The campaign to contact Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, and Visa to express concerns about the crackdown on Itch.io’s NSFW content is working. After sharing some information about how you can participate, I’ll share a thread that explains the power of this concerted effort.

The following is from YellAt.Money. The site provides essential information on how to contact the payment processors politely and express your concerns. The site shares more information on emailing and sending letters regarding the issue.

Wherever you vocalize your frustrations and concerns, be polite and chill when discussing in customer service lines or email inquiries. Do not harass or threaten individuals and workers. Please.

If you're a Sex Worker, please avoid directly contacting the companies in question, as exposing details about your shop / services could result in them being deactivated by payment processors in question, especially PayPal and Stripe. Stay safe!

When contacting Mastercard, do not let them direct you to their Concierge service.

When contacting Visa, you may be asked to hang up and send an inquiry through an email instead. Continue calling back and escalating the situation (politely) to talk to a supervisor. You can still email, but there's a clear intent from companies to filter out the wave of complaints by having it be sent to an email instead.

A lot of these companies have their own branches / phone lines depending on different regions. If your region is not covered here, we highly recommend searching for contact information related to your region, which can often be done by searching on language-specific websites.

— SOURCE: Yellat.Money

I spoke to a couple of colleagues with call-center backgrounds, and they told me that this kind of action can be very powerful, but it must be sustained over a significant period of time. That’s because handling that extra volume of calls hits the company where they notice it — in the pocketbook. One person explained that some companies have been compelled to pay overtime and hire temporary employees to address situations like this. That extra expenditure — in time and money — gets the attention of key people in even the largest corporations.

That’s why your call matters — and why you are encouraged to call rather than send an email. A thread from Elliot Wilson explains why this needs to happen over an extended period:

So, WFM [Workforce Management] guy here, I crunch call center numbers all day and advise management on performance and staffing requirements. Here are some concrete goals to keep in mind with any sort of calling campaign: 🧵

- Forecast accuracy needs to be off for at least a week before I notice / bring it to management's attention. What is off? Up by at least 10%. I don't know what normal volume is at MC or Visa, but that's one goal to get attention.

- Increased handle times reeeealllly stand out. If every call is taking, on average, even 3 seconds longer than normal, that is typically worth one additional body in a seat. 30-60 seconds and suddenly we're talking of adding an unexpected new hire class, which costs soooo much money

- Service level needs to drop for at least a month. This is how most call centers decided if they had a good month or not. Most times this means answering 80% of all calls in under 30 seconds. More and longer calls makes that harder.

- Another monthly metric to keep in mind is first call resolution (FCR). A lot of places these days don't want customers calling back, and they measure this, typically against a goal of 90%+. Tanking this number will typically get an equal amount of attention as service level.

— SOURCE: Elliot Wilson on Bluesky