Talk:Financial censorship

2021 Onlyfans Sexwork Ban and Unban

The censorship of Steam and Itch.io are probably linked to 2021 censorship of sex workers that Mastercard financially benefited from. I'm going to leave some links here for myself or some excellent person to expand on the Financial Censorship article at a later date.

https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercard-is-endangering-sex-workers

https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/onlyfans-reversing-ban-on-adult-content Gingercake (talk) 04:25, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Compliance With Wiki Mission Statement

This page needs to be expanded to include the ways that financial censorship is anti-ownership/anti-privacy. I think an argument can be made that a duopoly should not be able to prevent people from purchasing legal stuff, like NSFW content that payment processor may find objectionable. This practice is a violation of user privacy and anti-ownership (ownership of money!). I'm working on improved verbiage and will update accordingly. Gingercake (talk) 15:10, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Article's scope

It's unclear what the intended scope of the article is. For example, there is a major difference in PayPal censorship vs Well Fargo/BoA censorship vs Visa/Mastercard censorship. I narrowed the focus to Visa/Mastercard due to their global reach and lack of consumer alternatives; whereas banks and fintechs have feasible alternatives.

Additionally, some companies follow a trend to censor, such as the WikiLeaks financial blockade. This sort of group censorship, even when it's done by a group of banks (WF, BoA, etc) rather than the large duopoly of Visa/MC, may still be within scope since it leaves consumers with no valid alternatives. Beanie Bo (talk) 17:05, 26 August 2025 (UTC)