Censorship on the internet is a hot button issue, and if you’ve been online in the past two weeks you’d know just how dire things are on the world wide web. Things are bad enough with the entirety of the United Kingdom essentially being hogtied behind a censorship wall, but before THAT story broke we were hearing stories of Mastercard and Visa clamping down on distribution services like Steam.

Valve is tightening its guidelines around ‘adult only’ content to satisfy rules set by Steam’s payment processing partners, with dozens of sexually explicit games removed from the platform throughout the week. https://t.co/dPnrSBF9jg pic.twitter.com/HJuwuDYuD8

— IGN (@IGN) July 18, 2025

As mentioned above, sexually explicit games were the games targeted, and it’s not just Steam that’s undergone this change, indie game platform itch.io has also moved forward with a similar policy towards their distribution.

https://t.co/jUal5f8zvr

— itch.io (@itchio) July 24, 2025

The story behind these distributors having sudden policy changes is very long and very annoying, but the main takeaway is that Mastercard and Visa hold power over their heads and have decided that it’s in their best interest to be a bit more strict when it comes to what distributors can sell. But, of course, this is a slippery slope. The entirety of the online userbase of both Steam and itch are against this; first it’ll be the porn games, but who’s to say what’s porn and what isn’t? Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3, Game of the Year and celebrated across the world, has graphic depictions of sex and even bestiality in it, will that get banned? And even beyond sex, when do we reach the classic 1990’s talking point of violence and gore being too unacceptable to be consumed?

It’s just another example of censorship overreach, luckily people have been harassing Mastercard over this for the past week and it appears to be having some effect.

Called MasterCard. Confirmed the Steam / itchio issue has been escalated to a higher department and they’ve been getting calls about this for a week (!)

— Ana V (@acvalensVT) July 27, 2025

But it’s worrying that, seemingly all at once, all these censorship issues have reared their ugly heads. This story of course pertains to media and games, but as mentioned before general social media and internet browsing has been kneecapped in the United Kingdom, and another bill has risen to try and have a similar motion take effect in the United States (that will hopefully fail again).

The Kids Online Safety Act is the US equivalent of the EU’s Digital Services Act and UK’s Online Safety Act. If passed, it will lead to digital identity, total deanonymization of the internet, and massive censorship. It was reintroduced to Congress May 2025. pic.twitter.com/HHGOg9fTUl

— th_l_t_d_ 🇺🇸 (@thltd_) July 27, 2025

It’s a scary time online right now with a very uncertain future, and we can only hope that the voice and the power of the people is enough to overcome the overreach of corporations and governments.