Should a December day be too warm for you, you may chill your blood by reading “What the Hell Happened to PayPal?”, which recounts incidents in which the country’s most widely used method of transmitting electronic payments has canceled users’ accounts for reasons that it declines to disclose but that apparently have much to do with punishing wrongthink.
One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”
There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy.
They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”
In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”
Then, toward the bottom: “If you have funds in your PayPal balance, we’ll hold it for up to 180 days. After that period, we’ll email you with information on how to access your funds.”
Noting the irony that PayPal was founded by eccentric libertarians like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (they sold it to eBay, which later spun it off to a new public company), the author summarizes thus:
But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.
Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above.
You may or may not sympathize with the article’s examples of individuals banned from PayPal. One is an entrepreneur whose product has been criticized (justly or not, I have no way of knowing; I had never heard of it before) as overpriced and underperforming. One is a biologist who publishes a newsletter “dedicated to providing weekly news, articles, and other content about the biology of sex and sex differences, gender ideology, Critical Social Justice, free speech, and related topics”. One “is the founder of the Free Speech Union, an advocacy group, and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Skeptic, which has questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines”.
Let’s suppose arguendo that each of these characters is engaged in some variety of unsavory conduct that merits expulsion from the electronic economy. Such people exist. I don’t think that there would be many objections to banning fentanyl dealers from PayPal. But does it follow that PayPal should sit as unaccountable, unappealable judge and jury?
The company reportedly told the banned biologist “that, if he wanted to know why he’d been ejected, ‘an attorney or law enforcement officer must submit a legal subpoena.’” That response suggests that it isn’t very confident that its reasons will stand up to scrutiny. Refusing to disclose until and unless the former customer files a lawsuit and survives a motion to dismiss is a tactic for making complaints too expensive to pursue.
Yes, PayPal is a private company, and other payment apps exist. I have no proposal for compelling it to be a fair-minded intermediary rather than an enforcer of woke ideology. I only note this sign that an American version of the “social credit” system that suffocates the Communist-controlled regions of China is coming, softly on little cat feet, to a country near you.
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