for her medical bills?? And, more importantly, are these
rules being enforced equally, or are they selectively enforced based on
mere personal bias or selective prejudice against.....oh, I don't
know....sex workers and porn performers?
This
also brings us back to that "Operation ChokePoint" thing that the US
Department of Justice is now doing to target banks and financial
institutions to combat all sorts of shady activities. The initial
educational material that the DoJ pushed out to Big Finance did label
"pornography" as one of the subset activities warranting suspicion and
further investigation, alongside other, more traditional activities such
as subprime lending, online payday loansharking, telemarketing, and
other sources of possible chargeback/usury abuse. There is still plenty
of furious debate whether the real responsibility lies with the
government for "overzealous" regulation (the theory of the Libertarian
Right and the traditional conservatives who oppose all regulation on
general principle); or Big Finance for misinterpreting and twisting the
regulations around for their own purpose, and using sex workers and porn
folk as human shields and stepping stones to get back at the regulators
(the more liberal/progressive view).
And
then, you wonder whether even WePay understand their own Terms of
Service. The alleged acts that triggered Eden Alexander's account to get
pulled were two retweets that she did of a couple of porn sites which
attempted to give some...ummm, incentives to donate to her
fund....namely, some free pics and reduced prices on some porn videos
that Eden had starred in. Forget the basic fact that retweets are not
necessarily endorsements of what is tweeted, and that nowhere in
Alexander's initial funding pitch or any of her own tweets does she
offer anything in quid pro quo for donating to her fund. And, never mind
the basic fact that the whole point of the fundraiser was to
pay her medical bills and help her through a potential life threatening situation.
You could make the case that she really did not violate their ToS at
all..and yet WePay (perhaps under pressure from Vantiv or maybe OCP)
simply decided they had to pull the trigger and nuke Eden's account for
"consistency's sake".
The fact that WePay is induced (by their
contracts with their financial partners, they say) to essentially spy on
their paying customers' personal social media accounts in order to
detect even the smallest excuse for dismissal...errrrrrrr, the slightest
indication of "fraud and abuse", does not induce much comfort for those
who care about privacy or free expression, either.
More likely,
it looks like WePay/Vantiv is engaging in the same old tired bullshit
act of slut shaming, sex shaming, and porn shaming that other financial
institutions like PayPal, Amazon, JPMorganChase, and a few others have
mastered. Considering that a major antiporn summit just concluded this
weekend, alongside of a just as major confab of "movement conservatives"
bent on imposing similar moral values on the rest of America. Between
that and the ongoing "sex trafficking" panic that is scaring plenty of
liberals into compliance with antisex legislation, that's more than
enough to keep Big Finance and the politicians they buy to keep holding
the line against "those dirty sluts and whores" using "their money" to
"corrupt" fair patriotic American society.
It
may be that Eden Alexander is simply a small victim in this major war
of financial wits. Thankfully, due to the generosity of her fans and
those who actually think that sex workers are as human as everyone else,
she will survive and recover.
WePay, for
its part, has backslid a bit since getting absolutely singed by the
social media firestorm. They did offer to provide Eden a new fundraiser
page, but by then her followers had already moved over to Cloudtilt.
They also promised a review of their ToS and procedures for shutting
down accounts, though they didn't say whether or not they would change
their procedures for reviewing accounts or even their surveillance of
customer's social media accounts.
It should
also be noted that while Cloudtilt's ToS does not mention porn at all;
their own payment processing company, Balanced.com, does have a Sellers
Agreement with their clients that does ban "sexually-oriented or
pornographic products or services". (Raising the question of whether a
company like, say, Lovability Condoms could use their services.)
The
main issue in all this remains that sex workers who practice a legal
profession (and in California and New Hampshire, porn is fully protected
as constitutional free speech) should not face any Scarlet Letters when
they attempt to raise funds for whatever reason they choose for legal
purposes....and especially NOT for the purpose of paying their medical
bills. Why they should have to resort to crowdfunding for essential
healthcare in one of the richest countries in the world is an issue in
and of itself....but that's another issue to tackle.
It all comes back to the basic ideas:
Sex workers and porn performers/cam girls
are human beings; "sluts" are people, too; and if you exchange money
for sex in any way, then you might be as much a "whore" as an actual sex
worker....they just only are open and out and honest about it.
