PayPal do not appear to like free speech.
In a short period of weeks, they suddenly and without warning stopped the accounts of The Free Speech Union, The Daily Sceptic, the campaign group for children UsForThem, the UK Medical and Freedom Alliance (UKFMA) and seemingly many others. Others included Laworfiction. For each of us, the effect is that no new or recurring donations can be received.
As a result, there has been considerable disruption to organisations who have one thing in common: they speak loudly against the mainstream narrative where that narrative is otherwise carefully controlled and censored through mainstream media.
Our attention at Laworfiction over the last 12 months has been less on providing information regarding law and guidance as people have largely chosen to make their own decisions regardless. Instead focus has been on pursuing legal challenges in respect of the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’ and we have encouraged donations to support those legal campaign challenges directly via crowdfund sites. For Laworfiction, the stopping of the PayPal facility has therefore not had any significant financial impact as it has for others and we are pausing before rushing into arrangements with anyone else. (Obviously, that does not include being silenced.)
Why has PayPal blocked accounts?
The message we and others received from PayPal was this:
We have recently reviewed your usage of PayPal’s services, as reflected in our records. Due to the nature of your activities, we have chosen to discontinue service to you in accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement. As a result, we have placed a permanent limitation on your account.
In response, we have asked:
- who and what prompted the review of usage
- what is the “nature of” activities that PayPal identified
- what are those activities
- how has PayPal associated those activities with this account
- what terms or policy have been breached by such activities.
We have had no reply. Customer service tell us they do not know the answer, but say PayPal’s ‘back office’ would. We can only assume that PayPal’s back office does not share our belief in democracy and its foundations in free speech and bodily autonomy.
The frightening development to recognise here is this: in a society where financial transactions are almost always via digital financial services controlled by a small number of global corporations, if you can be easily excluded from of those services you can be easily excluded from society. That gives those corporations, those unelected corporations, tremendous power without any democratic accountability.
After much attention in social media, a few articles in mainstream and a letter of concern to the Prime Minister signed by about 40 MPs, and a slew of people closing their accounts in disgust, PayPal reinstated services to The Free Speech Uinon, The Daily Sceptic and UsForThem.
We are still waiting.
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