Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Visa Could Ruin the Internet

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

What if you woke up tomorrow and completely lost access to your bank account, credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo, all because of something you posted online? SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co    Support my work on Patreon for bonus episodes, monthly Q&A livestreams, and more: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz     In this episode of Free Speech Friday, Rainey Reitman, advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and author of the new book "Transaction Denied" joins me to dive deep into the terrifying reality of financial censorship and how major banks and payment processors are quietly becoming the ultimate gatekeepers of internet speech. Reitman reveals how a handful of massive financial institutions are bypassing the First Amendment to act as privatized censors, deciding what journalism you can support, what political nonprofits you can donate to, and what ideas are considered "misinformation." From the early financial blockade of WikiLeaks to recent debanking scandals involving independent journalists and nonpartisan advocacy groups, this hidden digital infrastructure controls your life more than you realize. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM:This channel has ZERO sponsors, and speaking out on financial censorship isn't advertiser-friendly. If you get value from this show, support my work so I can keep making these videos!👉 Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/taylorlorenz 👉 Support on Substack: https://www.usermag.co/subscribe 👉 Pick up a copy of Rainey Reitman's "Transaction Denied" here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804543/transaction-denied-by-rainey-reitman/ *(Note: Half of all book proceeds go directly to the Freedom of the Press Foundation)*We discuss: The Nightmare of Financial CensorshipHow Payment Processors Got So Much PowerThe Rise of E-Commerce & Speech DependencyPayPal, WikiLeaks, and Chelsea ManningCensorship by Proxy: How the Government Pressures BanksThe Visa Lawsuit That Could Ruin the Internet

It could upend our online experience completely. I don't even know what the future would look like for the internet if that court case goes wrong. What if you lost access to your bank, credit cards, PayPal and Venmo overnight because you posted misinformation online? Right now, banks are scouring adult content websites in order to flag objectionable words or ejectionable scenes. Payment processors are deciding what constitutes misinformation about a war and credit. unions are deciding whether or not you can donate to that nonprofit that you really want to support. Financial institutions are increasingly suppressing speech across the board. Rainy Reitman is an advisor at the EFF and the author of the new book, Transaction Denied,

which documents the rise of financial censorship. Today she's joining me to talk about how financial institutions and credit card companies are increasingly shaping the content we can consume, the journalism we're able to support, and the causes we're allowed to believe in. Rainy, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So I kind of want to talk about this concept of financial censorship and how kind of these payment processors really affects speech. And to do that, I feel like we first need to talk about how they got so much power and what these companies are and where they came from.

Obviously, back in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, people weren't really using the internet to pay for stuff. I guess not as many people had credit cards. people were mostly paying by cash. And it was just a radically different economy. And then we started to see the rise of e-commerce in the 2000s. We had sites like Amazon. We had a lot more online payment processing and donations. I'm thinking even of like Obama's first campaign back in 2008, how people were starting to make

like political donations online, donating to nonprofits online. In 2009, Venmo was founded as well. And I feel like that just kind of changed a lot of people's perceptions of like payments, I guess, and like using payments to express support for something or donate to somebody or try to support somebody. And of course, that's just two years after the iPhone itself was founded and we saw the app store and the explosion of all of these apps as well, including a lot of payment apps and payment processors and online financial banking systems. And I feel like suddenly there's just a lot more money moving.

throughout the internet and people were becoming a lot more comfortable paying for things on the internet and accepting payment for things on the internet. I think that's totally right. And what that means is that a lot of speech became increasingly reliant on those online payments. So everything from newspapers to publishers, online content creators, certainly nonprofit advocacy organizations. Their systems of receiving support really moved into these more digital platforms. they became reliant on systems like Stripe, credit card processing systems that are specific to nonprofits, things like that, basically to connect with their supporters and receive the funds that kept them afloat, right? To keep their doors open, to pay the bills, to pay their employees.

Yeah, it seemed like it was this like really convenient way for people to pay for things, but also for these digital publishers, nonprofits, organizations, content creators, et cetera, to also grow. their businesses. I mean, I'm thinking of also just the explosion of online S work. Sorry, I have to use the euphemism because we're going to get to monetize. But, you know, like adult content, I guess you could say on the internet that was really quick to embrace like these forms of online payments because it allowed them to grow their customer base or even just a lot of artists, independent artists. I think about some of these musicians who very early on were relying on Venmo, et cetera, to create their music or art or songs. Like it feels like the digital payment infrastructure that was being built and really proliferated in the early 2010s was also allowing for a lot more internet

speech to exist online. Like it was sort of the financial engine of a lot more independent speech and creativity and content creators. I think that's totally right. It's an opportunity for people that maybe wouldn't have had an audience in their local community to reach a much broader audience, even a global audience. We certainly saw the rise of blogging becoming really widespread. We saw so many different folks turning to different ways to monetize their content online. Small newspapers or small online outlets that were receiving funds from subscribers. All of that was made possible thanks to the rise of e-commerce and online payment systems. So these online payment systems are facilitating all of this new speech. It's this exciting new

world. Everybody is finally getting a voice. We're seeing content creators that would have been maybe shut out from legacy institutions, able to build their businesses, online and, you know, express themselves online. But it seems like it's also we're building this digital infrastructure that people are relying on now. And anytime people are relying on something, it seems like that can also be exploited and abused. And it seems like we started to see also examples of that happening really early. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, one of the things I think can be misleading when you look at the financial system is you can see a lot of different companies, including a lot of different startup companies with different names and think, oh,

this is a robust marketplace. There's so many different companies out there. But in fact, all of these companies have relationships with one another, and they're very reliant on the terms of service of honestly just a handful of very big companies within the space that are able to set the terms. So even though there are many different companies in the financial system and the online financial payment processing system, they are all beholden basically to a handful of very large companies setting the terms.

You got a sort of peek into how a lot of this stuff works back in 2011 when you were working to help free whistleblower Chelsea Manning. And from what I understand, you encountered this sort of financial censorship quite early on working on that campaign, correct? Yeah, that's right. I co-founded a campaign to help advocate for Chelsea Manning, who's a whistleblower, and raise funds for her defense and advocacy. And in 2010, our PayPal account got frozen, and we faced just incredible frustration trying to get it set back up again. All sorts of different excuses were getting thrown at us. In the end, we launched a publicity campaign, and through that PR, we're able to get the

account reinstated. But it created this kind of question in my mind, which was like, okay, well, who else could this be happening to? How many other websites might be dealing with this? Yeah, it's so insane that they suspended you guys on PayPal over this because it seems like from what I read, there was really no legal reason for them to do this. They had essentially made this arbitrary, maybe politicized decision to suspend the account. And then after the media attention reversed that decision, but you guys were never given

any reason as to why the account was suspended or what terms of service you violated. In fact, it sounds like you didn't violate any terms because, again, you were reaction. activated so quickly. Yeah, that's completely right. We got a bunch of different reasons. They tried to cite the Patriot Act at one point, but eventually they copped to the fact that it was an internal policy decision, and they couldn't tell us what it was based on. And obviously it was an internal decision because if it was a legal requirement, they wouldn't have reinstated our account within a day of us launching a publicity campaign. So it really made me curious to see who else this had happened to and and it made me very aware of just how disruptive and devastating for like a really small

advocacy group like we were at the time to lose access to the payment systems that we relied on to reach our donors. So in this book, you talk about this phenomenon of financial censorship and you define it as 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. This sounds so familiar to me as somebody that covers social media because I think we see a lot of this sort of forms of censorship in the social media companies as well. But when did this really start to become a form of abuse by, I guess, financial institutions? It seems like it almost parallels the rise of social media where it's escalating kind of throughout the late aughts and early 2010s.

Yeah, I think that's right. You know, I really target the financial blockade of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks as a turning point in this conversation because this first time we had a global example of an organization that had not been found guilty of anything at that time, basically being cut off from access to their supporters as a way to silence them. It was such an effort to shudder an online speaker that it really kind of changed the entire conversation. Now, if we go back historically, there probably are other examples, especially in the adult content space, that didn't get as much attention. But the WikiLeaks example sort of changed the conversation. And then after that, I've sort of started collecting a whole bunch of different stories, talking to people, sort of meeting with folks who

really came out of the woodwork through my work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and then after, kind of saying, hey, something like this happened to me too. I also was engaged in a form of free expression, and I did nothing wrong, I didn't break any laws, and I found myself suddenly cut off from my online payment systems. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co.

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You know, first it sounds like you're getting targeted by helping Chelsea Manning. WikiLeaks is getting targeted. I think in both cases, maybe these payment processors and financial institutions are saying, oh, well, the Patriot Act or, oh, like sort of vague national security threats, whatever. But you found instances of this sort of financial censorship playing out all across the board. So can you talk about some of those other examples that you uncovered in your book of this form of censorship being leveraged against other groups? Yeah. The first example for my book is Vote America, which is a nonprofit that helps people all across the country, regardless of the political affiliation, register to vote, find out how to vote. And their executive director actually lost access to all of her credit cards with Chase. She just logged on one day and couldn't use her credit cards. And then after that, she found that she found that she found that she,

Chase blocked the account of her nonprofit, Vote America. And she ended up having to get into a huge fight with them over months to try to get access to the funds that they were hanging on to. So you might be like, well, why? And she tried to get answers to it, like, what's going on? And Chase wouldn't answer. But then she was rejected from a different bank. And at that point, she finally got writing that it was due to her political activities. So it was the sense that her nonprofit and they didn't get into the detail.

but was too political, and even though it was nonpartisan, they weren't comfortable providing services to her. That seems crazy. This woman is just trying to get people to vote. That's like such a classic American, like, you know, important thing in democracy. Was it something that she said online, or did she sort of seem to be part of a specific

political persuasion that you think triggered this? Like when you dug into this case, what else did you find? We didn't find specifics about that. I kind of held that. one out as interesting in the sense that it's part of a larger pattern of different political groups losing access to financial services. Another example is the national community for religious freedom, which is a group in the United States advocating for religious freedom. They also lost access to their chase account and faced a huge battle trying to get answers to what was going on with them

and got all sorts of a run around. But it became part of this symptom of political advocacy organizations struggling to open or maintain banking services. That's crazy to me. And I think what's even more disturbing is that this wasn't just affecting political organizations and advocates, right? This was also this sort of like financial censorship is also spilling out to other areas. Yeah. Another example from my book is a bunch of different independent journalists who lost access to payment services. Consortium News, Mint Press News.

These are organizations that have been doing just tons of independent media for years and saw their accounts shuttered basically without being provided very much reason at all by PayPal. It's wild to me that journalists were being censored and there was no recourse. I mean, did you ever find any information out about why these journalists were being financially censored? Well, the journalists in question felt like it was likely due to coverage of some of America's overseas policy. So for example, consortium news has been very critical of the U.S. engagement with the war in Ukraine. Mint Press has been writing a ton of articles about what's happening in Gaza. And so these are organizations that have taken a really different stance in regards to, you know, America's overseas engagements. So they felt like it was like part of this crackdown on so-called misinformation

that they just got swept up in it. And there's some information that kind of lends itself to that. kind of lends itself to that. You know, PayPal at around the same time released an update to their terms of service where they basically said that they were going to be fining people and removing money from their accounts, thousands of dollars if they spread misinformation, which was a term that they never even really defined. So that got a huge backlash, right? Members of Congress were speaking out about it. Former heads of PayPal were saying this is against all of our our values as an organization and PayPal ended up retracting it.

But we do know that in addition to shutting down these accounts, PayPal was actively engaged in updating their terms of service at the time as part of this crackdown on misinformation. The misinformation stuff is horrifying to me because it really parallels again so much of what I've covered in social media where journalists, including myself. I've had my Instagram page taken down for quote unquote misinformation for reporting actually accurately in the Washington Post on, you know, things the Biden administration did. And it just seems like it's this way for the government to censor speech that it doesn't like. Because, of course, the government just determines that anything that questions power or, you know,

American foreign policy is misinformation. Yeah. I mean, I think people are really accustomed to thinking about it in the social media context because we see how frequently social media companies get it wrong. And what I would posit is I think financial companies get it wrong even more often because they don't have the developed content teams and folks on staff who are like really focused on thinking about content censorship issues. These are financial companies. They're thinking about their bottom line. They're thinking about payments. They're not speech experts. They don't hire speech experts. So this is like even

worse when you're asking your, you know, credit card companies to weigh in on whether or not something is legitimate speech. Yeah. And we know also with these systems of cracking down on misinformation, et cetera, that it's often like marginalized people that suffer the most. And I mean, you also give other examples in your book of Muslim entrepreneurs and some of the groups that end up being censored under these policies. Yeah, I was really struck by how many Muslim Americans are faced with the lack of access to banking services. One of the folks I interviewed had a really powerful story. He runs Persian Poetics.com, which is a website and serves a service where you can basically take classes in Persian poetry and you can take Farsi classes

online. So he's incredibly dependent on services like Venmo and PayPal to receive really small transactions from students who are interested, often just in learning about their own heritage or getting to learn a new language. And people would write things like Persian class or Farsi class in the, you know, reason for why they were sending him the payment, and it kept getting flagged by the payment services because they're trying to abide by sanctions laws and make sure that, you know, terrorist funds aren't flowing to Iran. But in reality, they're basically stopping this American citizen from being able to teach Farsi classes online. It's crazy. I mean, it is so similar to, I think, like, just this broader crackdown on speech that we're seeing,

where, you know, Muslims we know and people, anybody with Arabic in their profile is more likely to actually have their Instagram account deleted because these AI systems. You call this censorship by proxy where these private companies are effectively taking action in response to government pressure. How clear is the government pressure, though? Like, how is it? Because I mean, I know, especially with the social media companies, they were dragged to court for allegedly jawboning or, you know, where they tried to make this case that like the government undulyly. pressured the social media companies and they just couldn't really prove it because it wasn't super overt. Yeah, well, it really runs the gamut. So on the far end of very overt government censorship requests and jawboning, as you say, you have Superintendent Maria Vulo in New York State,

sending out a letter pressuring insurance companies and banks to stop doing business with the National Rifle Association. And that resulted in a Supreme Court case, which resulted in a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court saying that this is illegal unconstitutional coercion and that they wouldn't stand for it. Most of the time, it's not going to be the overts. A lot of times you see compliance officers at different companies, maybe imagining what they think the government might want or like reading into regulations. Up until last year, there was language in the guidance from financial regulators urging financial institutions to consider their reputation. risk, which is an incredibly vague concept, this idea that your reputation might be hurt by the

customers you choose to do business with. And that resulted in a lot of financial companies saying, well, we're going to stop doing business with certain people because it's going to be bad for our reputations. So a lot of times the censorship by proxy, it's much softer. It's more hidden. It's more implied than what we saw in the Vulo case. Yeah, I feel like it's also what makes it more dangerous and harder to combat. Because when it's so overt, We can actually take it to the courts, right, and litigate it. I know, especially in the tech world, the big tech companies also do this guesswork where they sort of, it's like they moderate the platforms very differently under Biden versus under Trump. And they sort of just try to moderate in a way that they think will be friendly to the current administration so that they have a friendly regulatory environment.

And I'm curious if you saw changes as well, you know, depending on kind of the media sentiments or the political moods of the time of like kind of what was being censored and why. Well, I was super curious to see what would happen under a Trump administration, right? Because on the one hand, Trump has put out an executive order against debanking and he had the word reputational risk removed from all the guidelines around financial regulation. But that hasn't really resulted in the kind of sea change that I was hoping to see. For example, we just had the Southern Poverty Law Center, lose access to donations through donor advised funds, through all the donor advised fund companies, including Fidelity, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab, even when they didn't need to shut off a Southern poverty law center. So it does feel like the political winds shifted, but they didn't shift towards accessibility and neutrality for everything. Yeah. It seems like especially under the Trump administration, you're seeing them, you know, declare

people who criticize big tech as terrorists or people who promote LGBTQ rights as, you know, extremists, et cetera, and people that should be cut off from the government. their social media accounts or their banking accounts, et cetera. So it just seems like once again, we have this system where like both political parties just want to kind of censor the other. It is hard with the free speech stuff. I feel like to get people on the left to care. It's become this very right coded issue.

And outside of like some orgs like the EFF, it seems like a lot of activists. I mean, at least what I see is I covered lips of TikTok, for instance. And like there was a big campaign to get her removed from the payment processing platforms that she uses. And it seems like a lot of people kind of on the left are like, well, we should censor these people. We should debank maybe people that we find distasteful. And I'm curious kind of what you're seeing and how that like political break is playing out. In my experience, people always think that people that they disagree with should not have access to the banking system.

And part of what I wanted with my book was to be like, actually, let's look at this from every angle and see how powerfully this can affect not just people you disagree with, but our society, right? that this idea that we're asking financial companies who do not have the expertise and frankly get it wrong a whole bunch of the time to weigh in on important speech issues in ways that we don't have control over. And remember, whoever's in power today, even if you agree with them or even if you don't, that can change in four or eight or 12 years. And that means you've just got a system in place that can be used against you in the future. So I think that it's a pretty dangerous tool. Yeah, I've written a lot about Section 230 and these efforts that people are making to attack speech through the companies where they claim, you know, like we need to take down Facebook because they have some objectionable content, whatever, whatever. And it seems like you're saying this a lot more with payment processors where because maybe people can't directly go after an adult website, they sort of try to get the payment processor access taken away or they sort of target the adult content through the payment process. or like also as a proxy.

Well, I think there's two ways to think about that. First of all, there's a lot of folks who are trying to go after companies that they disagree with. For example, oil and gas companies by saying, well, we should rob them of their ability to have banking services, even basic banking services. And then there's this question of, you know, can we police different types of online speech by holding financial companies accountable for the speech that happens. And I think both of these are very dangerous directions to go down. First of all, as you pointed out earlier, and as I talk a lot about in my book, the folks who suffer the most with financial censorship are those who otherwise don't have power in our society. They are the ones who deal with big consequences.

So, you know, multinational corporations with literally hundreds of millions of dollars, they're not struggling because their PayPal account got, you know, frozen for a week or two. It's not going to have the same kind of devastating impact on them. So it's, it's frankly, it's not a very useful tool to go after those who have the most power. And then there's this question of like, well, can't we ask financial companies to suffer consequences or be held liable for speech we disagree with online? And I think that's also a really dangerous thing to do. I detail in my book an ongoing lawsuit right now that's basically trying to hold visa liable for illegal. content that was uploaded onto a website. Visa doesn't review this content before it goes up.

Visa doesn't run this website. Visa didn't create this illegal content or benefit from it. So there's this huge ongoing questions that the court is going to have to face, which is like, well, should visa be held liable for it? And the issue at heart to me is, do we think that visa should be reviewing every piece of content on the internet before it is made public? Right? It's should we have a visa review things. It's like you'd submit something to any website. And then Visa would like have somebody look at it and decide whether or not it's okay before it goes online. And when you think of it in those terms, you have to remember, visa is not the only financial company out there, right? There's all the other credit card companies. There's all the other payment services. There's all the ancillary services. Any one of them could equally be brought up into a lawsuit and held liable for these things. So I really honestly believe that is V's the same. is held liable for this illegal content, it could upend our online experience completely. I don't even know what the future would look like for the internet if that court case goes wrong.

Yeah, it's really scary. And I feel like it's not even the only court case. I mean, you talk about just like all of this, this like legal onslaught. And it sounds like we do need like a section 230 kind of for banking almost, again, to protect speech and to make sure that these banking platforms don't become moderators of content online. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. A lot of people have been talking about that idea, something like a Section 230 for banking. And I don't, you know, Section 230 is such a beleaguered term.

I feel like the language itself is like, I'm scared to even say it because people hate Section 230 so much and like they already want to abolish it. So I'm like, we need a better language. But just some sort of like law, I guess that like removes that liability so that the companies do not even feel compelled to kind of protect themselves by doing that. sort of censorship. Yeah. Right now the system we have is that financial companies have every incentive to shut off accounts and not ask that many questions and very few incentives to keep accounts open. When I've spoken to folks who have tried to sue banking institutions for

violating anti-discrimination laws, they tell me it's incredibly difficult, right? Those lawsuits are so hard to move ahead. But it's very easy to hold companies accountable for letting the occasional illegal transaction proceed, even if they had no idea it was happening and they weren't directly involved with it. So we need to address this liability imbalance so that companies will be more likely to keep accounts open and stay neutral and not try to weigh in on speech decisions. Well, Rainy, thank you so much for chatting with me about all this day. I hope that people can think a little bit more carefully about this financial censorship stuff and recognize the power that these payment processors have on the content ecosystem that we all sort of live in and consume

every day. And you're donating a bunch of the proceeds from your book to sort of further these efforts, right? That's right. So half of the proceeds of my book go to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is a nonprofit. I co-founded and I'm still on the board of directors. And I also talk about the founding of Freedom of the Press Foundation, which got started as an effort to thwart a financial blockade. and you can hear all about it in the book. Well, thank you so much. And I highly suggest everybody go out and pick up the book today.

Okay, thank you so much. I had a blast doing this. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the link below. As you guys know, I have zero sponsors. Talking about this stuff is not popular.

So please, please, please support my work if you like this show and you get any value out of it. The link to buy Rainey's book is also below. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.