Payment apps are watching what you say (feat. Rainey Reitman)

About this episode

The episode discusses the implications of financial censorship by payment apps and banks, featuring insights from digital rights activist Rainey Reitman.

In the United States today, you can have your bank account closed, your credit cards cancelled, and your online payments revoked for any number of crimes, like funding terrorism, engaging in money laundering, or violating sanctions. Sensible, right? Well, you can also face financial ruin for teaching poetry. That’s what seemingly happened to a Persian poetry teacher from Detroit whose accounts were flagged for “sanctions violations” because his students wrote “Persian classes” in their Venmo memos. There’s also the story about the naked yoga practitioners who lost their payment processor for 60 days, forced to rebuild a subscriber list from scratch. And we can’t forget the San Diego cannabis journalist cut off from Stripe—and from a paid Substack newsletter—because of the payment platform’s rules that prohibit the promotion of the sale of cannabis. This is “financial censorship,” and it often happens when a bank, credit card provider, or payment app decides that a customer is too risky to serve. But “risky” doesn’t always mean “illegal,” and when a major financial institution errs towards caution about what a customer is saying, advocating for, representing, or publishing, a lot…

People in this episode

Host: Malwarebytes

Guest: Rainey Reitman

Topics covered

• financial censorship
• payment apps
• digital rights
• banking issues
• freedom of speech

Keywords

• financial censorship
• payment apps
• Rainey Reitman
• banking
• freedom of speech
• Venmo
• Stripe
• cannabis

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Malwarebytes

Books & works: Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech

Places: United States, Detroit, San Diego

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