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Money doesn’t just talk anymore. Increasingly, it decides who gets heard at all.
Banks are combing through adult websites searching for flagged words, questionable scenes, and content they think might create legal exposure. Payment processors are making judgment calls about alleged misinformation tied to wars and politics. In some cases, even a donation to a cannabis advocacy organization can trigger scrutiny. Quietly, steadily, financial institutions have become gatekeepers in places most people probably never imagined.
Rainey Reitman saw an early version of this more than a decade ago while helping support imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The fundraising campaign she worked on operated through an organization called Courage to Resist. Then, in 2011, its PayPal account was suddenly frozen. Reitman and the group’s leadership struggled to get a straight answer beyond vague references to the PATRIOT Act. Repeated attempts to resolve the issue with PayPal representatives went nowhere. Public attention, however, changed things fast.
“When PayPal reversed their decision so quickly in response to the publicity surrounding our press release, it was clear to me….We really had done nothing wrong,” Reitman writes in Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech. “If there had been any legal requirement for PayPal to suspend our account, they wouldn’t have changed their mind just because people were tweeting at them.”
That experience pushed Reitman deeper into what she now describes as “financial censorship.” In her book, the term refers to banks, credit card companies, and payment processors restricting or shutting down accounts belonging to “controversial or marginalized speakers who haven’t violated any laws,” effectively turning financial systems into “a tool to pressure dissenting and marginalized voices” into silence.
What Is Financial Censorship?
“It is a form of privatized censorship where banks and payment intermediaries act as censors in ways the government couldn’t do directly without violating the First Amendment,” writes Reitman, a longtime civil liberties advocate and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
And no, Reitman isn’t especially interested in debates over whether “censorship” technically applies only to governments. “I think that’s a pedantic and unhelpful distinction,” she writes.
Transaction Denied traces how financial censorship — sometimes called “financial exclusion” or “debanking” — has affected people and organizations over the last 15 years. Protesters, journalists, gun-rights activists, adult creators, Muslim business owners, cannabis advocates, erotica writers, religious liberty groups, and even naked yoga instructors all appear in its pages. Strange mix, honestly. But that’s partly the point.
Legally speaking, banks and payment processors generally have broad discretion over who they do business with, provided they are not discriminating against protected groups based on characteristics such as race, religion, or sex. A financial institution can usually close an account for almost any other reason, whether it’s reputational concerns, moral objections, or simple risk avoidance.
Reitman acknowledges that reality while also arguing the system may need reform. “People today cannot survive on wads of cash stuffed under a mattress; they need access to payment and banking services to exist in society,” she writes. Among her proposals are laws preventing financial institutions from denying services based on constitutionally protected speech, stronger enforcement of antidiscrimination protections, and greater transparency around account closures and appeals.
Still, even without embracing all of Reitman’s proposals, the broader concerns she raises are difficult to ignore. Financial exclusion, she argues, often overlaps with more traditional forms of speech suppression in ways that are increasingly hard to separate.
Government ‘Censorship by Proxy’
Reitman argues that financial companies are not always acting independently when accounts are closed over controversial speech or politically sensitive activity. In many cases, she says, institutions are responding to direct or indirect government pressure.
Sometimes that pressure is explicit, as in disputes involving the National Rifle Association, Backpage, and WikiLeaks.
In Illinois, former sheriff Tom Dart sent letters to credit card companies urging them to “cease and desist from allowing your credit cards to be used to place ads” on Backpage, a classified advertising platform widely associated with sex-work listings. In New York, financial regulators under then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned banks that maintaining ties to the NRA could pose “reputational risk,” language financial institutions often interpret as a warning sign for increased regulatory scrutiny. Following the publication of leaked State Department cables by WikiLeaks, then-Sen. Joe Lieberman publicly accused the organization of criminal conduct and suggested companies maintaining relationships with the group risked aiding illegal activity.
Other times, the pressure is less direct. Reitman points to efforts like Operation Choke Point, as well as regulatory systems used by agencies such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, where vague assessments of “reputational risk” can influence how banks handle customers. Financial institutions, eager to avoid regulatory headaches, often respond by adopting aggressive risk-management systems.
“Often in cases of financial censorship, there’s a whiff of government involvement but it’s hard to prove,” Reitman notes.
In other instances, the issue stems from compliance systems tied to anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism laws. “Know your customer” requirements, which force banks to verify customer identities and monitor transactions, expanded significantly after passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Reitman argues that these systems frequently sweep up lawful customers who have done nothing illegal.
Economic sanctions create another layer of pressure. Financial institutions are expected to help enforce sanctions programs, and the penalties for mistakes can be severe. As a result, many institutions adopt broad enforcement policies to avoid scrutiny.
That environment contributed to a bizarre but revealing situation involving New York City Councilwoman Shahana Hanif. A $14 Venmo payment she sent to reimburse a friend for lunch at a Bronx Bangladeshi restaurant called Al Aqsa was reportedly blocked after the restaurant’s name triggered automated systems tied to sanctions enforcement. While “Al Aqsa” is a common Arabic term used by many businesses, an unrelated organization with a similar name appears on U.S. sanctions lists.
For many Americans — particularly Muslim communities and people connected to certain foreign regions — such incidents can create recurring financial obstacles, even when no wrongdoing exists.
Culture and Courts Encourage Financial Censorship
Government pressure may play a significant role, but Reitman argues cultural and political activism have also shaped the current environment.
Activists across the political spectrum increasingly pressure financial institutions and digital intermediaries to sever ties with people or organizations viewed as objectionable. Over time, providing neutral services has become framed less as infrastructure and more as implicit endorsement.
That shift, critics argue, creates a dangerous precedent.
“Just because it might make you happy today to see a person that you don’t agree with losing access to their money and suffering, that doesn’t mean that that same mechanism might not be turned against you down the road,” Lia Holland of Fight for the Future told Reitman.
The legal consequences of this evolving mindset are already surfacing in court.
One closely watched case involves Visa, Pornhub, and Serena Fleites, who alleges that videos she recorded as a teenager were uploaded to Pornhub without her consent. Fleites argues that Pornhub facilitated sex trafficking and that Visa, by processing payments connected to the platform, participated in that venture. Reitman notes that there is no allegation Visa processed payments tied specifically to the videos in question, and that the overwhelming majority of Pornhub’s content involved legal adult material. Still, a judge declined to dismiss the claims against Visa.
The implications could be enormous.
“If credit card companies are held liable for the potential illegal content hosted by websites that have any kind of payment or advertising service, it creates an untenable burden on credit card companies to review and police every piece of content on any aspect of the web that has any form of payment,” Reitman writes. “It is hard to overstate how far-reaching and dangerous it would be for the courts to hold Visa liable because users decided to upload illegal content onto Pornhub.”
Critics warn that such liability standards could pressure payment processors to aggressively police speech and content across vast portions of the internet, especially on platforms hosting user-generated material or controversial discussions.
Bankers as Sex Police
Faced with legal exposure and reputational concerns, many financial institutions have adopted increasingly strict oversight of adult content platforms.
“Bankers are making sweeping decisions about what types of sexual speech should exist online today,” Reitman writes.
Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition told Reitman that adult websites sometimes provide banks with passwords allowing direct review of platform content. According to Stabile, banks routinely flag specific words, categories, and scenes that sites must remove in order to maintain payment processing services.
Meanwhile, Cathy Beardsley, CEO of Segpay, said banks and payment companies also use automated scanning systems to monitor merchant sites.
“Use spiders, and they’ll go through the websites monthly looking for terms and words that will get flagged, that we have to then have our merchants clean up,” Beardsley told Reitman.
Mastercard receives particular attention in the book for what critics describe as broad and often vague standards governing acceptable content. Banks and payment processors are frequently left interpreting those standards on their own, creating inconsistent enforcement and uncertainty across the adult industry.
Whether driven by liability fears, public pressure, or institutional conservatism, large financial companies wield enormous influence over who can participate online. Reitman argues that limited competition within banking only magnifies that power.
“Banks enjoy special privileges and benefits (like government backed insurance), and there are lots of barriers to entry for start-up companies wanting to enter the financial space,” she notes.
More competition, she suggests, could reduce some of the pressure points currently shaping the industry. But heavy regulation also makes new entrants difficult.
A Section 230 for Banks?
Among Reitman’s more notable proposals is legislation modeled loosely after Section 230 protections for internet platforms.
“We need legislation to make it clear that payment intermediaries, banks, and credit card companies are not liable for the activities of the people and institutions who use their services,” she writes.
The book also explores the potential — and limitations — of alternatives such as cash and cryptocurrency.
More than anything, though, Transaction Denied frames financial exclusion as a growing systemic issue rather than a series of isolated incidents. Cases involving WikiLeaks, Backpage, Pornhub, or the NRA are often easy for the public to dismiss because they involve polarizing organizations or industries. But Reitman argues the underlying mechanisms extend far beyond any one political movement, industry, or ideology.
By tracing stories across a wide range of communities and viewpoints, the book presents financial exclusion as the product of overlapping political, regulatory, cultural, and corporate pressures. The institutions enforcing these restrictions may be private, but the incentives shaping their behavior often originate elsewhere.
And that may be the part making some people uneasy now. Not just who loses access to financial systems — but how ordinary the process has started to feel.
