Essay by Eric Worrall
Paypal stirred a firestorm over an apparent threat to pull money from the accounts of people whose views they don’t like, before apparently backing down.
PayPal Reverses Course, Says Company Will Not Seize Money From People for Promoting ‘Misinformation’
By Zachary Stieber
October 8, 2022 Updated: October 8, 2022PayPal on Oct. 8 said it was not implementing a new policy that would have enabled the company to seize money from users who allegedly promote “misinformation” or “hate.”
“An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy,” a PayPal spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused,” the spokesperson added.
The company in September announced that it was amending its acceptable use policy, or AUP.
The policy, due to take effect in November, said that users may not use PayPal to for the “sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable, (b) depict or appear to depict nudity, sexual or other intimate activities, (c) depict or promote illegal drug use, (d) depict or promote violence, criminal activity, cruelty, or self-harm (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) (f) present a risk to user safety or wellbeing, (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation, or are unlawful, (h) infringe the privacy, intellectual property rights, or other proprietary rights of any party, or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.”
For each violation, PayPal says users are subject to repercussions. Those include “liquated damages” of $2,500 per violation. The money will be taken directly from a person’s PayPal account.
…
Read more: https://www.theepochtimes.com/paypal-reverses-course-says-company-will-not-seize-money-for-promoting-misinformation_4783827.html
Paypal is widely perceived as a woke, climate alarmist anti-conservative organisation. Shutting down and disrupting the activities of law abiding groups who entered into an agreement with Paypal in good faith is bad enough, but arbitrarily “fining” people for holding views Paypal considers misinformation would be an even more outrageous attack on free speech and liberty.
WUWT will be keeping an eye on this issue. Paypal claim the apparent threat to arbitrarily “fine” people whose views they believe are misinformation was all a big misunderstanding, but frankly I don’t trust them.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“frankly I don’t trust them” and you are not alone in that. Of course, it would be entirely illegal to seize account holders funds — for any reason except as ordered by a court of law.
I cancelled my Paypal account today. Where do they get off telling anyone that they are our arbiters of truth and acceptable information.
I too have just closed my PayPal account. It amazes me that people running (what was) such a good business can get so blind so fast.
Aka what happens when the idiots are running the asylum.
It never was a good business. Search the internet for paypalsucks. You will then find out what they got up to.
Regards
Climate Heretic
Get “woke” go broke. The more we make it true, the more it is true.
PayPal, infected with wacko leftists, is just dancing to the tune of the White House posse that took over the federal government after the most fraudulent 2020 Election in decades, and gave us open borders and no oil-leasing.
That posse usurped a mandate to rule to which it is not legally entitled.
The hand-maiden, traditional US media are all-in with this, to protect their “access” for survival
This came into my mailbox just as I went to cancel my PayPal account today: https://youtu.be/ZNy3-e9wk7s
I no longer use PayPal. They wanted me to agree to some financial stipulation a few years ago (don’t remember what it was), that I disagree with.
Anthony please explain why you continue to use Paypal as an interceptor of my credit card donation? I probably know the answer…it stifles by contributions to WUWT and any other organization.
Rumble has a competitive platform that offers an alternative to PP.
https://paralleleconomies.com/
Check it out!
If such “fines” are listed in the Terms of Service document, and you are using their service, you are assumed to have agreed to the terms of the TOS.
I’m pretty sure the courts would permit such deductions.
Not necessarily- you have a contract of adhesion, meaning one party was given no opportunity to draft or negotiate terms, merely to say yes or no, and a liquidated damages clause, which are generally subject to scrutiny as to whether they bear any rational relationship to actual damages. These two factors together would make a tough sell to most courts.
IIRC, this would be a nonstarter in some jurisdictions.
Not in the UK. If a term in a consumer contract unfairly “helps” one side to the detriment of the other, then it’s unfair and there’s a law to prevent that. It wouldn’t get through a UK Court.
I’m sorry MarkW, but I have trouble believing that still holds when people are being thrown in jail for saying that transwomen are real women. Your justice system is being parasitized every bit as much as ours.
Canceled my PayPal account a while ago. You don’t need them for anything, they’re just a convenience.
For a while, at least for me, they weren’t even a convenience, but an extreme inconvenience. They blocked my cards from being used even outside of a PayPal account for any retailer using PayPal.
I tried closing my account today, but they were closed for the holiday. I’ll try again tomorrow first thing.
Regards,
Bob Tisdale
I don’t think they are closed for holidays. I tried to use my account to pay for something simple the other day. It refused to work.
PP are in trouble.
I’ll be closing my account soon to help the process along. This is a taste of digital banking. I hope people make the connection.
Good luck with closing your account, HotScot. I just spent an hour+ on the phone with PayPal, trying to close my account. I now have to wait 5 days for them to manually confirm the account, and then call them back. All this for a chump-change balance…that I refuse to leave there.
Regards,
Bob
One of the beauties about owing people money (I took a small 0% loan out with them last year) is that they get to worry if I pay them back. I don’t leave any money with them, it’s simply a payment platform for me.
I have only used Venmo and Zelle and no longer will use Venmo. I only put money in as I used it. Never held any balance in there…Oh hell no.
“Error” my eye! This was a trial balloon.
If someone senior is not shortly fired, boycotting PayPal would be reasonable. Vigilante fascism is still fascism.
As someone else who said similar pointed out –
things like that get “scrutinised with a very intense scrut” by an army of lawyers before release
Well, that’s the thing. Their boilerplate is written by a team of high priced fancy lawyers. They KNOW what’s in it. There are no mistakes in the publicly released boilerplate. It’s not like it was written by some intern.
Yup. Paypal screwed up massively – it’s fairly obvious that they were jumping on a bandwagon and severely underestimated how many customers were against that move.
Embarrassed much?
I think it was also the amount they were taking out that shocked people into action.
“…all a big misunderstanding…”
Yeah, seriously, my cat walked across my keyboard and accidently typed that AUP and then I slipped and banged by head against the keyboard and accidently hit send.
Seriously, all just a big misunderstanding; and we will never try anything like this again.
No one will get fired – this initiative comes from one of their Chinese technicians – probably at the behest of Xi. From reading around I’ve found that most of the big tech platforms use Chinese subcontractors for coding and the like.
PayPal must think they also own the science … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRR9AMum9A0
I’ve managed to avoid them almost from the start. I had awful difficulty because I’d just moved to Australia, but my credit cards were UK based. PayPain (as I dubbed them) decided to refuse my use of said cards.
When I tried to use them through PayPain in the UK, they refused because they were linked to another account (despite me taking them off). In fact, even if I used my credit cards on any system that used PayPain, they refused my transaction, because the card was linked to a PayPain account, and they weren’t able (through PayPain) to use that card outside of the account.
Eventually all related cards were replaced, and I studiously avoided PayPain ever since, having completely stuffed up almost all of my online transactions for years. Never wanted it, never needed it, never actually used it.
I will never, never again use PayPal nor will I never, never, give through Gofund .(or whatever the name is).You have to be careful if you live in Canada as our dictatorship type of Gov’t can pass laws at anytime to legalize seizing your money. They did it once, they may do it again
You’re probably thinking of GoFundMe, which does censor, and possibly Patreon, which also does censor. I recommend as substitutes GiveSendGo and SubscribeStar, respectively.
Kickstarter also censors. There was briefly an alternative, freestartr, that did not, but their credit card companies cut them off for not going along with it.
Patreon have a reputation for gatekeeping and leaning ‘left’.
When I first saw this I thought “What the hell could they have been thinking … how big is this bubble that they all live in?”
Then I remembered that they had an example template to utilize … The country of Canada.
Good luck up there Andre.
The amateur radio club I belong to hosts two swap fests each year. We use Eventbrite, thus PayPal for registration of vendors. In the United States, even to this day amateur radio is a mostly white male hobby. This is due not from anything amateur radio has done. Rather it is a result of racial US military practices generations ago. It was white males in the military that were trained to use and repair electronic equipment. Because of past societal norms it was the sons of white military veterans that learned electronic skills rather than daughters.
What if someone at PayPal were to believe that current amateur radio operators were racist and misogynistic because there aren’t many minorities or women in amateur radio and robbed our PayPal account?
Just ‘identify’ as a black lesbian, and you’ll be golden.
Bingo
Disabled black lesbian if you want to tick all their significant boxes!
PayPal stock tanked today as clients ran for the exits:
paypall is trading at 50 pe ratio
its going to drop a lot more – basic financial valuation should 12-15 x PE
expect drop from 77 to around 30 with next two months
Ooooops!
Get woker go broker. All the way to zero if there is any sanity in this world.
This is a case study in what it looks like when formerly decent companies get woke and do stupid woke things… their stock chart looks just like this as all their users quit them and head for the hills. Bye Bye Paypal!!
If I hadn’t read it here, I would never have known. Cord-cutter bubble.
I ditched their service when it demanded access to my bank account,
Yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy
Send all of big tech a message!!!
Get off facebook and twitter. Lots of other platforms out there. Gab, Truth Social, Parler, Gettr, Minds and Telegraph for example.
Had a Facebook account because I thought I needed it to access another Facebook account. As soon as I found out that I didn’t need it, I tried to close the account. It took about 5 days to find a website that provided the instructions and get quit of Facebook.
Apparently, I still have a PP account. I’ll keep it – I have no balance in the account, and it costs them something (microUSD$ pa?) to maintain it. Plus, the CC number they have is way old – no longer valid.
mebbe look to see who/what shorted the company before the policy was ‘put out there’.
Then look for a connection to that entity and the internal instigator(s).
I wonder how much PayPal stock Elon still has, and if he is intending to sell it to buy Twitter?
Step into the wayback machine to a time when the internet was going to free information and allow everyone to have a voice. What happened?
Silicon Valley let itself get captured by woketards.
Paypal: no
Facebook: no
Twitter: no
LinkedIn: no
Amazon: no
Apple: no
Google (& Android); no
Keep your internet footprint small.
Good idea they are just leftist fronts now which means I can’t trust them at all.
I have NO with all of them and do just fine even with my own forum I don’t allow facecrook and twatter any connections I see their bots crawling around my place lately thus considering banning them which can be done using myBB software.
Amazon is useful.
Good ideals, but the last two practically mean no cell phone. Blackberry isn’t any better.
flip phone, tracfone or consumer cellular or other
Take at look at these alternatives:
Graphene https://grapheneos.org/
Lineage https://lineageos.org/
When my ten year old Samsung dies I am going to look hard at one of these running on a FairFone https://www.fairphone.com/en/
I clicked on your fairphone link … as I have an old dying samsung.
A company that touts sustainability & recycled as the two top selling points shows that they think I am an idiot, and/or that they are already on the bandwagon.
No fairphone for me.
Everyone’s gotta make a buck. Look past the greenwash.
See the modularity and the end-user repairability (is that a word?). Have you ever tried to replace a Samsung battery? I have. I wrecked it.
FairFones might be rubbish–I don’t know. But I like the idea of being able and allowed to fix my own stuff. I think the principle is sound.
Add U-Tube to that list as well – they are owned by google.
PayPal isn’t as important as they think they are.
I buy lots of stuff online. I use Paypal linked to a credit card and my bank account. I only buy and don’t sell. I’ve had no issues and it’s convenient. I use my credit card separately as well.
I’m not promoting them but I’ve had no issues.
The point wasn’t if they provided a service, the point was that the corporate entity went to far and stepped into the realm of deciding what speech of their customers is acceptable. If unacceptable they can then fine you at their discretion up to $2,500. I believe a corporation can under certain circumstances close a customers account, but misinformation is too loose a definition to allow for a $2,500 fine based on their decision. That is why I cancelled my account. Any company that is so controlling and greedy is not going to get my business.
I was amused by their sex thing. It would seem you couldn’t buy the little boy peeing statue Manneken Pis, a Venus de Milo or David statuette or any other print of artwork.
I dismissed the whole thing as nonsense and unenforceable.
Until it actually happens to you. I told them, when they asked why I was closing my account, that I was opposed to censorship and they could “go f**k themselves”. If you keep your account, you are supporting them.
I’m using them. They are not using me.
If you are using them, then they are using you.
So what they attempted to do to the Canadian truckers didn’t set off any alarm bells?
That was a government directive. Banks followed suit. I trust Paypal over the government. Not that I particularly trust Paypal. They are currently a convenience.
My government may decide that because of my name (Russian), they would seize my assets and put me in a concentration camp. That sort of thing happened all over the world in the past. I can stop my account with Paypal but I can’t stop my account with the government.
I am insulated from Paypal because I do most of my purchases through Ebay, though I use Paypal. They don’t know the person I am buying from or what I am purchasing.
I don’t think this deserved to be down-voted. Alexy might be a little complacent about PayPal but he is spot-on about the government role. That is the one we all should absolutely be sh**ing ourselves about.
There is the Canadian thing for one. And in the UK the government has made banks responsible for all kinds of identity checks and scrutiny of account holders. They are subject to severe penalties for errors. The banks are not competent to do the checks properly so they err on the side of safety and refuse services to new and existing customers if they’re not quite sure. My wife was refused signing authority on an account because they didn’t understand her immigration documents. That was a business account and there were other people who could sign, but it was humiliating, incapable of being appealed, and keeps me awake nights wondering what happens when they come after our personal joint account.
If I get back to sleep after that the next thing I wake up screaming about is what happens when the government decides to make banks scrutinise something else I do. They will over-react; we already know they do. We are only ever one dud election away from that now.
The banking regulations in the UK are intended to prevent drug dealers from laundering the profits, and terrorists from acquiring resources. It has worked so well that Britain is now completely free of either ill. /s/
It’s not about convenience, your credit card is just as convenient and doesn’t involve an unnecessary party to the transaction.
It’s about yet another extreme left company telling you what you can think and what you can’t think.
First they came for ….
It is about convenience for me. I can do more with Paypal than I can with my credit card for certain things. I’m not interested in your opinion of what I should and should not do. I’m not marching in the streets with your banner. I follow my own path in life.
Here here. I sort of thought that all folks on WUWT were independent thinkers.
They are /s. The ones who are most vocal about personal freedoms are the ones who won’t accept any opinion apart from their own.
Privacy.com links to your bank account & gives you individual virtual credit cards for each site you want to transact with. You can pause or set transaction limits. Been using it for a couple of years, it is a great alternative to Alt-Left PayPal.
“…your credit card is just as convenient and doesn’t involve an unnecessary party to the transaction.”
Until the banks follow PP with their wokeness and ESG/AUP. Hopefully this sends a huge message to financials that we won’t take this sitting down.
Yet there are online vendors who ONLY work through PP. I’ve gotten around that by calling them (great fun if they are 10 time zones away and aren’t native English speakers) and making other payment arrangements.
I trued using them for cheap credit as they had a 0% offer about a year ago. It’s gone fine and I have a final small payment to make this month.
Such a pity as I would have considered “fining” them the outstanding balance for promoting “unethical financial practices” by refusing to make my monthly payments.
I haven’t borrowed money in over 40 years. I don’t pay interest on my credit cards, I transfer funds before the due date. My last 5 cars and the last 4 residences were ‘cash’ transactions. I live within my means and go without, rather than borrow.
I don’t borrow money either unless it suits me, no one else. A small 0% loan made sense as I figured borrowing rates would rise so I’m costing them money.
I also have a small mortgage I can afford to pay off but it’s fixed at 3% until the loan term is finished in several years. Mortgage rates are already up to 6% in the UK and bound to get higher over the coming year, so if I’m not actually making money, I’m certainly costing them money which gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
I expect over the coming year they will contact me and offer me a deal to pay the mortgage off, at which point I do make money.
I’m cool with it with one provision; a law that says PayPal has to pay treble damages when they’re proven wrong.
Don’t expect to win in court, even if you’ve opted out of PayPal’s binding arbitration.
When your pal says he is going to keep your money you trusted him to hold for you if he doesn’t like what you say, then he is no longer your pal.
PayPal is the reason it is difficult for me to donate to WUWT. I used to have another vector, but that one stopped working. This subject has been discussed here before, but no resolution has been found.
I do not, have not, and never will use PayPal. Anthony et al, please let me know when you develop another way to donate to WUWT. Thank you.
The Heartland Institute has a number of ways to donate. Perhaps you could use their model.
Mike you can Click on the PayPal button there it shows you other donation routes which I used my debit card without a problem.
I see. Thanks. Will do.
The only debit card I use is my ATM card. I use credit cards because I get the float (however insignificant). I pay my CC’s off each month and avoid paying interest.
privacy.com
What would Elon make of this?
He’s already commented on it. If he creates a new PayPal competitor, game is on!
National Review was all over this story two days ago and as soon as I saw what was going on, I canceled my account. Probably should have done it a couple of years ago but I thought it might come in handy in the future. I didn’t expect them to engage in the highly illegal act of theft.
In any case, even if they made a mistake, the fact that they were thinking it and had even produce a document with it in it, makes me think they would have done it if the backlash hadn’t been so quick and so intense.
I can use credit cards and checks and the only reason I had the account was a few places that couldn’t handle credit cards.
If you look at PayPal’s new TOS on their site now, they have not deleted the paragraph that provides for the $2,500 “fines.” They have only deleted the word “misinformation.” The rest of the changes remain intact, so I’m not going back.
Attorney Robert Barnes (vivabarneslaw.locals.com) thinks the “fines” would probably be upheld in court, if you continue to use PayPal after they take effect November 2.
And for those who don’t already know: Venmo and Stripe are not competitors. PayPal owns both of them.
There are a few competing services in that space, or at least folks who say they’ll offer such a service soon. They include paralleleconomy.com, gabpay.com, and glorifi.com. I cannot vouch for them as I have not used them.
Will they enforce the rule with respect to the hatred against whites from BLM?
The otherwise unfit for publication clause is completely open ended and ripe for censorship and abuse.
Although it has been retracted, someone must have written this stuff, so somewhere in PayPal lies the desire to steal funds based on THEIR morality and way of thinking. Just how many breaches of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are violated by this? Articles 1, 2,7,10,17ii,18 and 19 are being violated. Once we allow just ONE human right to be trampled, the rest will follow.
Luckily , GabPay has started. With luck, people will punish PayPal by leaving in droves-we can’t send our business to any organisation that would seek to trample human rights or champion the woke agenda.
To label something “misinformation” without providing clear and compelling reason and evidence for doing so, is in itself misinformation. In addition, if such supporting reason and evidence cannot be demonstrated. it would also seem to constitute a quite deliberate and damaging defamation of anyone whose exercise of free speech has been thus falsely mislabeled. Surely it cannot avoid being seen as other than an obvious intention to not only deprive a person of their constitutional right to free speech but to also defame them, and rob them as well. It is going to be interesting to see how this kind of arbitrarily imposed censorship is going to be treated by the legal system.
That PayPal is trying to dismiss it as simply an “error” only compounds the ill-intent. If PayPal does not fire everyone involved in responsibility for this fiasco, the DoJ should consider whether or not a criminal conspiracy was comprised.
The DOJ is “onside”. Don’t bother wasting a drop of ink or an electron or two on the DOJ.
“seizing money” is an outright theft.
Governments do that all of the time.
Governments and private entities are two different things. The former can “get away” with doing things that would put the later in jail or out of business. And since PayPal is not a government, your comment is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
It’s ‘freedom of speech’, not ‘freedom to steal.’
Given a) “…objectionable” and f) “…present a risk to user health or wellbeing” and g) “are fraudulent…” still remain, and given the redefinition of “fraudulent” to be a synonym of “misinformation” and the word “objectionable” being so vague in that it hypothesizes an emotional reaction from an unknown actor; I fail to see how stripping out “misinformation” is an improvement. In reality it is gaslighting in that they can state that they removed the objectionable material but left in the equivalent language.
The chief problem I see is that the Left has deconstructed so much of the language that a commonly understood term like “facts” has transmogrified into a post-modern paradigm of Your Truth vs My Truth. That is, you can have your “facts” and other people can have their contradictory “facts” (or lies that are presented as assertions). What makes one set of facts “misinformation” has nothing to do with the truth since truth is something long ago jettisoned by the Left in favor of trigger words (emotionally manipulative sounds) and narrative supporting statements.
“Misinformation” is now defined as statements (presented as facts) that may or may not comport with reality or truth, but are antagonistic towards the Party Narrative.
In the summer of 2020, “misinformation” was identifying Ivermectin or HCL as effective against the SARS CoViD-2 – because it went against The Party Narrative that the only recourse was to go home until deathly ill or take the mRNA Clot Shot.
The Party Narrative started as the Vaxx would prevent C19, then when that was proven to be false, the Narrative claimed that the Vaxx would mitigate the health risks, that it would stop the spread, and prevent people from dying. Everyone who said to the contrary was indicted as spreading “misinformation” even though the “misinformation” was true and the Vaxx was in reality more deadly to certain age groups that what it was supposed to combat against.
Paypal, being a Woke fascist company, works in lock-step with The Party Narrative, so determining what is
“misinformation”, “objectionable”, “fraudulent” or “risk to health” information has no relationship to the truth, but only does it or does it not support the Party Narrative.Sorry PayPal, you’ll have to do much better than backtrack to regain trust. Mistake maybe, but not an accident. You’ll have to also go public and denounce your partisan bias and modify your terms of use to reflect it.
They haven’t and they won’t. Their T’s&C’s are much the same as they were just with certain key parts removed but key part’s remain.
They can, in fact, fine you as much as they wan’t for being anti-woke although I don’t understand why anyone would trust them to hold their money. It’s a transaction platform, not a bank.
I understand if this gets deleted but doesn’t their logo look like a customer is about to get DP’d?
Yeah, I’m going to hell but anyone who laughs will keep me company.
Seriously. At some point corporations become speech platforms. When they do they need to be regulated as such.