Chris Lange, FISM News
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PayPal reversed course on a controversial new censorship policy to block and fine users who promote “misinformation” following a barrage of backlash, including from two former top executives of the international online payment company.
PayPal recently updated its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), which prohibits users from promoting things like illicit drug use and criminal activity, to include activities to “depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.),” or which “present a risk to user safety or wellbeing.”
The revised policy, which was set to go into effect Nov. 3, subjected violators to fines of up to $2,500 to be automatically debited from the user’s account.
Over the weekend, the financial tech company said the policy revision was sent to users “in error,” Mediaite reported.
The announcement came shortly after PayPal’s former president, Lightspark CEO David Marcus, said that a private company that gives itself the power to fine users over speech it disagrees with is “insanity.”
“It’s hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to. But @PayPal’s new AUP goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity,” Marcus wrote in a tweet.
It’s hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to. But @PayPal’s new AUP goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity. https://t.co/Gzf8faChUb
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) October 8, 2022
Another former PayPal exec, Utrust CEO Sanja Kon, concurred with Marcus’s assessment.
“As a former @PayPal exec, I often prefer to let other voices take the lead when being critical of their policies. This, however, crosses all kinds of lines. Much like @davidmarcus, I can’t be quiet,” she wrote.
“Agreed,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted in response to Marcus’s criticism. Musk cited Twitter’s overt suppression of free speech as one of the chief reasons behind his tumultuous buyout of the social media giant.
A short time later, PayPal blamed the publication of those policy changes on an error, saying in a statement that:
“An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy,” the statement read.
“Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused,” they added.
Aaron Terr, a senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told The Daily Wire that the policy would have a “chilling effect” on free speech.
Under existing law, PayPal has the ability as a private company to implement this type of viewpoint-discriminatory policy. Whatever motivation PayPal has for establishing these vague new categories of prohibited expression, they will almost certainly have a severe chilling effect on users’ speech. As is often the case with ill-defined and viewpoint-discriminatory speech codes, those with unpopular or minority viewpoints will likely bear the brunt of these restrictions.
Gays Against Groomers recently complained that it had been banned by both PayPal and its mobile payment company, Venmo.
The founder of the group, Jaimee Mitchell, said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that neither company specified exactly what it did to violate its user agreement.
“We’ve never gotten a violation before. They said that we violated, though, their user agreements, which, we’re not sure what in the agreement we violated,” Mitchell said. “There was no really detailed message to that. Just the notification that we have been banned.”
Gays Against Groomers is a coalition of gay and lesbian people speaking out against “indoctrinating, sexualizing, and medicalizing children under the guise of LGBTQIA,’” according to its website.