The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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Your bank may never send you a memo about it, but it’s quietly shaping your life.
Every time you click “buy now,” a small army of institutions decides whether that purchase gets to exist. And for adult creators, that army has been steadily tightening its grip. For years, people in the industry have been warning about financial discrimination and debanking — the sudden closure of accounts, the polite but devastating “we can no longer do business with you.” It’s happening more often now. And it’s happening quietly.
“I don’t know what could happen next or when it might happen,”
Adult VTuber, journalist, and activist Ana Valens says. In just two weeks last November, nearly every platform she relied on either removed her content or suspended her outright. “While my Patreon and Ko-fi were reinstated, I’ve spent the past two months waiting for the other shoe to drop — another Patreon ban, my PayPal deactivated, and so on.” She reached out for explanations. Most platforms couldn’t clearly articulate how she’d violated their terms. Ko-fi didn’t respond until repeated messages finally led to reinstatement.
That kind of uncertainty lingers. It’s like walking on ice that might crack at any moment.
“Deplatforming and debanking are an occupational hazard for any adult content creator,” says Gina, a co-founder of PeepMe, a startup that set out to build a worker-owned creator marketplace. PeepMe was imagined as an alternative to OnlyFans and Patreon — a space where creators could hold equity, elect a democratic board, and receive quarterly profit-sharing dividends.
Gina requested that a pseudonym be used, given her continued work adjacent to the adult industry and the very real fear of financial fallout. “Even still, I’ve never seen someone banned on so many sites before [as Ana has been],” she says.
And it’s not just adult creators feeling the pressure. Companies in oil and gas, cryptocurrency, tobacco, and firearms have also raised concerns about politically motivated debanking. The pushback has grown loud enough that U.S. regulators are now stepping in, attempting to rein in financial discrimination.
Who’s Blocking My Buying?
When you make an online purchase, your money doesn’t travel in a straight line. It passes through layers of gatekeepers. The pipeline often looks like this:
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Platform (merchant) websites: where creators earn income — YouTube, Patreon, Etsy, DoorDash, Steam.
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Payment processors: companies that route the transaction between card networks and banks — PayPal, Stripe.
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Card networks: Visa, American Express, Mastercard — the rule-makers that standardize how buyers and sellers interact.
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Your bank and the seller’s bank: Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and so on.
Each step has discretion. Beyond preventing illegal activity, these institutions can decide what kinds of money they’re willing to touch.
“The rules set by card networks are sometimes vague,” says Dr. Val Webber, a postdoctoral researcher at Dalhousie University’s Sexual Health and Gender Research Lab. Mastercard’s June 2025 rules restrict “any Transaction that […] in the sole discretion of [Mastercard], may damage the goodwill of [Mastercard] or reflect negatively on the [brand].”
“In the sole discretion” is doing a lot of work there.
Last summer, Steam and itch.io removed or deindexed adult games after pressure from payment processors and card networks. Steam cited pressure from Mastercard, conveyed through processors like Stripe. Stripe told itch.io, “Stripe is currently unable to support sexually explicit content due to restrictions placed on them by their banking partners, despite card networks generally supporting adult content.” Stripe’s prohibited business list includes “pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery, and other media) designed for the purpose of sexual gratification.”
Mastercard later denied involvement. In August 2025, the company stated, “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.”
Meanwhile, Valens saw her articles disappear from Vice. “My suspicion is that it was easy for a financial company to flag me as high risk as a punitive measure for my content, or my activism work,” she says. Attempts to obtain comment from Vice were unsuccessful.
Who Can Get Debanked?
“We have lots of data to show that people in the adult industry face financial discrimination in the form of their accounts being closed, being denied mortgages, business loans, and other banking services — despite banks often not being able to substantiate legal reasons related to these individual accounts,” says Maggie MacDonald, a PhD researcher at the University of Toronto.
The tension escalated in December 2020 when Visa and Mastercard cut ties with Pornhub, citing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). “Our adult content standards allow for legal adult activity created by consenting individuals or studios,” Mastercard said at the time. “Merchants must have controls to monitor, block and remove unlawful content from being posted.” Pornhub denied hosting illegal content and emphasized the harm to “the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on [their] platform for their livelihoods.”
But here’s the inconsistency that nags at people: X continues to process payments despite widespread reports of CSAM and non-consensual deepfake content. No sweeping financial freeze there.
Watching major platforms lose payment relationships makes smaller startups tread lightly. “We just can’t afford to lose our ability to do business with these financial companies,” Gina says. “Stripe takes only 2.9 percent from businesses they’re willing to work with, while high-risk processors willing to take on adult content can charge up to 15 percent.”
That difference can sink a company before it starts.
“Losing a relationship with card networks is a risk payment processors can’t afford, and losing relationships with payment processors is a risk that platform websites can’t afford,” explains Webber. “In the end, the responsibility of ensuring their content stays within the lines of these oftentimes unclear rules trickles down to each individual creator. Because ultimately, content creators are more expendable to platforms than payment processors and card networks.”
One justification often cited is chargebacks — when customers reverse credit card transactions. Gina isn’t convinced.
“Locking out entire industries makes less and less sense as fraud detection technology advances,” she says. “Payment processors and card networks already have processes to step in when an individual business has a high rate of chargebacks, there’s no reason to block out a whole industry.” Mastercard recently announced expanded generative AI fraud-detection tools, building on already sophisticated monitoring systems.
“We also haven’t seen the claim of high-chargebacks in adult content substantiated anywhere in terms of measured data,” adds MacDonald. “As a researcher, that makes me suspicious of the criteria these companies are using behind the scenes.”
The Evolving Landscape of Banking Regulations
In February 2025, the Free Speech Coalition filed a statement with the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, calling for due process protections, objective risk assessments, and explicit recognition that lawful adult businesses do not inherently present financial crime risk. Blocking entire industries without individualized evaluation, the statement argued, is regulatory overreach with serious implications for free speech.
Multiple efforts are underway in the United States to limit financial institutions from denying service for reasons beyond legal violations. In August 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing regulators to investigate and reverse politically motivated debanking. Bank regulators have begun removing “reputational risk” from compliance criteria, and proposed Senate legislation would impose civil fines on banks and card networks that avoid entire categories of customers.
“Card networks and payment processors began by blocking pornography, but they’ve moved into other online industries as well,” says Webber. “The line in the sand continues to shift, and it has recently expanded to video game creators and streamers as well. We don’t know how these rules might evolve, and what type of online content might be next.”
Valens has spent months urging customers to call Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Stripe to question purchase restrictions and account freezes. Visa points to its policies for combating illegal activity; PayPal requires pre-approval for adult materials, similar to tobacco; Stripe states it does not support adult content.
“Private companies have been deputized to decide how we can earn and spend our money,” says MacDonald. “Anyone who is ideologically misaligned with any of these companies faces the risk of losing their livelihood.”
That’s the part that lingers.
It’s not just about porn, or games, or activism. It’s about the invisible committee that votes on your transactions — and whether one day, without warning, they decide you don’t get a vote at all.
