Read this piece from Monster Romance Reviews for an excellent summary of how NSFW content creators have gotten marginalized by payment processors.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
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.
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.
The piece outlines how Operation Chokepoint, an Obama-era project targeting bank fraud and businesses at risk for money laundering, influenced how banks and payment processors continue to treat adult content today. It explains Mastercard’s 2021 crackdown on adult content and Collective Shout's recent action.
It’s essential for several reasons. First, it helps NSFW content creators understand the root causes of events like the recent Itch.io crackdown. It’s also crucial to know where our allies lie. The same corporate and government actions that impair OnlyFans performers also harm romance authors.
The history laid out in this piece makes one thing clear: censorship doesn’t always come from politicians or pearl-clutching watchdogs. More often, it’s enforced quietly by the companies that handle our transactions. That’s why it’s so important to recognize that we’re not fighting these battles alone.
The same pressure that stifles romance authors also hits indie game developers, performers, and adult comics creators. If we want to push back, we need to start seeing our community not as a niche, but as a coalition — artists, writers, and performers across genres who are all facing the same chokehold.
Our strength lies in connection. The more we build alliances across these creative fields, the harder it becomes for payment processors to quietly decide what art the world is allowed to see.