PayPal’s alleged content-based bans raise additional concerns about Big Tech’s grip on free speech, a digital privacy advocate told Fox News.
“For a decade I’ve been watching platform-level content moderation go terribly wrong,” Corynne McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, told Fox News. “Now, we’re increasingly seeing the same problems…in other parts of the Internet stack.”
“It’s not just PayPal,” McSherry continued. “Several major payment processors have played an increasing role in policing online speech.”
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Numerous users have said PayPal temporarily suspended their accounts for their content, resulting in lost revenue, McSherry told Fox News. Critics also accused PayPal of censoring conservative-leaning organizations without reason and scrutinized the tech company for working with the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2019.
PayPal, for example, suspended two UK-based organizations, the Free Speech Union, a free speech advocacy group, and The Daily Skeptic, a news platform that began publishing stories critical of the COVID-19 lockdowns. 19, in September 2022, which removed their access to funding. The accounts were reinstated two weeks later, but the organizations founder and director, Toby Young, told The Telegraph that “PayPal’s software was integrated into all our payment systems, so the sudden closure of our accounts was an existential threat.
“When they make decisions about whether they are going to process payments for you, that can mean your business is going under,” McSherry said. “That may mean you won’t survive because no money is coming in.”
Young’s personal account was also suspended and later reinstated. PayPal said the accounts violated its user policy but did not provide details, and Free Speech Union said it received no prior warnings. The payment platform has also said that the First Amendment allows it to restrict accounts for any reason at any time.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel told The Free Press in December that “if you freeze the online forms of your money, that’s like destroying people financially, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice.”
And if companies are eliminated during the fundraising months, they could risk losing large sums of cash, McSherry said.
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“That could be life or death” for his business, McSherry told Fox News.
In a statement, PayPal told Fox News that it is “dedicated to providing safe and affordable financial services to people of all backgrounds with a diversity of viewpoints. We also take seriously our responsibility to protect buyers and sellers, as we work to ensure that our services are not used for fraudulent or illegal activities.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo in June 2021 asking for clarity behind their ban decisions, but the coalition never received a response. It is not clear how many accounts have been suspended or banned.
Gays Against Groomers, a coalition of LGBTQ members who oppose a focus on gender identity and sexual orientation in children’s education, for example, said PayPal and Venmo closed their accounts for “violating” user agreements. . But the platforms, the group said, did not detail what the breaches were, and their accounts were later reinstated.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has spoken out against the decisions to ban the payment platform.
(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
“They took our account down for discriminatory behavior, but I think that’s exactly what they did to us,” Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Mitchell previously told FOX Business.
The payment platform told FOX Business following the account suspension: “PayPal has a longstanding and consistent Acceptable Use Policy. We take action when we believe that individuals or organizations have violated this policy. According to the policy of the company, PayPal does not disclose specific account information to current or former customers.”
PayPal’s acceptable use policy prohibits users from using the service for activities that involve the promotion of hate, violence, or “racial or other bigotry that is discriminatory.” Critics have accused PayPal of running vague policies that allow them to censor views they disagree with, but PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has defended the platform for doing everything it can to eliminate hate speech.
“These payment processors are largely irresponsible,” McSherry said, noting that companies can create their own policies and contracts that allow them to remove users without explanation. “The only way to put pressure on them is to just make noise on them, but it’s very, very difficult.”
Big tech companies “find themselves in a situation where they’re big enough that they’re not as vulnerable to pressure from civil society as they should be,” McSherry said.
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The legal director previously told Fox News that big-tech ban decisions, while permitted by a company’s First Amendment rights, displayed “an enormous amount of power over online discourse that is relatively concentrated in a few hands”.
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“There has to be a lot more movement and a lot more visibility to put pressure on infrastructure providers to basically stay neutral,” McSherry said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was among an international coalition of 56 civil liberties groups that launched a website called. “Protect the stack.” He called on online commerce and communication companies to avoid excessive surveillance of content and promote freedom of expression.
“We have tried, along with many partner organizations, to push them as hard as we could,” McSherry said. “We will not give up.”
To hear more from McSherry on the power payment processors have over online speech, click here.
