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Financial Companies as Censors: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Reading of EFF's Transaction Denied

A piggy bank with its mouth taped shut, representing payment rails severed by financial intermediaries
Image from EFF Deeplinks article Former EFF Activism Director's New Book, Transaction Denied, Explores What Happens When Financial Companies Act like Censors (EFF Financial Censorship banner library), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

On 9 May 2017, the cross-border electronic payment service PayPal closed all domestic transaction functions in Taiwan. Two PayPal Taiwan accounts could no longer send money to each other. Cross-border transfers kept working. The streamer economy took the worst hit. Twitch Cheer, YouTube Super Chat, StreamLabs, and NightDev — tools that processed local audience tips through PayPal — went dark on the same day. Small organizations and independent media that relied on PayPal for domestic flows lost a payment rail overnight8.

The legal trigger was Article 3, Paragraph 1 of Taiwan's Electronic Payment Institution Management Act, passed in 2015. PayPal chose not to apply for a license and closed domestic functions instead9. Nearly nine years later, the U.S. online payment processor Stripe still does not allow individuals or companies in Taiwan to register. Stripe is the credit card collection layer behind Substack, many subscription SaaS products, and many open source sponsorship pages. Individual creators in Taiwan have to first register a U.S. LLC to use it10.

In Taiwan's payment conversation, these two facts have usually been filed under "compliance trade-offs" or "market size." EFF's former Activism Director Rainey Reitman, in her April 2026 book Transaction Denied12, compiles cases from 2012 onward across the U.S. and the Middle East. Stacked together, the cases reveal a cross-region, cross-issue pattern that's been running for more than a decade. Taiwan's two events belong in that record. So do parallel events from Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia, which Reitman's book — focused on U.S. and Middle Eastern material — does not yet cover.

What Reitman compiles: a decade-plus of financial censorship cases

Rainey Reitman spent 11 years at EFF, serving as Activism Director and later Chief Program Officer, before leaving in 2022. She co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation and chairs its board11. Half of the author royalties from this book go to that foundation. In EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn's introduction on Deeplinks1, she writes: "Rainey is a storyteller and an activist. She uncovers hidden systems of power that shape our choices, our voice, and ultimately our society."

The bulk of the book documents cases that actually happened. The 2012 anti-book-censorship coalition EFF led pushed back PayPal's content restrictions on the self-publishing platform Smashwords3. The same year, the Nifty Archive Alliance case saw Stripe cut payment rails for the LGBTQ erotica writing community that had been running since 1992. After advocacy, Stripe reversed course4.

The 2021 Larry Brandt case had no such reversal. Brandt is a U.S. individual donor who used PayPal for nearly 20 years to send small recurring donations to Tor relay operators around the world. One day in 2021, PayPal shut down his account with no warning, no appeals process, and no one able to explain why5. Tor is one of the anonymity tools the anoni.net community documents and many readers actually use, and Tor relay operators around the world depend on exactly this kind of individual sponsorship. Translate the case to a context English-language readers in Asia recognize: if you've been sending regular cross-border support to Hong Kong media in exile, Burmese independent journalists, Ukrainian grassroots groups, or any cross-border human rights project, the experience is the same. Small amount, clear purpose, multi-year history — none of it grants immunity.

When a multi-year small-amount donor has a single fresh donation flagged as suspicious and the account terminated, the claim that "financial institutions aren't censors" gets harder to defend. More cases line up: a U.S. citizen who taught Persian poetry had PayPal and Venmo accounts frozen, a New York Muslim city councilmember was blocked because a transfer memo named a Bangladeshi restaurant, and Palestinian users across an entire region were locked out of PayPal6.

Reitman points out that this pattern works long-term because the underlying assumption — financial institutions are neutral conduits — is widely accepted. In practice, the combination of overcautious compliance-driven risk avoidance, service terms vague to the point of unpredictability, automated decisions with no human review interface, and no functioning appeals path for those cut off produces an outcome that's effectively the same as content removal7. EFF has tracked dozens of these cases over the past decade-plus, faster than any legislature has moved on the issue.

From account blocks to platform content policy: a new chain of cases in 2025-2026

The cases Reitman compiles mostly center on financial institutions cutting off individual or organizational accounts. From 2025 onward, a different mode of pressure has emerged. Payment processors use contract terms and fine threats to push platforms into revising their own content policies. The target has shifted from individual accounts to entire platform-level policies.

In February 2025, Mastercard and Visa pressured multiple Japanese cultural-industry platforms, forcing services to adjust what they sold. Japan's domestic card brand JCB and various stored-value mechanisms absorbed some of the impact, allowing the affected services to barely scrape through13. In July of the same year, Steam (Valve) confirmed it had removed adult games from its store under payment-processor pressure14. In March 2026, U.S. FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson issued warning letters to PayPal, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard on "debanking American consumers" — the first time a U.S. federal regulator publicly framed this pattern as an issue15. In May 2026, Kickstarter revised its content guidelines to ban several categories of NSFW content, with Stripe identified as the pressure source behind the policy change16.

From individual accounts severed, to entire markets shut out, to platform content policies rewritten by proxy, the reach of financial intermediaries has expanded steadily over the past decade-plus.

Taiwan as case study: PayPal's domestic shutdown, Stripe's continued closure

Read PayPal's 2017 domestic shutdown and Stripe's continued closure through Reitman's lens, and both look like the same thing: financial intermediaries unilaterally deciding who can collect money on their networks.

PayPal's case is "compliance-driven domestic shutdown." After Taiwan's Electronic Payment Institution Management Act took effect in 2015, PayPal opted out of applying for a license and closed domestic payment functions. Cross-border functions stayed. Local third-party processors like ECPay, NewebPay, and Pay2Go filled the gap. In hindsight, this localized Taiwan's domestic payment infrastructure further. But applications that had built on PayPal for local Taiwan flows needed an alternative the same day8.

Stripe's case is "the market was never opened." Individuals and companies in Taiwan cannot apply for a Stripe account directly. The common workaround is to register a U.S. LLC, apply for an EIN, open a U.S. bank account, and operate Stripe under the U.S. corporate name10. That route carries its own compliance cost — failure to file IRS Form 5472 starts at a US$25,000 penalty — and the threshold is high for individual creators. In October 2025, Stripe Tax began supporting Taiwan remote-seller tax registration12, but Stripe Tax handles tax registration only. Taiwan users still cannot open a Stripe payment account.

Neither is "censorship" in the traditional sense, but for advocacy organizations, independent media, and creators, the effect is censorship-shaped. Depending on cross-border payment rails means the primary collection channel can disappear at any time, or may have never existed. Domestic third-party processors fill some of the gap, but cross-border collection, international convergence on KYC, and the gradual rollout of Taiwan's Virtual Asset Service Provider Act are tightening simultaneously. The institutional framing is documented in Mandarin at Taiwan VASP Act 2026 (zh-TW page, en version pending). Organization-side responses sit under Anonymous Donation Channels for Advocacy Organizations (zh-TW page, en version pending).

Sinophone Asia-Pacific: the same mechanisms with regionally specific outcomes

Reitman's book doesn't expand into Asia. But the four elements she identifies — overcautious compliance-driven risk avoidance, vague service terms, automated decisions, and absent appeals — map cleanly onto specific events across the Sinophone Asia-Pacific. The differences are who drives the cutoff and what the motivation is.

  • Mainland China: Account freezes after mandatory real-name registration on WeChat Pay and Alipay are a long-running phenomenon. Transfers touching sensitive topics, cross-border collection, or inbound flows from outside the country trigger "protective freezes" on accounts. The product of state censorship layered onto platform compliance — the mechanism Reitman documents in U.S. cases, with an additional policy-driven layer on top.
  • Hong Kong: After the 2019–2020 protests, HSBC, Stripe, PayPal, and others faced a mix of international due diligence and local compliance pressure. Accounts belonging to pro-democracy organizations, independent media, and overseas Hong Konger fundraising platforms have been frozen or terminated repeatedly. Domestic regulation and external due diligence tightened during the same window.
  • Macau: AML compliance pressure from the gaming industry spills over to ordinary users. Cross-border small transfers easily trigger EDD (enhanced due diligence), and independent media or human rights workers find their cross-border collection options thinning.
  • Singapore: The Monetary Authority of Singapore's Payment Services Act and the 2023 onward tightening of crypto/DPT licensing make it difficult for startups, independent creators, and cross-border NGOs to access stable collection infrastructure inside the country. Some foreign providers have stopped accepting Singapore registrants outright.
  • Malaysia: Bank Negara Malaysia's convergence on e-wallet KYC and existing foreign exchange controls make it hard for domestic users to receive small cross-border donations. Independent media and human rights NGOs need to route cross-border flows through longer paths.

Taiwan's situation — PayPal closed in 2017, Stripe never opened — belongs to the same family of mechanisms. The Taiwan payment conversation simply tends to file these under "compliance trade-offs" rather than identify them as financial censorship.

For English-language readers approaching this from outside the region, the takeaway is that Reitman's framework — financial intermediaries as de facto censors — extends well into the Sinophone Asia-Pacific. The U.S. and Middle Eastern cases in her book are well-documented and serve as the global anchor. The Sinophone Asia-Pacific cases summarized above are not yet catalogued at the same level of detail. That gap is exactly where the anoni.net community wants to contribute.

What the community wants to advance next

The community set anonymous payments as one of three 2026 focus areas. The original framing was "individual financial flows are an independent dimension of metadata." Reitman's book reframes the question: financial flows can be actively wielded as a censorship tool, and the risk is not abstract for advocacy organizations, independent media, or creators.

The existing Why Anonymous Payments Matter anchor (zh-TW page, en version pending) addresses payment flows as passively observed. This post addresses payment flows as actively cut off. Reading both together gives the fuller picture.

Next steps planned include adding a "cross-border sanctions and over-compliance side effects" section to Taiwan VASP Act 2026, and selecting 5–8 EFF Financial Censorship articles from the past decade-plus for curated translation. Tracking the progress of alternative payment systems is also part of the picture. Europe's European Payments Initiative and Brazil's Pix are two existing implementations1718, though payment rails are heavily regulated in every jurisdiction and building a scaled alternative is not cheap. The Anonymous Payments Research Track (zh-TW page, en version pending) is where the community discussion and translation backlog live.

For English-language readers who want the underlying material, EFF's Financial Censorship issue page{target="blank"} is the best entry point. _Transaction Denied is available from Beacon Press.

  • Internet Freedom: why the broader internet freedom frame matters for payment infrastructure
  • LGBTQ+ scenarios: a scenario page covering anonymous social participation, which intersects with payment privacy
  • Existing English coverage is sparse on payments. Several Mandarin anchor pages are linked above and will be ported to English on the roadmap.

  1. Former EFF Activism Director's New Book, Transaction Denied, Explores What Happens When Financial Companies Act like Censors - EFF Deeplinks ↩↩

  2. Transaction Denied book page - Beacon Press ↩

  3. Free Speech Coalition Calls on PayPal to Back Off Misguided Book Censorship Policy - EFF Deeplinks ↩

  4. Payment Provider Stripe Upholds Free Speech, Reactivates Nifty Archives - EFF Deeplinks ↩

  5. PayPal Shuts Down Long-Time Tor Supporter with No Recourse - EFF Deeplinks ↩

  6. Why Is PayPal Denying Service to Palestinians? - EFF Deeplinks ↩

  7. Financial Censorship issue page - EFF ↩

  8. PayPal withdraws, Taiwan local payment platforms rise - TechNews (in Mandarin) ↩↩

  9. Streamer donations affected? PayPal announces end to Taiwan domestic transactions - Bahamut GNN (in Mandarin) ↩

  10. Essential guide for Taiwan creators: platform fees and remittance back to Taiwan - most.tw (in Mandarin) ↩↩

  11. Rainey Reitman - EFF Staff (11 years at EFF, co-founder and current board chair of the Freedom of the Press Foundation) ↩

  12. Adds support for remote sellers in Taiwan to Stripe Tax - Stripe Changelog (2025-10-29) ↩

  13. Mastercard and VISA's Offensive Against Japanese Cultural Industries - Gea-Suan Lin's BLOG (in Mandarin) ↩

  14. Steam (Valve) confirms adult games removed under payment processor pressure - Gea-Suan Lin's BLOG (in Mandarin) ↩

  15. FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson Issues Warning Letters to CEOs of PayPal, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard About Debanking American Consumers - U.S. Federal Trade Commission ↩

  16. Kickstarter Is The Latest Platform Seemingly Forced To Ban Adult Content By Payment Processors - Kotaku ↩

  17. European Payments Initiative - Wikipedia ↩

  18. Pix (payment system) - Wikipedia ↩