Paypal could be banned from blocking accounts for political reasons (UK)

[Hydrogen]

PayPal and other finance companies could be banned from blocking the accounts of campaign groups for political reasons under a new law being proposed by MPs.

Conservative backbenchers are considering launching an amendment to upcoming financial legislation in the House of Commons that would ban companies from freezing campaigners’ accounts.

It comes after UsForThem, which campaigned to keep schools open during the pandemic, and the Free Speech Union (FSU), a pressure group, had their PayPal accounts blocked and were accused of violating terms of service.

PayPal has since reinstated UsForThem’s account but the FSU’s three accounts with the US tech giant are still blocked and are not expected to be reviewed.

An amendment to the Online Safety Bill or Digital Markets Bill, which are both yet to be passed in Parliament, could be launched by Tory MPs.

One source said ministers are likely to accept the amendment to the law because Conservative backbenchers will support it.

It comes after officials from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport reached out to PayPal to demand an explanation for the accounts being blocked.

PayPal is not understood to have provided any official explanation to the Government beyond its public statement, which says the company “assesses activity against our long-standing Acceptable Use Policy and will discontinue our relationship with account holders who are found to violate our policies”.

Dozens of MPs sign letter calling for ban

Although the company does not comment publicly on individual accounts, the freeze is understood to have been imposed because of allegations of Covid misinformation, which both organisations deny.

Dozens of Tory MPs, including Michael Gove, David Davis and Sir Iain Duncan Smith signed an open letter to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s business department calling for a ban on the practice by financial services companies.

The MPs said it was “hard to avoid construing PayPal’s actions as an orchestrated, politically motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views on these topics within the UK”.

Asked about the issue in Parliament last week, Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the Commons, said the firms were “still in the dark about exactly why they have had those services removed from them despite making great efforts to find out”.

She said the unexplained removal of service by tech companies was a “common theme amongst our casework” for MPs.

Toby Young, the FSU’s founder and general secretary, told The Telegraph: “The withdrawal of banking services from an individual or an organisation because they aren’t toeing the right political line is something you’d expect to happen in Communist China or North Korea, but not in a supposedly free country.”

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport was contacted for comment.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/paypal-could-be-banned-from-blocking-accounts-of-campaign-groups-for-political-reasons/ar-AA12es6K

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This is interesting:

It comes after UsForThem, which campaigned to keep schools open during the pandemic, and the Free Speech Union (FSU), a pressure group, had their PayPal accounts blocked and were accused of violating terms of service.

PayPal has since reinstated UsForThem’s account but the FSU’s three accounts with the US tech giant are still blocked and are not expected to be reviewed.

I read a lot of comments on social media, forums and the internet. And have never seen anyone propose laws to prevent banks or financial services from closing accounts for political reasons. Its an interesting if not unique line of thought the UK appears to have discovered here. I don't know whether it can be enforced or is feasible given our current political climate. The last time serious financial reform was attempted in the USA was early in Obama's 1st term. The backlash for the attempted financial reform was massive. Democrats lost significant amounts of campaign funding in retaliation from wallstreet and finance. Since then no one has made a serious effort to reform things. Even Trump didn't invest much effort in it. And he was by far the biggest political rogue and loose cannon we've seen recently.

It seems that the UK has discoverd an interesting angle here. Is it possible that they could make this a reality. Would support this train of thought.

[Iroh]

I don’t think PayPal blocked those accounts for political reasons. PayPal being a private organization has its set rules and if one party or individual breaks those rules, the organization has a right to deal with such adequately as they see fit.
The same could be said in the case of former president Donald Trump. His supporters, most of them republicans and conservatives argued that the twitter ban placed on his account is politically motivated and a move to mute him and free speech in general. Multiple times, he broke the rules and terms he agreed to when he signed up on twitter.
So PayPal might just be blocking accounts that has breached the terms and agreement and people would then scream political persecution.

[cabron]

I don’t think PayPal blocked those accounts for political reasons. PayPal being a private organization has its set rules and if one party or individual breaks those rules, the organization has a right to deal with such adequately as they see fit.
The same could be said in the case of former president Donald Trump. His supporters, most of them republicans and conservatives argued that the twitter ban placed on his account is politically motivated and a move to mute him and free speech in general. Multiple times, he broke the rules and terms he agreed to when he signed up on twitter.
So PayPal might just be blocking accounts that has breached the terms and agreement and people would then scream political persecution.

There had been many example of these though.  1. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/04/uofx-m04.html
But Gofundme was once used also where they take down some pages of political movement.

There was even some discussions here about the Canada Truckers account were censored not just their crypto wallet. PayPal is political which is why some countries even today in 2022 has no access to Paypal.

Calling for ban from blocking the accounts will allow political movement to be funded. But with this approved, there will be a lot of political protest that will happen across the globe. You can expect that to happen while they defund the police.

[edgycorner]

I think that this proposed amendment is a good idea, and one that should be seriously considered by Parliament. I think it is important to protect freedom of speech, especially for those who may hold dissenting or unpopular views. It is worrying that companies like PayPal can block access to accounts without providing a clear explanation or justification. This amendment would help to prevent such practices from happening in the future.

But Iroh has raised an interesting point here

I don’t think PayPal blocked those accounts for political reasons. PayPal being a private organization has its set rules and if one party or individual breaks those rules, the organization has a right to deal with such adequately as they see fit.
The same could be said in the case of former president Donald Trump. His supporters, most of them republicans and conservatives argued that the twitter ban placed on his account is politically motivated and a move to mute him and free speech in general. Multiple times, he broke the rules and terms he agreed to when he signed up on twitter.
So PayPal might just be blocking accounts that has breached the terms and agreement and people would then scream political persecution.

What if paypal was just following its T&C? But then there's a possibility that paypal has a very vague Term which they can use to exercise such political bans. It's very common 

Anyways, Paypal is a shit company and if a law can prevent them from placing unnecessary bans then why not lol

[ChiBitCTy]

PayPal is an absolute joke, and they will often ban accounts for all sorts of reasons that are largely politically motivated. They operate in a way that is very similar to Coinbase. (I used to always call Coinbase the PayPal of crypto before they actually started selling /storing crypto).

My advice to everyone is to STOP using PayPal/Venmo. Start using more legitimate apps such as CashApp. They are much less politically motivated.

[davis196]

Even if Paypal gets banned from blocking accounts for political reasons, they could find other reasons to block those accounts.
Paypal's Terms of Service can be interpreted in multiple ways. The political dissidents might be "violating" the "non-political" rules of Paypal.
This change in the legislation won't change anything. The term "political reasons" is too vague. The "progressive-liberal" establishment would always try different methods of oppressing the conservative right-wing opponents. Blocking bank accounts is one of those methods.
The high tech corporations like Paypal are usually pretty "progressive" and "liberal". They won't give up on their manipulation techniques and oppression tactics.

[Wexnident]

Then wouldn't Paypal just ban them for violating T&C then? In the first place, I think the reasons for the bans that were officially recorded would be under that (since I don't think they'd be dumb enough to state politics as a reason). I'd rather have a law that enforces the transparency of reviews done on banned accounts instead (with a group governing the fairness of the transparency rather than Paypal themselves). If it were indeed violating T&C then proceed, if not well then they have to restore the account.

At this point though I'd just completely avoid using Paypal. There'd probably be better alternatives out there.

[justdimin]

PayPal is an absolute joke, and they will often ban accounts for all sorts of reasons that are largely politically motivated. They operate in a way that is very similar to Coinbase. (I used to always call Coinbase the PayPal of crypto before they actually started selling /storing crypto).

My advice to everyone is to STOP using PayPal/Venmo. Start using more legitimate apps such as CashApp. They are much less politically motivated.

That is what happens if you give the rights of smaller scale payments to a centralized organization and have nearly no competition. Of course there are companies like paypal, but it is not as famous as them, and even though we are in crypto and right now we do not deal with paypal thankfully and do our transactions in crypto world, there are still millions of people who use it every day.

This gave them power to do whatever they want, ban whoever they want, chargeback whenever they want and leave open loopholes for abusers to take advantage of. If they had some competition, they would try to fix themselves and be better, but they didn't so they didn't see a reason to fix anything because you are forced to use them anyway.