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.”
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.”
If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents—simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)
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.
Then there’s British journalist Toby Young.
Young 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.
On September 15, 2022, PayPal informed Young that his personal account had been suspended. A few minutes later, he learned the Daily Skeptic’s account had also been shut down. A few minutes after that, he learned the Free Speech Union’s account was defunct.
In under a half-hour, he’d been cut off from the financial-services world.
“I was appalled when I discovered PayPal had suspended my accounts,” Young told me. “The authoritarian, social-credit system developed in China was now being implemented in the West, except instead of ideological compliance being enforced by the Chinese Communist Party, it was being policed by a woke capitalist corporation.”
Full article:
www.thefp.com/p/what-the-hell-happened-to-paypal
h/t thinking…