Thread by @michaeljknowles

Hi, @Stripe. Are we still doing this de-banking thing? Was it something I said?

If we say that men can’t be women, if we donate to pro-life charities, if we oppose two men buying eggs, renting wombs, and commoditizing babies…

Does that come at the cost of de-banking?

2/ X pays its monetized users through Stripe. Six months ago, my payments abruptly stopped, and I began receiving this notice even though I had a perfectly functional Stripe account.

3/ An innocent mistake, I assumed! I reached out to Stripe and “Leigh,” a delightfully unhelpful Stripe employee. Leigh confirmed a “hold” on my account but said I had to contact X for the content of the “hold” email they sent to X, despite the fact that Stripe sent the email.

4/ While I worked on reaching out to X, I called Stripe. They confirmed that my payouts were “temporarily disabled” but again insisted they would only share the details of this “hold” with X—not me, whose money they were holding.

5/ Stripe says they began this effort in October 2024. I wonder what was going on in October 2024 that might have emboldened payment processors to de-bank conservatives? Could it possibly have been my vocal support of someone they had already tried to de-bank?

6/ I asked Stripe what happened in October. They admitted it looked “confusing” and said it would be better to contact X “to rule out if your speculation is correct.” But I wasn’t speculating. I only asked what Stripe had said to X about placing a “hold” on my account.

7/ It’s now July 2025—nine months since the “hold” email and six since Stripe officially cut access to my X payouts. I’ve yet to receive any clear answer. They don’t deny that it’s their hold or their “temporary” disabling of my account. They just tell me to ask X. So I did.

8/ X checked. They confirmed the issue was with Stripe and kindly directed me to Stripe’s policy restrictions, saying I should check to see if the policies might “pertain” to my account.

9/ Since I haven’t been distributing fake IDs, selling drugs, or jamming telecommunications equipment, it seems Stripe concluded that my political opinions had somehow violated their policy against encouraging “unlawful violence” against certain demographics.

10/ Of course, I’ve never encouraged “unlawful violence” against anyone. But in the absence of any real explanation from Stripe, I can only conclude that they’ve now decided that certain conservative opinions amount to “illegal” activity.

11/ This is not a small problem. Stripe handles more than a trillion dollars in payments every year. Millions of businesses rely on their tech. If they can put a “hold” on my money for no reason, they can do it to anyone. Is that the plan @patrickc?