PayPal Has Merely Reworded the Same Policy

The PayPal logo on a smartphone in front of the same logo displayed in this illustration taken on Sept. 8, 2021. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Commentary

When PayPal updated its Acceptable Use Policy to say it could confiscate $2,500 from users who spread “misinformation,” many people were stunned. The stock price was hit hard and it is still falling, off 53 percent from the high this calendar year. Many people closed their accounts. One supposes that many also transferred money out for fear it would be taken.

Faced with the huge backlash, PayPal backtracked and said this was a mistake and should not have been sent out. Of course no one believes this. Such a change had to go through many legal and administrative layers to be approved. We know from metadata of the file that it was weeks in preparation.

Still, even now, Snopes has swung into action, dinging people for misinformation: “users concerned about the purported change can relax; no such provision about misinformation is actually being added to the service’s User Agreement.”

Oh really? It’s unbelievable: PayPal admits its own policy on misinformation was itself misinformation but if you point out what the original policy said, you are then shamed for spreading misinformation.

What a world!

Meanwhile, we have encountered many, hundreds or possibly thousands, of cases in which PayPal has tossed people off their services. It’s been going on for years, and quite often the cases are similar: political non mainstreamers or dissidents of one form or another. It became obvious to me, at least, that this was not a mistake but rather a codification of an existing practice.

This is why no one at PayPal really expected a controversy over the updated AUP.

A day later, The Epoch Times reported what now seems inevitable and obvious. The company did not actually back down. Not at all. They merely reformulated the policy in different words, making the potential for arbitrary bans and confiscations just as possible and likely.

The AUG now says “the promotion of hate, violence, racial, or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime.” “If we believe that you’ve engaged in any of these activities, we may take a number of actions to protect PayPal, its customers, and others at any time at our sole discretion .... You acknowledge and agree that $2,500.00 per violation of the Acceptable Use Policy is presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages.”

Of course promoting violence and so on is awful but “intolerance that is discriminatory”? That could be anyone’s opinion you don’t like. It could be targeted at any form of partisan religious commentary. It could include engaging hot topics like the trans movement or woke ideology generally. It’s hard to think of any serious advocacy that could not be squeezed into the subjective category of “intolerance” that is “discriminatory.” It might even apply to a negative movie or music review.

And that’s perhaps why the PayPal stock shows no signs of recovery.

This truly does seem to be the age of lies. Biden, who just said his son died in Iraq when it was really Delaware, says inflation is zero even as it hits a four-decade high. Pharmaceutical companies claim their products are safe and effective despite every signal otherwise. And now we have tech companies claiming that a policy change was a mistake when it clearly was not, based on their own language.

Nothing has changed.

We last addressed the chilling reality that our financial systems are being used to force political compliance with regime priorities. This is surely the dream of every despot in history. Instead of jailing or annihilating your opponents, merely cut off their ability to feed their families and live a normal life. In this way, a totalitarian government could control the whole of society.

In light of this, consider Executive Order 14,067 that calls for a Central Bank Digital Currency, which would deploy emancipating blockchain technology to achieve the very opposite: a complete surveillance state using the financial system. China has already taken steps in this direction with a social-credit system of contingent permission for movement and associations.

There is another feature of this strange PayPal system of fining users for supposed wrongdoing. PayPal says it is a method of compensating the company. This is, says its AUG, “a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages.”

Catch that? It’s a minimum estimate.

Let’s be more blunt. It’s a form of private taxation on services. It comes from a private-sector company that is working on behalf of—or even setting—regime-based priorities. In the Middle Ages, this was called tax farming. The King did not have an army of tax collectors. Instead, it unleashed unscrupulous private-sector actors to go out and collect from people through any means necessary. On coughing up the proceeds to the palace, the tax farmer kept a portion for himself.

It was common in the ancient world and even then known as a deeply corrupt practice because of the methods that the tax farmers would use, which today we might describe as mafia-style enforcement. The practice spread throughout the Roman Empire and some writers have even said that it contributed to the fall of the Empire in the West. Still, it survived through the Middle Ages.

With the Enlightenment came the general presumption of liberty and the rule of law. Tax farming was the mark of a despotic regime and has since been generally verboten.

Can it come back? Well, on Feb. 27, 2020, the New York Times published a generalized hope that the whole country should “go Medieval” on the virus, and thus did many forms of compulsion from more than 500 years ago come back. For a time in 2020, even dentistry was unavailable, so there we go.

Is PayPal’s tax farming another way in which we are going Medieval here? Possibly. It’s a bad sign regardless, not only for free speech and financial independence but even for fiscal justice. Private companies that claim they can take your money at their own discretion while asserting opaque “damages” that do not exist are not normal market actors. They are acting as regime tools.

Will PayPal reverse its policy following this article? Maybe. But now we know to look closely at the new tricky way in which they will smuggle the same policy into new language and hope that no one notices.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.