Gab.com banned from PayPal

[acoyfellow]

Breaking: Gab Upset by the same treatment they promise in their legal terms: "Termination We may terminate your access to and use of the Services, at our sole discretion, at any time and without notice to you." [1]

1- https://gab.com/about/tos

[Meekro]

Most companies have something in their ToS to the effect of "we can do whatever we want" -- that doesn't mean they're all the same. For example, Stripe and PayPal both have essentially the same ToS. But only PayPal has so many "banned for no reason" horror stories that there are multiple websites dedicated to cataloging them.

[Dylan16807]

Or in other words: "Entity believes that discretion can be misused, despite thinking discretion is important"

Which is an extremely reasonable position.

(I've never heard of Gab.)

[dgzl]

That's just a catch-all for "our house, our rules". Legal authority aside, it's political warfare and nothing more.

[stickfigure]

I don't really have a take on gab.com (never heard of it until now) but a couple years ago I was processing thousands of transactions per day with PayPal. Their technology is awful and (from outside observation) their engineering teams are incompetent.

In a business where "the hard technical problem" is how to stop fraud while allowing legitimate transactions to occur, you'd expect bad engineering to mean that the fraudsters win and the whole thing blows up. But what seems to have happened is that they've simply overcompensated on the other side. It's easy to stop fraud if you just flag everything as fraud. You end up with pissed off annoyed users, but you don't go bankrupt.

It's too bad. I really wish PayPal was a vibrant alternative to Visa & Mastercard; they fundamentally have the trust model right. It's just that they've been failing at execution for decades now and even with the braintree acquisition it looks like they're dead in the water, milking the last of their fading reputation.

Stripe is really the class act here, but they're playing a very conservative game. I wish they "owned" the payment process more instead of just being a front for credit cards. Maybe someday.

[dmartinez]

Interesting thoughts. It could be that PayPal has over extended certain models for far longer than they should have. Some forms of tech debt should be resolved sooner, rather than later. It would be fascinating to know the real reasons behind the fall from grace.

Is it really the employees, or the managers? There could be dilapidated business processes still in place that even prevent the company from healing itself. An interesting take on this is the book How The Mighty Fall.

Some relevant things to know might be if they have restructured a lot, and what their churn has looked like both in the executive suite and in engineering.

[fzeroracer]

It should honestly come as no surprise considering Gab, much like Voat, is a website filled with some of the most vitriolic and racist garbage I've ever seen. No company wants to be associated with a walking PR disaster.

Most of the time however they're more than happy to take money from said places as long as people don't make it into a big PR problem.

[smsm42]

I can see "some of the most vitriolic and racist garbage I've ever seen" on Twitter any day I want. Granted, I don't want to go on Twitter that often, but finding garbage there is not a problem. I mean, https://twitter.com/louisfarrakhan exists and this is the person who literally talks about "Satanic Jews". Why it isn't a walking PR disaster I wonder?

[ben_jones]

As bad is voat is I've seen that aspect of humanity on Youtube, Facebook, the comment section of most major news sites, the live chat of twitch, etc.

[orf]

It's funny how those who cry hardest about being censored, when given a completely free space to express themselves, fill it to the brim with xenophobia, racism, fake news and outlandish conspiracy theories involving the Clintons

https://gab.com/popular

[zarriak]

I appreciate that fact that you can tell this is all just a front for beliefs they don't have.

I mean if they really believe in free speech you would assume they would have mentioned Julian Assange or Wikileaks once. It would have made a lot more sense if they had ever mentioned how dangerous the censorship of Wikileaks by monetary means was. Fortunately they never did this so you can reasonably assume it is a front.

[kingvash]

I find it a little humorous that they posted this to twitter

[fjsolwmv]

Atripe froze gab a few weeks ago, and PayPal put gab on notice for allowing a post with the Navy Seal copypasta aimed at the PayPal CEO.

https://gizmodo.com/stripe-freezes-gabs-account-for-nsfw-con...

[rurounijones]

Can someone provide background context for gab.com?

[panarky]

Does it require the slaughter of innocents to decide not to support hate?

[atomical]

It shouldn't. You could easily say that of Sergei Brin, Sundar Pichai, and Jeff Bezos.

https://www.google.com/search?biw=1280&bih=619&tbm=isch&sa=1...

Look at what a great time Bezos is having with MBS. Aside from executing homosexuals and oppressing women he must be a really great guy.

[colemickens]

I am sort of assuming this is related to this article? https://www.businessinsider.com/pittsburgh-synagogue-shootin...

Is Twitter, who also gave him a forum and declined to censor or punish him for threatening tweets, being similarly affected?

[kevingadd]

Twitter doesn't use PayPal to process payments, does it?

[Ice_cream_suit]

The anti-Semitic mass murderer who killed eleven people at the Pittsburgh synagogue today was a Gab user.

[Ice_cream_suit]

Gab has been described as Reddit for Racists.

A quick glance at Gab seems to show a large number of hate groups. Perhaps PayPal simply do not want the fallout that might ensue from that association.

Google has already removed the Gab app for violating their hate group policy. Apple and Twitter have also removed them.

[atomical]

They are already on the crypto bandwagon but I can see how this would make it more difficult for users.

[radicalbyte]

What is Gab? Some knock-off clothing brand? Their website returns a blank page unless - I assume - you enable external scripts (which ain't happening).

[VectorLock]

Alt-right Twitter knockoff according to some other commenters.

[Asparagirl]

Good. Now for Stripe. I already called their customer support this morning and told them I'd pull my organization's account unless they dropped Gab. I'm sure I'm not the only customer who has. They enable payments processing for Gab, which means that they also profit from Gab. They make money off the alt-right. They choose to make money off the alt-right.

You want protests in front of your office, Stripe, raising hell about the blood money you take? We can surely arrange that. For every TechBro being oh-so-concerned about "financial censorship, oh noes!": you ain't seen nothing yet.

not doing business with white supremacist profiteers > nice API and documentation

[Meekro]

I notice your organization (reclaimtherecords.org from your profile) uses Cloudflare, which also serves Gab. Are you going to threaten to leave them, too?

[someguydave]

What if someone from the "alt-right" donated to your organization? You should probably start screening donors.

[jesssse]

Gab is a free speech platform.

Free speech != white supremacist

[tptacek]

Does Stripe still process payments for Gab?

[dna_polymerase]

You are the reason why the Republicans will easily win the mid-terms as well as the 2020 reelection.

[VectorLock]

As much as people seem to hate PayPal this event might actually improve people's view of PayPal.

[sctb]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318477 and marked it off-topic.

[tptacek]

None of this has anything to do with what I'm talking about. I think everyone doing business with Saudi Arabia has blood on their hands. I'm not interested in litigating the point further.

[village-idiot]

Downvote for whataboutism.

[dgzl]

Was Gab actively supporting the hateful groups more than just giving them a speech platform? Because if not, this is truly terrifying. It seems like the "left" (whatever that means), with waves of ignorant support, is turning into the monster it thinks it's fighting against.

[Quanttek]

PayPal is a profit-oriented company, not the "left" - whatever that boogeyman means. A company that doesn't want to support one of the most vitriolic, hateful platforms on the internet. Speech has consequences and can turn violent and this platform welcomed these people and this hate speech (by explicitly catering to those that got banned from other services etc).

Relevant: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-05/uok-rsp05031...

[threeseed]

You just seem like a parody right now.

(a) Why did you turn this into a left/right issue ?

(b) How is Paypal left ?

(c) Since when is the left the only one responsible for censorship or ToS enforcement.

Because many examples exist today where centrists and the right do this as well.

[pavlov]

It’s easy to say everyone has the right to a platform, but an overwhelming majority agrees that this shouldn’t apply to groups like pedophiles and Islamic State. The antisemitic alt-right is growing more violent. When do they cross the line, if you feel it hasn’t been crossed yet?

[krapp]

You don't know what "the left" means, but you do know they're ignorant and equivalent to neo-nazis?

[orf]

Is there a difference?

[raverbashing]

Financial censorship is still censorship

[Waterluvian]

This sounds like an argument that can only be made if one believes that they're incapable of competing without PayPal's involvement. It sounds like a meek whine that they deserve special protections that force other companies to work with them.

If PayPal is such an overwhelming giant of a service that you genuinely believe it needs to be forced to do business with certain corporations, then maybe it should be made into some sort of regulated service.

[InfiniteBeing]

It's very troubling. In certain respects it's more troubling than speech censorship.

[kevinmgranger]

Censorship by being killed is also censorship.