Adult creators are still getting debanked — but it doesnt just impact them
Every company involved in your online spending gets a vote in how you spend your money. For years now, adult content creators have been sounding the alarm about financial discrimination and debanking. Debanking is the practice of banks terminating a person's accounts and refusing to do business with them, an increasingly common occurrence as institutions continue to shut out individuals and businesses.
"I don't know what could happen next or when it might happen," Adult VTuber, journalist, and activist Ana Valens tells Mashable. Over the course of two weeks in November, Valens had content removed or her entire account suspended from nearly every online platform where she makes a living. "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." Valens reached out to the various platforms, and they were often unable to specify how her content violated their terms. Ko-fi remained unresponsive until multiple messages led to reinstatement.
"Deplatforming and debanking are an occupational hazard for any adult content creator," says Gina, a co-founder of PeepMe, a startup that intended to create a worker-owned creator marketplace. PeepMe was built as an alternative to platforms like OnlyFans and Patreon, so creators could be stakeholders in the business, form a democratic board, and receive quarterly profit-sharing dividends.
Gina requested that Mashable use a pseudonym due to her continued work adjacent to the adult industry and the increasing risks of businesses losing relationships with financial institutions. "Even still, I've never seen someone banned on so many sites before [as Ana has been]," Gina says.
In addition to discrimination aimed towards the adult industry, companies in sectors such as oil and gas, cryptocurrency, tobacco, and firearms are also actively calling out politically motivated debanking, resulting in a recent series of regulatory actions in the United States, intending to rein in financial discrimination.
Who's blocking my buying?
When you make a purchase online, your money passes through many hands. The pipeline of financial institutions your money goes through might look something like this:
Platform (merchant) websites: sites where creators earn income, like YouTube, Patreon, Etsy, DoorDash, and Steam
Payment processors: the companies that communicate the transaction between your card network, the sending bank, and the receiving bank (ex. PayPal, Stripe)
Card networks: Visa, American Express, Mastercard, etc. These companies standardize the relationship between banks, sellers, and buyers to allow them to do business.
Your bank and the seller's bank: Wells Fargo, Bank of America
Beyond their responsibility to prevent illegal activity, restrictions on the money any individual financial institution is willing to handle are at the institution's sole discretion.
"The rules set by card networks are sometimes vague," says Dr. Val Webber, a postdoctoral researcher at the Sexual Health and Gender Research Lab at Dalhousie University, who studies online platform regulations of the adult industry. According to Mastercard's rules document from June 2025, Mastercard restricts "any Transaction that [...] in the sole discretion of [Mastercard], may damage the goodwill of [Mastercard] or reflect negatively on the [brand]."
"Deplatforming and debanking are an occupational hazard for any adult content creator."
In July 2025, Valens wrote about video game storefronts Steam and itch.io removing and deindexing games with adult content due to pressure from payment processors and card networks. Steam cited pressure from Mastercard, communicated through payment processors like Stripe, as a reason for these changes. In a statement to itch.io, Stripe said, "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 sales of "pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery, and other media) designed for the purpose of sexual gratification."
In a brief statement released in August 2025, Mastercard refuted any connection to these policy changes, stating that "Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations."
Valens' articles were removed 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," says Valens. Mashable attempted to contact Vice for comment, but Vice's press email is no longer functional, and a former editor declined to comment.
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 who studies the impact of technology and commerce on the adult industry.
In December 2020, Visa and Mastercard refused to work with Pornhub, citing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) hosted on the website. "Our adult content standards allow for legal adult activity created by consenting individuals or studios," said Mastercard in a statement to Mashable. "Merchants must have controls to monitor, block and remove unlawful content from being posted." In a statement to Reuters at the time, Pornhub denied hosting any illegal content on its website and noted the disappointing impact on "the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on [their] platform for their livelihoods."
Despite their cautious policies regarding platforms that host adult content, card networks and banks have not yet made similar moves against X, where CSAM and non-consensual deepfake nudes are becoming increasingly common.
Seeing major platforms like Pornhub, Steam, and itch.io lose their relationships with payment processors and card networks causes smaller platforms to move cautiously. "We just can't afford to lose our ability to do business with these financial companies," says Gina, from her experience starting up PeepMe. "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."
"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 reason often cited by payment processors for not banking the adult industry is that it experiences a high rate of customer chargebacks, Gina explains. A chargeback is when a customer requests a reversal of a credit card transaction.
"Locking out entire industries makes less and less sense as fraud detection technology advances," adds Gina. "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." Last year, Mastercard publicly announced its generative AI fraud-detection technology, which is just the next step in a system that is already highly sophisticated and collaborative, monitoring financial activity in the United States.
"We also haven't seen the claim of high-chargebacks in adult content substantiated anywhere in terms of measured data," says MacDonald. "As a researcher, that makes me suspicious of the criteria these companies are using behind the scenes."
The evolving landscape of banking regulations
The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association representing the legal adult industry, filed a statement for the record in February 2025 with the United States House Committee on Financial Services. The FSC's statement calls for due process protections, objective risk assessments, and to explicitly affirm that lawful adult industry businesses do not present an inherent financial crime risk. It echoes other regulatory initiatives underway, pointing out that blocking out entire industries without measurable, individualized risk evaluation is an overreach by financial institutions and has dire implications for free speech.
"Card networks and payment processors began by blocking pornography, but they've moved into other online industries as well."
In the United States right now, there are multiple efforts to regulate financial institutions from blocking customers for reasons other than violation of the law, including an August 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump. The order directs multiple financial regulatory bodies in the United States to investigate, identify, and reverse any cases of politically-motivated debanking. The order follows steps taken by U.S. Bank Regulators to remove criteria of "reputational risk" in their evaluation of bank compliance, and Senate legislation proposing civil fines for banks and card networks for avoiding 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 the last several months advocating against financial censorship, urging concerned customers to call Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Stripe to question and challenge purchase and account-limiting practices. (Visa directed Mashable to a page on how it combats illegal activity; PayPal stated that adult materials need pre-approval to accept payments, as it does with tobacco and other products; and Stripe told Mashable it doesn't support adult content.)
"Private companies have been deputized to decide how we can earn and spend our money," says MacDonald, referring to banks, payment processors, and card networks. "Anyone who is ideologically misaligned with any of these companies faces the risk of losing their livelihood."