PayPal shuts Free Speech Union account

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11296589/PayPal-backtracks-policy-fined-users-misinformation-following-backlash.html

It looks as if there is quite an internal battle going on within PayPal.

I thought Elon Musk originally founded Paypal?

Theil, an American Trump supporting libertarian billionaire and one of Facebook’s first investors, and Musk both jointly founded PayPal to make their billions.

With CIA funding, Thiel also founded Palantir, the big data analytics surveillance firm that has been awarded contracts by the uk govt to manage NHS data as well as uk border controls. When the govt paused one NHS contract, Palantir hired the NHSX AI director. Same person who had been advocating the contract. It’s a small world in the tech industry and many if not most focus on the tech more than the wider implications.

Palantir’s decision to hire former NHSX AI director Dr Indra Joshi has been described as “deeply worrying” by a leading privacy expert amid the controversial tech company competing for a £240 million NHS federated data platform (FDP) contract

Joshi, who left NHSX on 31 March 2022, oversaw the creation of the NHS AI Lab prior to being appointed to the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in May 2020. During her time at NHSX, she oversaw a number of significant tech deals as the UK’s healthcare system expanded its AI capabilities

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group which campaigns for digital rights and freedoms, described Palantir’s “recruitment of this senior NHS executive” as “deeply worrying”

www.techcentral.ie/palantirs-poaching-of-former-nhsx-ai-chief-branded-scandalous/

twitter.com/barrymulholland/status/1517417565257097216?s=20&t=wnJEalvOt5llMpwtcrOztA

It is very likely far scarier than we can ever imagine…These tech firms are imbued with the personality of their founders. Far too many are deeply misogynist and using ‘woke’ as a cover for a desire to control. There is no hiding from surveillance firms. There is no such thing as ‘anonymous’ online data.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56183785
www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/21/palantir-concerns-over-data-firm-poised-to-be-operating-system-of-nhs
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-5513350
www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-24/revealed-data-giant-given-emergency-covid-contract-had-been-wooing-nhs-for-months
www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/
aboutintel.eu/palantir-eu-independence/
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/28/palantir-employee-cambridge-analytica

Or would barring people with the protected characteristic of sex and/or political belief constitute prohibited discrimination under the Equality Act 2010? In the same way as if he decided that he did not want to offer the same service to people of a particular race, religion or sexual orientation?

Wow.

Yes founded by Simon Ellington who is based in Cambridge. Its supposed to be a "tip jar" top allow small donations to creators. I guess it is his right to decide that he does not want to offer the same service to women or Conservatives (or both) but its not clear on his website, and I suspect his investors don't know.

Ko-fi appears to be a UK registered company. Think they're a bit foolhardy to try this on Conservatives for Women.

I think he's still banned, but he's in US. I expect PP will do what they can get away with.

Great news

And what about Colin Wright?

All of Toby Youngs accounts have also been restored.

5.30 p.m. this evening, PayPal notified me that it has restored all three of the accounts it cancelled a couple of weeks ago – the accounts for the Daily Sceptic, the Free Speech Union and my personal account. In all three cases, the email read as follows:

“We have continued to review the information provided in connection with your account and we take seriously the input from our customers and stakeholders. Based on these ongoing reviews, we have made the decision to reinstate your account. You should now be able to use your account in the normal way. We sincerely appreciate your business and offer our apologies for any inconvenience this disruption in service may have caused.

www.spectator.co.uk/article/paypal-has-restored-my-accounts

Great news, Pay Pal have backed down. Well done to all those who took action.

PayPal has just reversed its decision to deplatform the Free Speech Union and apologised.
A reminder that it's never a good idea to try to cancel us or any of our members.

We will die in a ditch to defend free speech.

t.co/0iu1M5Oryv

twitter.com/SpeechUnion/status/1574821962383253504?t=5up467qN6wJkvDGRDjB9eQ&s=09

Fairly tricky read but some useful points in this.

But, I guess the “neither” part is recognizing how these apps are infrastructure and are controlling us as populations. I mean, it’s not so linear like that. I think about the algorithmic flagging of fraudulent transactions resulting in any money being sent to Palestinians on these platforms being suspended and frozen without recourse.

We are in a situation where we must have mutual aid. We must send money back home. We must send money to Texas when the state has failed to take care of people. But in that must, we’re relying on these apps or these infrastructures that were designed not in service of us. Not to produce that livability, right? So how do we think about whether there is something qualitatively new manifesting in these technologies? What is new about predictive policing? Before the prediction, policing was still bad, still needed to be abolished, right? Is it just automating that same practice or is something different happening? I think about Virginia Eubanks’ comparison between the 20th century brick-and-mortar poorhouse and the present day digital poorhouse that is using algorithms. She emphasizes how the former geographically co-located Eastern European immigrants and Black Americans together—which some argue laid the ground for the Poor People’s Movement—as compared to the algorithmic sorting of the digital poorhouse which preempts that kind of cross racial solidarity or physical proximity. I feel like the way political subjectivities are formed in relationship to a state’s (often concealed) control of people’s movement through space is a theme of your work on Blackness and migration. Are there connections that you’re making in thinking about these examples?

logicmag.io/beacons/technologies-of-black-freedoms-calling-on-black-studies-scholars-with-sa/

I'll just quietly roll my eyes beside them in the gulag.

Had to laugh at that! True, some of the comments are all 'don't spread misinformation then' simplistic level of reasoning.

augh oh my god that Jack Dee thread is going to make my head explode

I guess that means if Hitler were alive today you would want him to be allowed to spread his propaganda because of free speech

And lots more people saying idiotic shit like "just follow the terms and conditions" as if "don't politically advocate for free speech" were in the PayPal terms and conditions.

Fucking morons, the lot of them. Sorry. I try to not think this thought too often, even of genderists, and the idiots in Dee's thread aren't even all genderists, just "mainstream groupthink" types as he put it himself. Perhaps one day they'll cop on that failure to reason through consequences does not mean freedom from consequences and I won't even be smug about it - I'll just quietly roll my eyes beside them in the gulag.

Jack Dee speaking up makes my heart sing. I hope to be there for his discussion with FSU. Please do sign up to FSU if you haven't already.

That article mentioned a law guaranteeing every citizen a right to a bank account, that was proposed by Gordon Brown’s government and then shelved because the banks didn’t want it. It’s hard to imagine this government defying the banks but maybe that would be a practical, useful thing to campaign for?

It still wouldn’t solve the problem of organisations that can’t get a bank account but it staves off some of the most dystopian implications of where we’re heading.

thanks. Looking into it.

Ebay don’t use PayPal anymore.

Interesting to see this from Jack Dee.

What's an ebay alternative? Can you use ebay without paypal?

Closed mine yesterday too. Every little helps. Used to need it back in the early 2000s for eBay, but not so much any more - certainly not necessary to send money anywhere, which is all I do. Main thing was all my Patreon subscriptions going through it. (And people are increasingly drifting away from that, too, with some similar concerns, often towards Substack.)

I got the email saying it has been closed. To be fair I've not used it an awful lot since ebay went shit, as I used to sell alot on there.

I closed my PP account yesterday, as a direct pushback for what they’ve done with the FSU.

As always, our small individual steps can be ignored. But if amplified by enough people taking collective action… eventually the change will come.