Government “Likely” to Back New Law to Stop PayPal Closing Accounts for Political Reasons
PayPal and other finance companies could be banned from blocking the accounts of campaign groups for political reasons under a new law being proposed by MPs. The Telegraph has more.
Conservative backbenchers are considering launching an amendment to upcoming financial legislation in the House of Commons that would ban companies from freezing campaigners’ accounts.
It comes after UsForThem, which campaigned to keep schools open during the pandemic, and the Free Speech Union (FSU), a pressure group, had their PayPal accounts blocked and were accused of violating terms of service.
PayPal has since reinstated UsForThem’s account but the FSU’s three accounts with the U.S. tech giant are still blocked and are not expected to be reviewed.
An amendment to the Online Safety Bill or Digital Markets Bill, which are both yet to be passed in Parliament, could be launched by Tory MPs.
One source said ministers are likely to accept the amendment to the law because Conservative backbenchers will support it.
It comes after officials from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport reached out to PayPal to demand an explanation for the accounts being blocked.
The development follows dozens of Tory MPs, including Michael Gove, David Davis and Sir Iain Duncan Smith, signing an open letter to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Business Department calling for a ban on the discriminatory practices by financial services companies.
The MPs said it was “hard to avoid construing PayPal’s actions as an orchestrated, politically motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views on these topics within the U.K.”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Times has published an excellent ‘Thunderer’ by Jawad Iqbal arguing that “PayPal – remote, unelected and unaccountable – has no business policing what people can say or think in Britain or anywhere else”.
Citing claims of Covid vaccine misinformation, PayPal shut the journalist Toby Young’s accounts with the Free Speech Union he created and his website, The Daily Sceptic. It is a mystery how a company that specialises in online financial transactions is qualified to make such a judgment. UsForThem, a parents’ group that fought to keep schools open during the pandemic, was unable to access funds after its account was discontinued, “in accordance with PayPal’s user agreement”.
This is censorship by corporate diktat: the company sets its own rules and interprets them as it sees fit. It appears oblivious to the notion that it is wrong in principle to withdraw vital services from people because of their political views. Would it be acceptable for a supermarket to refuse to serve a customer because of their politics or for a high street bank to refuse to make a payment to a company it deemed politically objectionable?
It is misguided to argue that private companies are free to do as they please. Surely not, if they insist on punishing what they perceive as errant opinions. Those who shrug because they don’t agree with the people targeted on this occasion miss the point: giving licence to the suppression of views you don’t like is a slippery road that inevitably leads to greater censorship all round.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press 2: Watch Toby tell Andrew Doyle on GB News that for all three accounts to be found guilty at exactly the same time “suggests that there is something else going on in the background“ and that the new law is the only way to rein in these out of control Big Tech companies.
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Toby is to be congratulated for mounting such an amazingly powerful and effective campaign, one which fundamentally benefits all of us.
It is also reassuring to see widespread political support, including from a former Conservative Party leader and current minister.
This all adds to the overall picture that at least in some crucial areas such as free speech / freedom in general and Net Zero the Truss administration is going to be the most progressive in a very long time.
I obviously hope the anti-censoring amendments get inserted and passed.
This is just depressing, that our MP’s are so completely and utterly thick they can’t see that woke PayPal is justifying it’s action to itself with reference to the very goddamned stupidly vague notion of “harm” the bill was proposing in the first place. The WHOLE problem being one persons notion of harm is different to another’s so it is ridiculously, unworkably legislatively vague in a way that could only result in precisely this happening. Excuse me, give me a moment while I scream into my pillow.
Tobes went rogue and will never get his KBE or Peerage, but he certainly deserves one.
The cynic in me suspects that the only reason CON MPs/former Ministers are considering an amendment to outlaw discriminatory practices is because they are desperate to force a cashless society on us (and therefore a version of a social credit system using “nudge” techniques and coercion rather than outright restrictions for those who transgress) and they know that PayPal’s actions have made it far harder for them to claim that it is a beneficial/benign policy for ordinary people.
When have these people EVER been on the side of Joe Public?
Never. So why would they start now?
Sadly, I am inclined to agree.
I had similar thoughts but with some variation.
I can believe that the MPs pushing for it may be doing it for free speech reasons. Well, maybe not Gove who is a total weasel, but most of them.
However, if it is allowed to become legislation by the establishment, then I agree they’ll wave it through only because to fail to do so might threaten their digital currency plans.
Also, the state bureaucracy doesn’t particularly want to give the power to private companies to censor people. That’s a privilege they want to keep for themselves. No doubt if a centralised digital currency becomes a reality, it will be used to control and censor people – but it will be in the hands of the state and the state bureaucracy, not of some private company.
Nail on head.
The problem here is not companies but the people working for them. These accounts aren’t being closed by Paypal but just under the umbrella of Paypal, where perfectly private individuals with chips on their shoulders are free to pursue any political agenda which suits them anonymously and without accountability to anyone or any options of redress for their chosen victims. The same is true for a host of other household-name internet companies, especially, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook) and also other large companies not under any business pressure to care very much for individual customers. In the UK, this presumably includes all larger banks and that people haven’t yet had their bank accounts terminated because they claim that woman means adult human female just means that the so-called political activists hiding there haven’t yet accomplished everything they ultimatively seek to accomplish.
While I am sure there’s some truth in what you say, I’m not sure how you can know. It may vary from organisation to organisation. I’m aware of some large, global financial services businesses, whose clients are not the general public but other businesses, which are aggressively pursuing woke agendas with their staff. I strongly doubt that those initiatives, which are high profile and mandated, are not supported or indeed initiated by senior management, who often put their names to communications promoting such initiatives. I’d love to know what makes them do this, but I’m not sure it’s possible to get an honest answer.
I don’t think your text has anything to do with my text which was about people employed to monitor customer or contributor compliance with some AUP and punish those found to be non-compliant. The current Paypal AUP is here
https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full
It’s pretty certain that nothing published on this site violates any of that except for a very much politically tilted idea of violation. The only general-purpose statement is
the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory
What that’s precisely supposed to mean is obviously anybody’s guess. Hence, it can be made to mean whatever J. Random Paypal employee wants it to mean.
My point was more general – that corporations appearing to pursue political agendas do so for a variety of reasons, some of which is employees like the ones you are hypothesising, some of which is driven from the top.
As I already wrote: Whatever your point was supposed to be, it had nothing to do with my text.
So you say
I beg to differ
You were clearly emphasising the role of individuals and I’m saying it’s both individual and corporate
I’m actually not even certain what you’re trying to express but it seems to move into the usual corporate fascism (We’ll all be frozen to death by wet fire!) direction. As it happens to be, I don’t think Toby Young’s paypal account was closed by the WEF to facilitate the depopulation of Alaska by introducing mandatory digital vaccination certificates storing social credit scores or whatnot. I was making a statement about the real-world deficiencies in so-called content- and user oversight procedures of (mostly) internet-centered companies and how this enables political retaliation against people or organizations deemed to be hostile to the [woke] cause through the vector of activist employees of said companies.
To provide real-world example how a blanket statement like this can be creatively interpreted: During the heydays of the COVID scam, it was claimed that statistics would demonstrate that so-called people of colour were more prone to severe and possibly deadly COVID. Based on this, white people opposed to lockdowns were accused of having a secret racist agenda, possibly even a genocidal racist agenda.
I wonder why CEOs go for this rubbish. One idea I’ve heard is that they feel the need to be more woke than their wokest employees, in order to avoid internal strife. This legislation may give those craven CEOs the excuse they need to ignore the woke agitators.
Perhaps a bit tinfoil-hatted, but one reason might be financial gain via market manipulation. Coordinated waves of outrage on social media could depress share value temporarily and artificially, creating an opportunity in the Wild West of the US financial system for executives and their pals to make a lot of money at the expense of shareholders.
Ugh. They don’t need new laws – especially ones to act as a trojan horse for appallingly ill thought-out legislation. They just need to bother paying attention to existing ones.
What a completely useless law. If PayPal continues not to give reasons for the bans, how are we to know if they’re politically motivated or not?
Typical of politicians offer a sticking plaster for an arterial wound. No intention of actually tackling the real issue. Don’t let them pamper your ego Toby, be tenacious.
daily sceptic instagram too doesn’t show up , just like rfkjr s.more censorship
Same government who have not consulted with the OBR to get a forecast for their ‘mini-budget’. Just like the previous government who did not do a cost/benefit analysis for locking the country down.
What we’re seeing here is the start of conversation about a cashless society – we’re being lead to believe the government and the backbenchers are good guys who support freedom of speech and expression. Laws, new or old, can easily be ignored by the prosecution service if it suits the powers that be.
Hopefully things are moving apace. Keep up the pressure everyone, this is an important “fight”.
Would it be acceptable for a supermarket to refuse to serve a customer….? They know that normally it wouldn’t be, but they can run out of delivery slots to any address instead. Tesco seems to reserve the right to ban customers who say the wrong thing about them on social media, but that’s not a political opinion. Hopelessly optimistic, but I do think PayPal has jolted an awful lot of people into awareness – it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to see that anyone could be next.