Should
credit card processors and crowdfunding sites be able to deny funds to
adult entertainers and sex workers? That’s the question at the heart of
an unfortunate situation where donated medical funds are being withheld
from a sick woman. Legal and moral issues often entangle to facilitate
discrimination against those who earn a living in adult work, or at
least complicate their lives in ways that induce hardship.
Here’s what’s happened, according to Alexander’s tweets and reporting by The Rumpus. Adult
entertainer Eden Alexander had an allergic reaction to a medication,
causing her to need serious medical care. In Alexander’s account, doctors wrote off her condition
as stemming from hard drug use, due to her occupation, and did not give
her proper treatment, which made her even sicker. Alexander then set
up Crowdfunding campaign for her medical bills on GiveForward (now
removed), which processes payments with WePay.
Unfortunately, one of the campaign’s supporters tweeted
offering nude pictures in exchange for donations to Alexander’s
campaign, and Alexander retweeted the offer.
That retweet was deemed to violate WePay’s terms of service,
which states “you will not accept payments or use the Service in
connection with the following activities, items or services: Adult or
adult-related services, including escort services, adult massage, or
other adult-entertainment services; Adult or adult-related content,
including performers or “cam girls”; and Obscene or pornographic items.”
The list of prohibited uses of WePay is long and many items are open to
broad interpretation, including the site’s own origin story.
WePay subsequently withheld some of the funds donated to
Alexander and eventually had her GiveForward page shut down. This isn’t
the first time its enforced its TOS against people in the sex industry
who were trying to use the service innocently. Bay Area sex worker Andre Shakti had funds raised on Fundly for a trip to the Feminist Porn Awards frozen by WePay for violating its terms.
Alexander spoke out against WePay, and supporters rallied with her to shame WePay for its actions. Alexander claimed she was unaware her retweet would violate the service’s terms.
WePay eventually responded with a blog post
explaining that it released donations made to Alexander from May 11th
to 14th. A WePay representative wrote “WePay is extremely empathetic to
what Eden Alexander is facing and her hardship is unfathomable. We are
truly sorry that the rules around payment processing are limiting and
force us to make tough decisions.” Alexander had a new crowd funding
campaign set up on Crowdtilt, which remains live.
We reached out to WePay CEO Bill Clerico, who tells me the
donations from after May 14th were refunded to the donors. As for why
its TOS bars adult services and why it had to enforce them, Clerico
wrote:
“WePay faces tremendous scrutiny from its partners &
card networks around the enforcement of policy, especially when it comes
to adult content. 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. We’re incredibly sorry that these policies added to the
difficulties that Eden is facing. We offered to help her setup a new
campaign that complied with our policies, but I believe that her friends
chose to work with another company instead. We continue to stand by to
help if Eden would like to work with us further, and we are reviewing
both our Terms of Service & account shutdown process to see how we
can avoid situations like this in the future.”
Clerico also tweeted:
I followed up asking whether the partner and card
processor stances come from legal or moral grounds. Clerico responded “I
don’t think I can speculate on why they’ve made that decision, but I do
know that it is a relatively common requirement in the industry. As to
why WePay prohibits it, it’s because we are contractually required to.”
WePay has so far absorbed the majority of the backlash
from this situation. It failed to go to bat against its partners on
behalf of Alexander, which perhaps it should have. But if it had, it
could have suffered shutdowns that would impact other users raising
money for worthy causes.
Blame might also be properly placed on WePay’s partners
who refuse to accommodate adult-related money transfers. Either they’ve
made a deplorable moral judgement against workers in the adult industry,
or they’re following along with society’s stigma against sex workers
that has wormed its way into our laws. PayPal has frozen accounts related to adult entertainers on several occasions and threaten to break integrations with sites that work with them.
Crowdtilt’s own Terms Of Service
prohibits “the sale of…pornographic items”, it’s important to note.
That means it too may have had to cancel Alexander’s campaign if she
retweeted offers of nude photos for contributions. When asked what
Crowdtilt would have done, CEO James Beshara said “I
can only comment on what we’re aware of, and that is simply that we felt
this was a human being who was suffering and in need of help, and we
wanted to do the right thing.”
It’s understandable why people would want to go after
WePay. The company surely could have handled the issue with more care,
like how Patreon communicated swiftly and empathetically
when PayPal forced it to remove the payment processor’s integration
from adult-related pages. And WePay seems to have learned little from a
previous time it froze funds of a sex worker.
This situation, like many in the new frontiers opened up
by the Internet — exposes many grey areas: Are retweets endorsements?
And do legal obligations trump moral ones? At the very least, it should
teach companies that enforcing terms of service shouldn’t be done robotically. It might not always be scalable, but we must remain humane
in how we treat each other, even online.
Source:http://techcrunch.com
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