A new PayPal policy update appears to authorize the company to pull a significant sum of money from the accounts of users who spread “misinformation.”
Effective November 3, the new conditions will be added to the restricted activity section of the PayPal User agreement, the Daily Wire first reported. Changes include prohibitions on “the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials” that “promote misinformation.” While the prior policy already forbade “hate,” “intolerance,” and discrimination, the new one now also explicitly applies to specific “protected groups” and “individuals or groups based on protected characteristics.” Identities under this umbrella include race, religion, gender or gender identity, and sexual orientation.
“The promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory” would also be deemed a violation of the policy and possible grounds for penalty,” according to the soon-to-be-launched acceptable use policy. The financial tech firm’s current rulebook doesn’t cite these activities.
Breaking the rule against misinformation and hate speech “may subject you to damages, including liquidated damages of $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation, which may be debited directly from your PayPal account,” the company warns. In a user agreement, account holders accept and attest that the penalty is “presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages” due to the expense the firm incurs by accounting for the violations as well as damage to its reputation.
“Under existing law, PayPal has the ability as a private company to implement this type of viewpoint-discriminatory policy,” Aaron Terr, a senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the Daily Wire. “Whatever motivation PayPal has for establishing these vague new categories of prohibited expression, they will almost certainly have a severe chilling effect on users’ speech. As is often the case with ill-defined and viewpoint-discriminatory speech codes, those with unpopular or minority viewpoints will likely bear the brunt of these restrictions.”
National Review
PayPal is a total scam and in my opinion a way to just get info on those who use it. It used to be when you signed up for a PayPal account that all you needed was a name and an email and that was it, now you have an account. Now you have to provide documents like an ID and a SSN. I don’t know about you but a company that wants to steal my money if I promote “hate, or misinformation” is not a company I’m going to give my personal info to.
What’s particularly bad about this is that a lot of people have PayPal connected to their bank accounts, and their PayPal also connected to their social media pages, or if they’re a streamer their donation pages. Which in turn could lead to PayPal reporting you to your bank. Then you would not only lose your PayPal but you could possibly lose your bank account if the bank decides you’re not deserving of an account.
This sounds like it’s not a real thing but we already know that it’s happened to multiple people who have spread “hate and misinformation”
PayPal partnered with the ADL last year to “combat extremism” which since they are technically a financial institution this really isn’t a surprise, but it is a scary precedent to set and especially if you’re a PayPal user knowing how many things you might have connected to your account which could completely ruin your life.
That sounds like a big statement “ruin your life” but honestly it’s true, good luck doing literally anything once they report you to the bank and you lose your cards.
EDIT: At 5:06 EDT today, PayPal reached out to Fox Business stating that the statement was “an error”
“An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information,” the spokesperson said. “PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy.”
The spokesperson added that the company is in the process of updating its policy changes and apologized for any confusion.
“Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused,” the spokesperson added.
As of the publication of this article, the policy hasn’t been updated.
Fox Business
To be clear though, it seems that PayPal will issue punishments for those who are guilty of “hateful conduct.”