Banking

Bankers Scouring Porn Sites. Payment Processors Punishing Journalists. Here's How 'Big Finance' Is Chilling Speech

Financial censorship should worry us all, suggests Rainey Reitman in Transaction Denied.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 4.29.2026 12:15 PM

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(Credit: Penguin Random House/Midjourne)

Banks are scouring porn platforms in order to flag objectionable words and scenes. Payment processors are deciding what constitutes misinformation about war. And a credit union could decide whether your donation to a cannabis advocacy group can go through.

We're now deep into the era of suppressing speech through financial institutions.

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Rainey Reitman got an early introduction to this phenomenon while working to help free whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The campaign she was working on was run through a group called Courage to Resist. Back in 2011, its PayPal account was suddenly frozen and neither Reitman nor the group's leader could get a clear answer on why, just some vague nods to the PATRIOT Act. Haggling with PayPal representatives didn't help—but getting media attention for their plight did.

"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."

Thus began Reitman's interest in what she calls "financial censorship." It's a concept her book describes as financial service providers—banks, payment processors, credit card companies—limiting or closing the accounts of "controversial or marginalized speakers who haven't violated any laws," thereby becoming "a tool to pressure dissenting and marginalized voices " into shutting up.

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 a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

And, no, Reitman does not want to quibble over whether the term censorship can apply to the actions of private entities instead of only describing government actions. "I think that's a pedantic and unhelpful distinction," she writes.

Transaction Denied details myriad ways in which financial censorship—also called "financial exclusion" or "debanking"—has played out over the past 15 years. It tells the stories of protesters, journalists, gun rights advocates, adult content creators, Muslim entrepreneurs, cannabis activists, erotica writers, religious freedom fighters, naked yogis, and others who have been affected.

Of course, private institutions like banks aren't required to do business with any particular person or group, so long as they're not rejecting their business based on a protected category (like race, religion, or sex). There's nothing legally amiss about a financial company canceling someone's account based on bad vibes, moral objections, incompatible moon signs, or any other reason, so long as that reason doesn't implicate antidiscrimination law.

Reitman recognizes this, though she also floats the idea of shaking things up. "People today cannot survive on wads of cash stuffed under a mattress; they need access to payment and banking services to exist in society," writes Reitman. She would like to "change the law to make it illegal for financial institutions to deny services or end services for people because they are exercising their rights under the First Amendment," to see more enforcement of antidiscrimination laws against banks, and to require more transparency and appeals processes around account closures.

But one needn't........

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