If you were wondering why new MasterCard regulations feel purposely difficult, and so similar to the recently defeated 2257 regulations, look no further than @NCOSE President Patrick Trueman. 1/
https://twitter.com/sexworkceo/status/1403061499459948546
Patrick Trueman, the current President of @NCOSE, was previously the Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section at the Department of Justice in the late 80s. Shortly after the passage of 2257, his department began one of the largest porn crackdowns in US history. 2/
During Operation PostPorn, the FBI prosecuted about half of the largest adult distributors, and worked with LAPD to raid even more. He brags that if it weren't for the Clinton election, DOJ “would have succeeded in completely eliminating the adult industry.” 3/
After he left the DOJ, he served as Executive Director of Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group. He worked at @AmericanFamAssc and the Family Research Council, both of which are listed as anti-LGBTQ hate groups. 4/
Fun Fact: Trueman does not believe that nudity is covered by the First Amendment.
"Unless it’s just waist-up nudity of a woman’s breasts, it probably can be found obscene somewhere in the country,” Trueman told @TheDailyCaller in 2012. (No one but Trueman believes this.) 5/
"Unless it’s just waist-up nudity of a woman’s breasts, it probably can be found obscene somewhere in the country,” Trueman told @TheDailyCaller in 2012. (No one but Trueman believes this.) 5/
In 2020, @NCOSE (formerly Morality in Media) and Exodus Cry launched the #traffickinghub campaign against Pornhub. They'd been pressuring credit cards to cut ties with porn for years — a backdoor for censorship. But nothing really stuck until they said the word "trafficking" 6/
Over a series of months, Exodus Cry and NCOSE worked with @NickKristof to push a moral panic about porn sites and trafficking in his opinion column on @NYTimes. @MasterCard and @Visa immediately suspended payments. 7/
In April, shortly after the government stopped defending 2257 regulations previously used by the FBI to raid businesses, @MasterCard released new, uncompilable regulations for adult creators — regulations which bore a suspicious resemblance to 2257. 8/
Anti-trafficking ministries like @NCOSE have lauded the regulations. Because compliance is so difficult, and the stakes for sites like @onlyfans so high, that people get suspended for even minor recordkeeping issues. 9/endsexualexploitation.org/articles/state…
Barred by the First Amendment, they can't prosecute adult businesses for obscenity. At least not successfully. But they can make recordkeeping so difficult that independent creators get pushed out — creator success is the biggest threat to their message. melrosemichaels.com/post/the-gospe…
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