I understand that companies want to avoid getting into legal complications over it, and that's why I think there should be some sort of legislation in place to force companies to explain decisions like this. This is becoming more and more important with time.
Something like: If you end your contract with someone because you think that they were in violation of the terms, you have to clearly list what your reasoning is for it, with no tolerance for black box answers.
DMCA takedown requests include the list of offending URLs. This should be made similar. "We terminated our contract because this, this, and this signal, make us think that you're in violation of its terms". You can then appeal, and obviously if the two parties can't come to an agreement by themselves, you can at least use the legal system.
Otherwise, we're living in a world where contracts between two parties mean nothing. Anyone can pull out of anything at any time for any reason, with no notice.
> PayPal [...] reserves the right to suspend or terminate [...] access [...] for any reason and at any time upon notice to you...
PayPal never said they broke any terms. PayPal has openly declared war on "hate groups", as defined by the ADL, which is an organization funded by the U.S. oligarchy[0][1]. That's the reason.
PayPal is on the side of the political establishment that is interested in consolidating power and manufacturing consent. Corporate and government power have merged a long time ago; it's not gonna reverse itself.
Liberals need to read Popper's Open Society and its Enemies, and realize that oligarchy is just as big a threat as fascism, if not bigger due to the population not being innoculated against it (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1039842312061374464).
I assume you are not a lawyer. Anyone can pull out of a contract for any reason. You can then get sued for damages and in specific scenarios (property sales for example), specific performance. Most scenarios do not allow a remedy of specific performance. So in general if you pay, you can walk away.
For example you can’t hold someone to their employment contract and force them to work for you.
I think that would end in a situation similar to parallel construction, where people end the contract for reasons that are basically "we don't like you" but find some token violation to blame, helped by very loosely defined contracts that don't clearly define what is and isn't a violation.
The problem there is that the terms are often ambiguous, and thus an explanation of how the terms were violated will be ambiguous. "Some sort of legislation ... to force companies to explain decisions ..." will be useless unless the terms are unambiguous. Look for example at youtube where there is a lot of subjective wiggle room in their definition of acceptable content.
Let's face it, the decisions of Paypal and others (Youtube, Twitter, etc) when deciding who stays and who goes on its platform are ideologically and politically motivated. The leaders of these companies are basing their decisions on their own political leanings. And in the vast majority of cases like the Daily Sceptic where a user or service is being deplatformed, the reason is idealogical (rather than a case where the user is for example defrauding the platform or service provider).
I believe a better solution would be for the government to penalize companies that are repressive to the rights granted to us in the bill of rights (for example free speech). This whole "but it is a private company who gets to dictate what speech they want and don't want on their site" needs to go out the window. If a company wants to operate within the US, it needs to respect the rights of the country's population (rather than define its own set of rights).
How would something like that work? If a company gets demonetized and provides an answer that you don't think is satisfactory, then what? All you'd be doing in this case is creating another opportunity for a lawyer to put out some legalese BS.
Otherwise, we're living in a world where contracts between two parties mean nothing. Anyone can pull out of anything at any time for any reason, with no notice.
Not if the contract stipulates that both parties must agree to unwind the relationship. We already live in a world where anyone can pull out of anything at any time for any reason, with no notice - however if the contract says you can't do that then you open yourself up to legal liability. That doesn't stop most folks.
> Oh, and by the way, it would be keeping the money in that account for up to 180 days while it decided whether it was entitled to “damages” for my yet-to-be-explained breach of its Acceptable Use Policy.
This is so unbelievably unacceptable and yet I’ve seen PayPal do it time and time again.
Protip: they should file a Notice of Dispute (https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/pp-notice-dispute). This will bypass the usual customer support chain of command and go straight to PayPal's legal department. While this does not guarantee a more reasonable response, it does mean your case will be scrutinized more heavily by an actual human and is more likely to lead to at least getting an explanation. It is also a required prerequisite before for proceeding further to third-party arbitration.
This behavior is causing new companies to get spawned as a response to fill the void created by censorship. A recent one mentioned by a Youtuber is Parallel Economy [1]. I have no idea how good/bad they are but I expect more of these to start popping up.
I am curious how people will vet these new alternatives to PayPal. PayPal for its good and bad at least have a known history and a myriad of discussion about the known behavior. Will people have a way to rate the alternatives, like a Dun & Bradstreet credit score or something like Yelp? How are people validating the behavior and reputation of these businesses?
>I suspect what’s really going on is that someone at PayPal – possibly the entire C-suite – doesn’t like what the Daily Sceptic or the Free Speech Union stands for.
I absolutely guarantee that there isn't a single person in the Paypal C-suite who knows who Toby Young or Daily Sceptic is.
Just few days ago in that site was article telling some negative points about Gates and WHO.
That what happens. Speak wrongly about big pharma, alphabet, Nestle or WHO, you will get cancelled.
Why ?
Because it's all the same Black Rock.
I think I understand gates about this needing to decrease the world population.
After he made so much money he travelled with hes wife and contributed huge amounts of money and energy into the poor countries... then I think what happened was that he saw that helping he actually made things worse because there were just millions of more people killing animals, destroying the planet and making more babies and needing more food & medical aid. Now he wants to cancel this.. because human is the worst being in this rock and causes more harm than anything else.
So, these decisions ought to be entrusted to an entity whose responsibilities are to its shareholders rather than elected representatives of the general population?
The thing about free speech is, that you are not entitled to be agreed with.
And it seems, paypal really doesn't agree with the rhetoric on the daily sceptic - just at a glance this looks to be completely understandable. If, as a private company, paypal doesn't want to be associated with a website that thrives on misinformation and fearmongering, you can't really be surprised - that's just bad for business.
I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.
just as a free society should fight any movement that wants to limit the freedoms of others, sews hate or doesn't follow the principles of a free society, free speech advocates should probably fight against peddlers of misinformation.
It's not all black and white, not all or nothing with this one... we can have nuance in this debate.
> I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.
I hear this position a lot in relation to free speech and it's one I can't understand for the life of me. I guess I don't know what a blatant lie is, and further I know it's something I've been accused of many times in my life when attempting to speak the truth.
I have two questions for you:
* 1: If I say something that I genuinely believe, but is strongly contradicted by evidence that I may or may not be aware of do I have a right to say it?
* 2: If I say something that I believe is factually incorrect would I not have any right to say it?
Perhaps an example here would help. So something I've noticed is there are a lot of conspiracy theory websites which talk about an invisible man that can cure sick people. As far as I can tell this seems to be contradicted by the evidence and these people seem to be either blatantly lying or just completely ignorant of current scientific data. In some cases people who run these website are causing real world harm by convincing people that they shouldn't seek professional medical treatment for their illnesses because the invisible man will take care of them. My understanding is that in some cases conspiracy theorists are even refusing to get vaccinated because they believe the invisible man doesn't want them to get vaccinated.
I'm just wondering if you believe that websites dedicated to the invisible man conspiracy theory should be banned? And if so should those causing real world harm by lying about the invisible man be held to account for their actions?
What you consider “misinformation” today may turn out to be the truth tomorrow. I am not familiar with this site, but do you have examples of the “blatant lies and deliberate misinformation”?
Imagine if in 2001 everyone used your argument to deplatform anyone who said that Iraq did not have WMDs. Imagine if anyone who claimed that the U.S. recruited Nazi scientists to work in the U.S. government after World War II had their funds cut off. Imagine if anyone who suggested that smoking cigarettes was unhealthy or could lead to cancer in the 1940s was banned. There are countless examples of things like this.
Your line of thinking here is very dangerous because the justification to ban or deplatform people you disagree with today will be the same one used to ban people you agree with tomorrow.
The other thing is, as you pointed out, the issue is not black and white. Neither is the classification about what is considered “hate speech” or “misinformation”. Are you comfortable with big tech giants making those decisions?
I only read the DS occasionally these days, but to accuse this particular site of fear-mongering is really just a knee jerk reaction that shows you don't know anything about it.
The site was originally born as Lockdown Sceptics in ~March 2020 and has historically been devoted to combating fear, not engaging in it. The site's history consists mostly of articles arguing that lockdowns and other COVID countermeasures were an overreaction based on hysteria and bad assumptions by governments/academics. In 2020 of course this was considered incredible heresy and "misinformation" even though a lot of the people writing for it were actual doctors, scientists and researchers themselves.
Since the UK PM leadership contest, several high ranking members of the Johnson administration have walked back their previous support for lockdowns and judging from the Spectator/Telegraph the feeling inside the ruling party is now much more aligned with the Daily Sceptic's writers - the Cabinet woke up to the fact that SAGE were feeding them misinformation and the scale of the problem was being regularly exaggerated. E.g. Rishi Sunak said the Treasury had someone on SAGE conf calls for a while who didn't speak, so they didn't realize she was there, and she fed notes back to Sunak who then compared then to the official minutes the government was being sent. What a surprise, the official minutes expunged any mention of dissent or disagreement with whatever the most extreme proposals were.
At some point Lockdown Sceptics became the Daily Sceptic and it branched out. Since then it covers not only COVID topics but also generic anti-woke stuff, debate about the situation in Ukraine (with Ian Rons and Toby Young taking up the more conventional side of the argument and others arguing against), and a bunch of other stuff I'm not so interested in.
Nonetheless the idea that they spread misinformation let alone "hate" is absurd. The writers are mostly a bunch of middle aged academics and journalists making various counter-cultural points, who use graphs and data tables 10x more than the average journalist does.
Who exactly decides what misinformation is? Remember when Twitter started banning people for discussing the lab leak theory, which turned out to be true?
By your own logic, Paypal may decide not to be associated with anyone based on any random criteria, including opinions, race, sex, age etc. It can be black and white, of course, just not today.
Yeah, all the counterfactual bad faith bullshit actors of chaos suddenly cry for rules when it hurts them. Conveniently forget any rules and decency when they stir up shit.
Not saying paypal isn't shit but there is some schadenfreude to be had for sure.
True. There is a real argument to be made here that this site is actively causing harm. Payment providers, especially credit card companies, have banned sites and services for far less, for example because they decided porn was incompatible with their public image.
But this illustrates the dilemma quite well: ideally we would like payment providers to be a public utility that is not allowed to make whimsical judgement calls, on the other hand we would like them to employ good judgement about facilitating things that are clearly detrimental.
While I share your schadenfreude in this case, I don't see how this is solvable in the general case.
This is one of the great failings of the constitution. It was meant to protect us from tyrants but the only tyrants contemplated were the government because they were the major tyrant at the time. We should be using a modern measure of potential to be a tyrant, like market power, and regulating these companies on a stepped system where the more market power they have the more they are subject to the exact same rules the government is.
[+] [-] moreira|3 years ago|reply
Something like: If you end your contract with someone because you think that they were in violation of the terms, you have to clearly list what your reasoning is for it, with no tolerance for black box answers.
DMCA takedown requests include the list of offending URLs. This should be made similar. "We terminated our contract because this, this, and this signal, make us think that you're in violation of its terms". You can then appeal, and obviously if the two parties can't come to an agreement by themselves, you can at least use the legal system.
Otherwise, we're living in a world where contracts between two parties mean nothing. Anyone can pull out of anything at any time for any reason, with no notice.
[+] [-] concinds|3 years ago|reply
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/useragreement-full
> PayPal [...] reserves the right to suspend or terminate [...] access [...] for any reason and at any time upon notice to you...
PayPal never said they broke any terms. PayPal has openly declared war on "hate groups", as defined by the ADL, which is an organization funded by the U.S. oligarchy[0][1]. That's the reason.
PayPal is on the side of the political establishment that is interested in consolidating power and manufacturing consent. Corporate and government power have merged a long time ago; it's not gonna reverse itself.
Liberals need to read Popper's Open Society and its Enemies, and realize that oligarchy is just as big a threat as fascism, if not bigger due to the population not being innoculated against it (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1039842312061374464).
[0]: https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/paypal-partners-with...
[1]: https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/anti-defamation-le... (J.P. Morgan, hello!)
[+] [-] killingtime74|3 years ago|reply
For example you can’t hold someone to their employment contract and force them to work for you.
An example of a massive walkaway https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-61770012. You think they wouldn’t try to enforce the contract if they could?
I’m an Australian lawyer, although this is first year level knowledge.
[+] [-] strken|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alldayeveryday|3 years ago|reply
Let's face it, the decisions of Paypal and others (Youtube, Twitter, etc) when deciding who stays and who goes on its platform are ideologically and politically motivated. The leaders of these companies are basing their decisions on their own political leanings. And in the vast majority of cases like the Daily Sceptic where a user or service is being deplatformed, the reason is idealogical (rather than a case where the user is for example defrauding the platform or service provider).
I believe a better solution would be for the government to penalize companies that are repressive to the rights granted to us in the bill of rights (for example free speech). This whole "but it is a private company who gets to dictate what speech they want and don't want on their site" needs to go out the window. If a company wants to operate within the US, it needs to respect the rights of the country's population (rather than define its own set of rights).
[+] [-] thr0wawayf00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blantonl|3 years ago|reply
Not if the contract stipulates that both parties must agree to unwind the relationship. We already live in a world where anyone can pull out of anything at any time for any reason, with no notice - however if the contract says you can't do that then you open yourself up to legal liability. That doesn't stop most folks.
[+] [-] possiblydrunk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneedem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TotoHorner|3 years ago|reply
This is so unbelievably unacceptable and yet I’ve seen PayPal do it time and time again.
[+] [-] twawaaay|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conradfr|3 years ago|reply
They have always done it, and it has always infuriated people affected by it.
[+] [-] blantonl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boole1854|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|3 years ago|reply
I am curious how people will vet these new alternatives to PayPal. PayPal for its good and bad at least have a known history and a myriad of discussion about the known behavior. Will people have a way to rate the alternatives, like a Dun & Bradstreet credit score or something like Yelp? How are people validating the behavior and reputation of these businesses?
[1] - https://www.paralleleconomy.com/about/
[+] [-] SilverBirch|3 years ago|reply
I absolutely guarantee that there isn't a single person in the Paypal C-suite who knows who Toby Young or Daily Sceptic is.
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|3 years ago|reply
We need better unregulated money transfer services
[+] [-] beardyw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymous344|3 years ago|reply
I think I understand gates about this needing to decrease the world population. After he made so much money he travelled with hes wife and contributed huge amounts of money and energy into the poor countries... then I think what happened was that he saw that helping he actually made things worse because there were just millions of more people killing animals, destroying the planet and making more babies and needing more food & medical aid. Now he wants to cancel this.. because human is the worst being in this rock and causes more harm than anything else.
[+] [-] rat_1234|3 years ago|reply
What clearly is true based on this example is that if we ever gave this power to the government they would use it and use it in a dangerous way.
[+] [-] loudmax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|3 years ago|reply
At this point I'm pretty sure a government would ban less.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xqcgrek2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nuklearwanze|3 years ago|reply
And it seems, paypal really doesn't agree with the rhetoric on the daily sceptic - just at a glance this looks to be completely understandable. If, as a private company, paypal doesn't want to be associated with a website that thrives on misinformation and fearmongering, you can't really be surprised - that's just bad for business.
I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.
just as a free society should fight any movement that wants to limit the freedoms of others, sews hate or doesn't follow the principles of a free society, free speech advocates should probably fight against peddlers of misinformation.
It's not all black and white, not all or nothing with this one... we can have nuance in this debate.
[+] [-] kypro|3 years ago|reply
I hear this position a lot in relation to free speech and it's one I can't understand for the life of me. I guess I don't know what a blatant lie is, and further I know it's something I've been accused of many times in my life when attempting to speak the truth.
I have two questions for you:
* 1: If I say something that I genuinely believe, but is strongly contradicted by evidence that I may or may not be aware of do I have a right to say it?
* 2: If I say something that I believe is factually incorrect would I not have any right to say it?
Perhaps an example here would help. So something I've noticed is there are a lot of conspiracy theory websites which talk about an invisible man that can cure sick people. As far as I can tell this seems to be contradicted by the evidence and these people seem to be either blatantly lying or just completely ignorant of current scientific data. In some cases people who run these website are causing real world harm by convincing people that they shouldn't seek professional medical treatment for their illnesses because the invisible man will take care of them. My understanding is that in some cases conspiracy theorists are even refusing to get vaccinated because they believe the invisible man doesn't want them to get vaccinated.
I'm just wondering if you believe that websites dedicated to the invisible man conspiracy theory should be banned? And if so should those causing real world harm by lying about the invisible man be held to account for their actions?
[+] [-] fsociety999|3 years ago|reply
Imagine if in 2001 everyone used your argument to deplatform anyone who said that Iraq did not have WMDs. Imagine if anyone who claimed that the U.S. recruited Nazi scientists to work in the U.S. government after World War II had their funds cut off. Imagine if anyone who suggested that smoking cigarettes was unhealthy or could lead to cancer in the 1940s was banned. There are countless examples of things like this.
Your line of thinking here is very dangerous because the justification to ban or deplatform people you disagree with today will be the same one used to ban people you agree with tomorrow.
The other thing is, as you pointed out, the issue is not black and white. Neither is the classification about what is considered “hate speech” or “misinformation”. Are you comfortable with big tech giants making those decisions?
[+] [-] origin_path|3 years ago|reply
The site was originally born as Lockdown Sceptics in ~March 2020 and has historically been devoted to combating fear, not engaging in it. The site's history consists mostly of articles arguing that lockdowns and other COVID countermeasures were an overreaction based on hysteria and bad assumptions by governments/academics. In 2020 of course this was considered incredible heresy and "misinformation" even though a lot of the people writing for it were actual doctors, scientists and researchers themselves.
Since the UK PM leadership contest, several high ranking members of the Johnson administration have walked back their previous support for lockdowns and judging from the Spectator/Telegraph the feeling inside the ruling party is now much more aligned with the Daily Sceptic's writers - the Cabinet woke up to the fact that SAGE were feeding them misinformation and the scale of the problem was being regularly exaggerated. E.g. Rishi Sunak said the Treasury had someone on SAGE conf calls for a while who didn't speak, so they didn't realize she was there, and she fed notes back to Sunak who then compared then to the official minutes the government was being sent. What a surprise, the official minutes expunged any mention of dissent or disagreement with whatever the most extreme proposals were.
At some point Lockdown Sceptics became the Daily Sceptic and it branched out. Since then it covers not only COVID topics but also generic anti-woke stuff, debate about the situation in Ukraine (with Ian Rons and Toby Young taking up the more conventional side of the argument and others arguing against), and a bunch of other stuff I'm not so interested in.
Nonetheless the idea that they spread misinformation let alone "hate" is absurd. The writers are mostly a bunch of middle aged academics and journalists making various counter-cultural points, who use graphs and data tables 10x more than the average journalist does.
[+] [-] twawaaay|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxmnxm99|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdrianB1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caiomassan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] accnumnplus1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reason077|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henearkr|3 years ago|reply
I know that it's a question of big principles etc... but still.
[+] [-] twawaaay|3 years ago|reply
"principle: a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning."
[+] [-] accnumnplus1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poszlem|3 years ago|reply
To quote Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear."
[+] [-] jnsaff2|3 years ago|reply
Not saying paypal isn't shit but there is some schadenfreude to be had for sure.
[+] [-] permo-w|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] berry_sortoro|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] greggeter|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Udo|3 years ago|reply
But this illustrates the dilemma quite well: ideally we would like payment providers to be a public utility that is not allowed to make whimsical judgement calls, on the other hand we would like them to employ good judgement about facilitating things that are clearly detrimental.
While I share your schadenfreude in this case, I don't see how this is solvable in the general case.
[+] [-] desindol|3 years ago|reply
They might be right in principle but how they go about conducting it… I am no fan it made me rather the opposite.
[+] [-] jackmott|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] AnnoyedComment|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] snapplebobapple|3 years ago|reply