PayPal's secret rules
PayPal's founders envisioned something very different from its current social credit system enforcer role.
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Dear Friends,
In the late ‘90s, PayPal’s creators envisioned a platform that could help people who bought or sold anything online. The company was meant to help avoid huge credit card fees and other inconveniences of online payments.
Now, the company is engaging in the scariest parts of a social credit system – holding on to people’s money, banning them, and in some cases, fining them. Those who’ve been punished rarely find out why.
In fact, even for people who want to avoid being banned, it’s hard to determine ahead of time how that could happen. The rules are vague and the consequences are harsh.
This week, Rupa Subramanya, a writer for Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press for Free People” Substack newsletter, took an in-depth look at PayPal’s increasingly shady practices.
The Great Beginning
Subramanya reports that in 1999, Peter Thiel promised:
“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before. It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”
Twenty years later, PayPal is more police officer than liberator.
It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse … the consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above.
Where We Are Now
As we’ve mentioned before, PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy, which was announced last October, prohibits all “objectionable” activity, but doesn’t clarify what that activity is. The company has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center – which are certainly not unbiased organizations – to decide what activities are unacceptable.
Several of PayPal’s founders and past presidents have objected to this new direction.
Elon Musk responded to Marcus’ tweet with one word: “Agreed.”
Subramanya takes a look at how PayPal got to this point, from the post-9/11 Patriot Act that checked money going into and out of the U.S. to PayPal suspending the WikiLeaks account to the more recent, and more frequent, punishments after the protests and wokeness of 2020.
She also points out that one of the PayPal founders is now very busy trying to kick down the social credit system by overhauling another social media platform instead.
Further Reading
Subramanya’s article is worth reading in full. In fact, “The Free Press” Substack is full of interesting articles if you’re looking for another Substack newsletter to follow (once you’re done reading mine, of course.)