Killswitch, Credit Card: The Impact of Payment Processors Playing Content Moderator
How Did We Get Here?
Payment processors function as critical intermediaries for online content. Social media services, independent creators, and small online businesses all depend on them to monetize and sustain their operations. As age verification laws proliferate, that dependence has turned payment processors into powerful enforcement chokepoints. Recent disruptions in the online gaming community show how easily advocacy groups can exploit this dynamic to erase entire websites and categories of lawful expression overnight.
Until recently, the loss of access to payment processor was a challenge faced primarily by adult websites. Last year, Collective Shout, an Australian anti-pornography advocacy group, coordinated a campaign with an open letter to payment processors and credit card companies calling for them to cease operations with gaming services that host “rape, incest, and child sexual abuse-themed games.”
The campaign landed at a moment of rapid global expansion in online age verification regimes. The U.K. had just implemented its Online Safety Act, the Supreme Court of the United States had just upheld age-verification requirements for adult websites as constitutional, and Australia was moving toward a ban on social media access for users under sixteen. Against that backdrop, payment processors, many of which fall squarely within the scope of these emerging regulatory frameworks, were already positioned as key enforcement chokepoints for a broad range of online content.
The Fallout
In the wake of the Collective Shout campaign, Itch.io, an independent online game marketplace that relies on PayPal and Stripe for payment processing, removed over 7,000 games, despite its reputation as a safe haven for consensual adult content. The scope of the action was sweeping. Itch pulled every “Not Safe For Work (NSFW)” game from search, erased entire developer catalogs from public view, and delisted individual titles without notice to their creators.
Worse still, the removals extended far beyond the categories identified in the letter. They swept in all NSFW content, including adult-themed visual novels, creative assets, and even innocuous LGBTQ+ material. As one LGBTQ+ identifying developer put it, “Queer people holding hands is now not safe for work.”
Itch.io later confirmed that it had come under scrutiny by its payment processors over the nature of its content. Even Steam—long known for resisting censorship campaigns—has begun to capitulate to standards imposed by its payment processors. In effect, it seems online services are increasingly offloading core content moderation decisions to their payment processors, rather than exercising independent editorial judgment.
The Imbalance
Payment processors already had policies in place regarding impermissible content. Stripe maintains a blanket prohibition on adult content, and Square similarly disallows transactions involving mature content, including literature, imagery, and other media. Visa and Mastercard also impose broad content-related rules and retain discretion to block transactions they deem harmful to their brands. While Stripe and Square avoid adult entertainment altogether, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard have long permitted some adult-content transactions.
And yet, despite these longstanding policies, adult-themed games continued to exist on major services. The emergence of sweeping age verification regimes created precisely the conditions under which fringe religious advocacy groups could advance longstanding censorship goals by targeting payment processors.
As a result, Manga Planet ceased operations on March 31, 2026. Manga Planet is a licensed digital manga subscription service that hosts six genres of manga, only two of which include explicit material. Last year, Stripe terminated Manga Planet’s account for hosting 18+ content, a decision that immediately canceled all user subscriptions and made continued operations impossible. The outcome is especially striking given Stripe’s public partnership with Bookshop.org, an indie bookseller that distributes a wide range of materials—including explicit romance novels such as Fifty Shades of Grey and other adult-themed works, as well as NSFW manga.
In short, payment-processing chokepoints have moved from the margins to the mainstream. Backed by an increasingly hostile regulatory environment, they now offer ideologues a powerful and largely unaccountable tool for suppressing lawful online content.
Author Bio: Elizabeth Grossman is a 2L at Akron Law and works as an RA in the Intellectual Property Department focusing on policy and First Amendment issues and is a legal intern at TechFreedom. Prior to law school, she got her Masters in Esports Management at Miami University.
AI DISCLAIMER: AI was used to make organizational & grammatical changes to this work.