Collective Shout: The "Charity" That Turned Censorship Into a Business Model

A Deep Dive into this QUOTE, UNQUOTE "Charity"

If you've been following the recent purge of adult games from Steam and Itch io, you - like many others lately - have heard about Collective Shout. They brand themselves as a grassroots charity “challenging objectification” ...yet their campaigns helped trigger payment-processor pressure that nuked thousands of pages of legal content and blindsided devs who never made anything illegal.

From where I’m sitting, the whole situation looks sketchy AF...

This all began when an anonymous tipster sent me an email from Collective Shout redirecting to their website begging people for money. The Grift was on, and I had to dig further. Since then, even more people have come forward behind the scenes to me and we have worked together, and them not wanting any acknowledgment or credit - they only want people to know just how evil this group of twisted feminists really are... To get he TRUTH out there.

And YIKES...

Let’s lay out what we can prove, and what's sus af about this "group".

Collective Shout: A registered Australian charity that must report yearly

Collective Shout Limited is an Australian charity registered with the ACNC. The Australian Business Register shows their ABN (30 162 159 097) and confirms they have been ACNC-registered since 31 Jan 2013. It also shows they've currently held a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) Item 1 endorsement, which means that the donations made to them can be tax-deductible.

Under Australian law, ACNC-registered charities MUST give an Annual Information Statement every year. If they are “medium” or “large” entity, they also have to lodge an annual financial report that is reviewed or audited and prepared under Australian Accounting Standards, which is then published on the public Charity Register. That isn't optional ...if you want to keep your registration.

Collective Shout’s ACNC profile shows them as a medium charity on at least some filings, (between AU $500,000 and AU $2,999,999 under the current thresholds in place over there). Medium charities must file a reviewed or audited financial report with their Annual Information Statement - Also known as an "AIS".

The ACNC “Documents” tab for Collective Shout lists multiple Annual Information Statements and Financial Reports, confirming they have been sending in the required materials to remain a legitimate "charity" under Australian law. If something’s missing or late, the ACNC flags it, but as of now at least - the page currently states the charity is registered and reporting is up to date. BUT...

The money question, and why their setup raises eyebrows

Here’s where potential conflicts creep in. Collective Shout’s movement director and co-founder, Melinda Tankard Reist, runs a separate for-profit operation offering paid speaking engagements through MTR Pty Ltd.

Complete with a bookings page and downloadable brochure advertising her school and community talks.

That is a private commercial service, promoted hand-in-hand by the same public figure who front-runs the charity’s campaigns.

Curious...

To be clear, on its own, that isn’t illegal.

But if a charity pays a director, executive, or a related company for services, that is a related-party transaction and, for medium and large charities, it must be disclosed in the ACNC reporting from the 2023 AIS period onward. On top of that, the ACNC also requires disclosure of key management personnel "remuneration" (remuneration basically means payment or compensation for work or services.) for large charities, and financial statements must give a “true and fair view” under the standards. So... In plain English, if the charity is routing money to MTR Pty Ltd. for speaking or consulting, that belongs in the notes. If there’s nothing to disclose, the notes should still make that clear either way.

In their documents, they’ve stated explicitly: The AIS confirms there were no reportable related-party transactions in the reporting period. They also report that they do not have documented policies in place regarding related-party transactions.

Red Flags... Raised!

The absence of a transaction is clearly declared when I went through the documents, which, to be fair, complies with ACNC requirements, so it’s not legally non-compliant on that point... BUT... the lack of any formal policy or process around related-party dealings is worrying, especially given that the head of the charity, Melinda Tankard Reist, also runs a separate for-profit entity (MTR Pty Ltd) offering paid speaking services.

For transparency and governance best practice, it’s typically standard for charities to have a documented policy governing related-party transactions, even if none occurred. Having none in place here feels like they hadn't even prepared for any overlap situation occurring ever... Which is... strange.

So the compliance lens here is simple: the ACNC filings should show whether any fees were paid to Reist or her companies, and on what terms. If the filings aggregate everything into vague line items without proper related-party disclosure, that is a big red flag under current ACNC rules. The transparency standard exists precisely to stop charities becoming personal revenue machines behind the scenes. Something "Collective Shout" ironically strikes me as the more I look into them.

I did some digging into acnc.gov.au requirements for those details... Feel free to dive in yourself for the full breakdown. I'll save you the boredom and move on tho lol...

“We only targeted rape and incest” - the campaign that blew up everything else

Collective Shout publicly says its 2025 push was about “rape” and “incest” themed games. They also say they tried Valve for months, then went straight to the money: Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and others.

After that campaign, Steam pulled a swath of adult titles and Itch.io de-indexed all NSFW content from search and browsing, citing payment-processor pressure. Mainstream outlets and Aussie public media all covered Collective Shout claiming credit for the pressure campaign and its fallout. Of course, whenever they get their feet put to the fire, they cry harassment as a get out of jail free excuse. That doesn't work. Not anymore.

Myself, developers and journalists everywhere called it what it is: financial censorship that hit legal content far beyond the stated “rape and incest” edge cases, with non-violent artsy titles caught in the crossfire and creators losing income overnight. Whether you like porn games or not shouldn't even enter this equation, flipping a payments switch to de-platform huge categories is the definition of coercive power... and an EXTREMELY concerning slippery slope.

That’s the grift angle for me: frame all this as “protecting women,” wave the “rape and incest” banner for moral cover, then let payment processors bulldoze entire marketplaces while your charity basks in victories, takes tax-deductible donations, and your movement director sells school talks about the harms of culture. It is a slick business model, and the costs are pushed onto artists, studios, and consumers who did nothing illegal. This needs to stop. Yesterday.

Why the ACNC filings matter right now

Because Collective Shout is a medium charity, their audited or reviewed reports should answer basic accountability questions:

• Who gets paid, how much, and for what services.

• Whether there are any related-party transactions involving directors, staff, or their companies.

• How much revenue comes from donations and grants versus fee-for-service or “program income.”

Those disclosures are not supposed to be “gotchas.” They're exactly what Australian charity law requires to keep public-benefit entities honest. If a group is using its charitable halo to run culture-war campaigns that prompt private payment companies to throttle lawful speech, the least they can do is be bulletproof on transparency... But of course, they aren't.

Bottom Dollar

Collective Shout is absolutely a real charity on the ACNC register and yes, by law it must file annual returns and, at its size, reviewed or audited financials that are published for the public to read.

Including how much they make annually...

That's the avenue to test whether their "anti-porn" activism coexists with clean governance, or whether the operation looks like a moral panic with a, tbh, pretty legit revenue stream. Garnering nearly half a million dollars in funding in a year is nothing to scoff at. Makes me wonder where that money is coming from. The public record already shows the charity status, DGR endorsement, and medium size... The bookings business for the figurehead is public too. Expenses are shown in the following image. The question here is whether any movement money flows to that business, and if so, whether it is properly disclosed.

Meanwhile, the real-world impact of their campaigns is indisputable: payment processors tightened the screws, storefronts over-corrected, and huge amounts of legal content disappeared or became harder to find. That isn't “protecting women” - it's financial choke-point censorship.

...And their claws are digging in deeper as each moment passes. Always follow the dollar. This was never about protecting "the girls". It has been about making as much money as possible, at the expense of creative expressions, freedoms and consumer rights. Grifters hate it when people start noticing. ~Smash