PayPal shuts Free Speech Union account

[ResisterRex]

Big Tech overreach in the Telegraph:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/20/paypal-shuts-accounts-free-speech-union/

"PayPal has shut down the account of the Free Speech Union, an organisation which defends gender-critical academics and opposes Drag queen story hours in schoolss_.
The US payments company shut down the accounts of the Free Speech Union, its founder Toby Young, and his opinion and news website the Daily Sceptic with no clear explanation last week, The Telegraph can reveal.
Mr Young said he suspected the action was driven by political motivess_ and was a “sinister form of cancel culture”.
...

The Free Speech Union, founded by Mr Young two years ago, has recently called on the Government to ensure children aren't politically indoctrinated at school, citing the teaching of “radical gender theory” through Drag queen story hours in schools.
The organisation has helped to defend people who claim they have lost work for expressing opinions, for example Gillian Philip, the author who said her contract was terminated because she stood up for JK Rowling on Twitter amid a row over transgender rightss_. It has also challenged universities that have “no-platformed” gender-critical academics.
...

Mr Young said: “Withdrawing financial services from dissidents and non-conformists and those who dare to defend them is the new frontline in the ongoing war against free speech.
“The Free Speech Union will be lobbying the Government to put new laws in to prevent companies like PayPal demonetising organisations and individuals because their employees disapprove of their views.”"

FSU tweet:

twitter.com/speechunion/status/1572323227040358401?s=46&t=Q_pYlcOXOni-UQ61agbaRw

This is another reason why we must all resist any more towards a cashless society.

I think it might be a bit late for that. So many shops now don't take cash payments anymore.

Thanks for this comment. I've not been vaccinated but I'm not antivaxx. I just wanted to wait a little while when they were first offered as I have an anti immune condition and wondered if it might be relevant. But quickly the talk turned to mandates and discriminating against the unvaxxed and I decided on principle that they could fuck off. I think it's absolutely right that if they had calmly discussed the pros and cons, I would have taken it, even with some trepidation. I find it amazing that people have put such trust in big pharma.

I don't think it's true that doctors and nurses would have refused to give the jabs though. Most people do what they're told. The doctors and nurses who spoke against it have been utterly monstered, and it looks like any information that calls the global narrative into question, even in a minor way, is being viciously stamped out.

I guess the next step is to connect vaccine status to your bank account. Then they can make sure we're all "healthy" - or else.

But how would you resist it?

I always objected to the Oyster Card Scheme. Refused to use one for years. And when it was initially introduced, there was a weak, diluted attempt by various human rights charities to grab peoples attention to the fact that by choosing to use a top-up card to travel, once enough people had taken it up, it would be used as justification to phase out cash use when travelling and your privacy would be compromised (it records every journey) and it would eventually be no longer a choice but mandatory to use it. Nevertheless people jumped onboard with using them. Now every journey whether you use an Oyster or your bank card or online Gpay is recordable.

I'm afraid people will simply 'slip' into a cashless society, in exactly the same way they have with cashless travel. And every transaction you then make will be recordable. People you're 'allied' with be open to scrutiny. I think it's inevitable.

They're just waiting for the volume of cashless transactions to get past a certain critical point and then cash will be phased out. Then you'll really be screwed when your opinions aren't liked by whatever payment provider or vendor you're with. And Bitcoin is as transparent as fuck and withdraws payment options to businesses when they are deemed 'unfavourable' or lent on.

And thanks to the democracy that is Canada, we all now know that crowd funding sites will share our info in a heartbeat and the banks will positively leap to give the government all our transaction details over anything it says is a threat, even if there isn't one.

Plurality of options in a market that is dominated by just a few big players is what's needed.

Isn’t the guy who founded PayPal Peter Thiel? He’s the one who financed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, which bankrupted the site. He did this because Gawker outed him as gay years previously.

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This whole thing has made me think again about going totally cashless. I agree they're probably waiting for transactions to reach a certain point.

What can we do? Not much, maybe. But where you can pay cash, I'm going to. And where it's a well known coffee shop saying they're "trialling going cashless" while there's a homeless person outside who's even further disenfranchised because now no one carries money, but there's a small independent that does still do cash, it's making me think - well, even more reason to use the small independent. I will make sure to carry cash again.

I also worry going totally cashless will teach children that money is abstract. Just numbers on a screen. They won't have the relationship with money that we'd have had growing up if they get money transferred into an account then they tap a card to buy something. What is money when you understand it like that? It's not real. It does become abstract - and it becomes subject to someone else's whims and values.

This turn of events with PayPal is really, really concerning.

I've always not been in favour of going cashless for exactly this reason.

I'm currently in Croatia, where cash is still the favoured way to pay. It us changing though. You can pay contactless in many places now, although a lot of places also stipulate cash only.

Just reading the FSU newsletter. It is really very worrying indeed.

I thought Elon Musk originally founded Paypal?

That story with P.T vs Gawker is deeply concerning. One person has enough money to shut down an entire platform of free speech because he doesn't like what they said, albeit indirectly.

But we've already seen something like this happening with mainstream journalism. They have wealthy sponsors and they will not report on subjects that upset those sponsors. You can see with some of them that they compromise by not allowing comments or removing comments after a certain time.

It also stands to reason that if their sponsors can prevent certain topics being reported on, they can tell them what subjects to include and report on. Distrust of the msm is at an all time high quite rightly.

Cashless will bring that compromise into your daily life.

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.

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.

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.)

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

Ebay don’t use PayPal anymore.

Interesting to see this from Jack Dee.

thanks. Looking into it.

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.

Lee Hurst now:

twitter.com/leehurstcomic/status/1573211981682978816?s=46&t=GxY9Ym90y3vPSAxxZQsQLA

"The attack that Jack Dee is now enduring on Twitter is why so many people in the public eye are fearful of making a stand outside of groupthink.
The pile on is designed to signal the virtue of the attacker and set an example to anyone else thinking of stepping out of line."

Comedians have had the Sadowitz scare, perhaps it focused minds to be more brave.

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.

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.

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.

PayPal forced to backtrack in clash over free speech.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3ca117b0-3b21-11ed-84dd-c16384999350?shareToken=dcfa95e28ea5dacd25e5294e9a885b866_

I think the only group they've backtracked over is Us For Them, unless anyone reads this differently?

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/

Another news article on this:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11246929/Michael-Gove-senior-Tories-urging-ministers-hold-PayPal-account.html

"dozens of Tory party grandees and peers from across the political divide have now written to Business Secretary Jacob Rees Mogg accusing PayPal of censorship, claiming it was ‘hard to avoid construing its actions as an orchestrated, politically-motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views’.
The letter, signed by 42 MPs and peers, warns that PayPal appears to be using ‘its dominant position in the market’ to ‘impose private economic sanctions on organisations of whose views it disapproves and thus to restrict their ability to engage in political debate in the public square’.
The politicians – who include Labour MP Graham Stringer – are urging ministers to demonstrate the Government’s commitment to free speech by demanding an explanation from PayPal for its actions.
They also call for the company to release any remaining donations or payments that it has confiscated unfairly from Mr Young’s 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

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