The recent itch.io shadow-ban is the latest in an ongoing troubling pattern: payment processors wield unprecedented power to censor legal romance and adult content across the internet. What happened to itch.io on July 24, 2025 represents just the latest escalation in a decade-long campaign by Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal to control what readers can buy and authors can sell, even when the content is entirely legal.
The Platform Problem: It Goes Beyond Itch.io
Amazon's Romance Shadow-Banning History
Amazon pioneered the romance censorship playbook years before itch.io's recent crackdown. Still haunting many in the Romance community, in March 2018, Amazon quietly implemented a shadow ban that removed romance and erotica titles from bestseller rankings while keeping them available for purchase. It was a strategy almost identical to itch.io's current approach.
Even E.L. James' "Grey" (published via Random House) was not spared, losing its overall ranking despite being categorized as romance rather than erotica. Amazon later claimed the change was "inadvertent" and restored rankings after 36 hours of negative publicity. This incident set a precedent, demonstrating the indiscriminate nature of the censorship.
Romance authors continue facing arbitrary bans on Amazon today.
Books flagged as adult content become unsearchable in general results, a common fear for many indie authors. Most recently, a 2024 category overhaul reduced author selections while implementing algorithmic suppression. In the meantime, concerns grow that queer content gets flagged as 'explicit' even when it's PG because Amazon's automated systems will flag "gay" for seemingly random reasons.
Steam's Payment Processor Ultimatum
Steam's recent policy changes mirror itch.io's experience, revealing the coordinated nature of pressure from payment processors. On July 16, 2025, just days before itch.io's shadow-ban, Steam introduced "Rule 15," which prohibits "Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content."
The rule essentially gives payment processors veto power over content. Valve notes that "particular care should be taken with 'certain kinds of adult only content" without defining what that means. Approximately 100 adult games were immediately removed from Steam following this policy change.
The Payment Processor Power Structure
Operation Choke Point: Government-Sanctioned Financial Censorship
The current wave of payment processor censorship has its roots in government policy. From 2013 to 2017, the Obama administration ran "Operation Choke Point," which investigated banks and targeted businesses deemed "high risk for fraud and money laundering," including legal industries like firearms, payday lending, and pornography.
Critics accused the operation of bypassing due process by pressuring financial institutions to cut off legal businesses without proving wrongdoing. The program was officially ended in 2017, but its impact on adult content creators persists. The precedent established during Operation Choke Point continues to influence how banks and payment processors treat adult content today.
Mastercard's 2021 Adult Content Crackdown
Mastercard dramatically escalated payment processor censorship in 2021 with new requirements targeting adult content websites. The policy requires banks to ensure that sellers have documented consent, as well as age and identity verification, for all individuals involved in the content before processing payments.
This decision had a significant ripple effect, hurting many performers who used the platform as a source of income and forcing creators to seek other, riskier sources of revenue. The impact of such decisions is not limited to the platforms themselves, but extends to the individuals who rely on them for their livelihoods.
The Current Censorship Campaign
The 2025 wave of bans stems from a coordinated pressure campaign by advocacy groups targeting payment processors. Collective Shout, an Australian anti-pornography organization, organized individuals to send emails to payment processor CEOs about adult games on Steam and itch.io, using an extreme example game to argue that both platforms hosted illegal content. (Proving the power of collective action regardless of the collective's intention.)
Industry-Wide Impact on Romance Readers and Authors
The High-Risk Label Trap
Payment processors typically categorize romance and adult content as "high-risk," leading to systematic discrimination. Adult websites are classified as high-risk businesses due to the nature of their content and the potential for regulatory and reputational risks.
The "high-risk" label can extend beyond obvious adult content to encompass large segments of the travel industry, furniture sellers, electronic retailers hosted by Amazon, eBay, or Google, as well as magazine subscriptions. Businesses that rely on payment processing often have to pay a steep risk premium, and sometimes, it can be highway robbery.
Financial Discrimination Against Authors
Authors and content creators face systematic banking discrimination far beyond platform restrictions. Sex workers and adult content creators report having 'their accounts shut down after years of having accounts,' leading to 'significant financial hardship.' This discrimination not only affects their livelihood but also their ability to express themselves and share their stories. The injustice of this financial discrimination should be a call to empathy for all who value freedom of expression and the markets. (This is really bringing out my old-school Republican upbringing. I hope y'all are shaking your heads at the irony like I am.)
Bank employees have been documented telling customers that they do not do business with adult entertainers and suggesting that sex workers use payment processors like Venmo and CashApp as an intermediary to protect their bank accounts from getting flagged. However, these alternative services also discriminate against adult content creators.
Platform Consolidation Amplifies Censorship
The concentration of payment processing among a few major companies amplifies the effects of censorship across all platforms. Payment processors have effectively become unelected censorship boards with the power to strangle entire categories of legal content by threatening to cut off the economic infrastructure that platforms depend on.
Diversification and political activism are necessary for resistance. By diversifying payment options and advocating for policy changes, we can empower authors and content creators to continue sharing their stories.
Legal and Constitutional Concerns
First Amendment Implications
Legal experts argue that payment processor censorship violates First Amendment protections. A federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that pressuring credit card companies, such as Visa and Mastercard, to stop doing business with speech-protected websites violates their First Amendment rights.
Constitutional law analysts note that Operation Choke Point targeted industries seemingly accorded constitutional protection against undue burdens, such as pornography (generally covered by the First Amendment), and firearms (protected by the Second Amendment).
The ACLU's Position
The American Civil Liberties Union has taken a strong stance against payment processor discrimination. The ACLU argues that using financial products and services like Mastercard and PayPal… can make or break a sex worker's ability to work and survive in our increasingly virtual society.
ACLU advocates emphasize that economic freedom, healthcare, and other fundamental rights are inaccessible when politicians and corporations don't treat sex work like they would any other job.
What This Means for Romance Readers and Authors
Immediate Platform Risks
Every platform hosting romance and adult content now faces similar pressure. The coordinated nature of recent bans suggests this is just the beginning. Platforms that host romance content, such as Kindle Unlimited, Patreon, and Gumroad, could face similar ultimatums from payment processors.
Key vulnerability indicators:
Platforms dependent on Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal
Those hosting user-generated adult content
Services with search and discovery features for NSFW material
International platforms are subject to varying regional laws
Long-Term Industry Implications
The romance publishing industry faces potential fragmentation and increased costs.
Authors may need to:
Diversify across multiple platforms and payment methods
Accept higher transaction fees from specialized "high-risk" processors
Build direct-payment relationships with readers
Navigate increasingly complex age verification requirements
Readers face:
Reduced content discovery on mainstream platforms
Need to follow creators across multiple services
Potential for content to disappear without warning
Higher costs as platforms pass along payment processing fees
Building Resistance
Growing legal and political pushback provides hope for change. Recent petitions against payment processor censorship have gained significant traction, with one ACLU petition gathering thousands of signatures demanding that MasterCard and Visa stop seeking to censor legal fictional content.
New payment systems, such as the EU's WERO and the US Federal Reserve's FedNOW, could shift the decision of who determines if your business can process transactions from those four operators to the over 10,000 banks and payment providers, offering much more choice.
The Bottom Line
Payment processor censorship represents the most recent significant threat to romance and adult content. What began with Operation Choke Point has evolved into a systematic campaign targeting Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, aiming to control legal content through financial pressure.
The itch.io shadow ban, Amazon's ranking manipulations, and Steam's new restrictions reveal a coordinated effort far beyond any single platform. For romance readers and authors, this creates an urgent need to diversify platforms, support alternative payment systems, and engage in the growing political movement to limit the overreach of payment processors.
The fight for the future of romance content is ultimately a battle over who controls the financial infrastructure of the internet and whether legal content can survive when payment processors become moral arbiters.
A Special Note
Please comment or DM me with any questions or corrections. I’m a one-lady show and topics like these are too important to worry about hurting people’s pride. I’d rather host correct information than feel “right.”
Housekeeping
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Thank you for sharing this! This kind of stuff makes my blood boil
Thank you for putting this information together! The romance community didn't raise enough concerns when legit sex work was being targeted. There were several LGBTQ+ creators that were swept up in that as well. Texas has long been the testing grounds for these bans. Now we are seeing international groups organizing to impact sweeping changes because these payment processors are global, and they act globally. Literally making it unsafe for sex workers, and by extension LGBTQ+ folks, in many countries to make a living from their writing/social media.
Platforms need to understand that they have power in their communities that they've built. They can work with the communities to stand up and fight back, or betray them like Itch.io did, capitulating without even pushing back.
What it will mean in the future is that platforms will in fact have a revenue loss. Small creators that had more reach will have to implement their own shops and hope that payment processors don't cut them off.
OR those of us deemed unacceptable by our governments will end up going to ground. The Chinese government's crackdown of LGBTQ+ content creators and writers are additional warning signs of shifting government enforcement and surveillance on marginalized communities.
What's even more stark, given how much romance genre makes every year, is the silence of traditional publishing and their complacency in this whole matter, especially around banning books - which were considered explicit - leading to a more broad ban of books by marginalized communities (fiction and non-fiction alike).
It is the best and the worst time to be a marginalized author/writer. Like Toni Morrison said:
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."