PayPal and America's Pending Social Credit System | Opinion

Do Americans wish to live in a world where dissenters from prevailing elite orthodoxy face discrimination in every public domain?

The recent fracas over PayPal's user policy raises the specter of such a dystopia: a de-banked future—driven by de facto social credit scoring—that is quickly becoming our present.

The payment processing company, one of the largest nonbank lenders in the world with some $75 billion in assets, recently modified its user agreement, threatening to fine those who use PayPal "for activities that...involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal's sole discretion...promote misinformation" up to $2,500 per violation.

The backlash was large and swift—and rightly so. PayPal patrons canceled their accounts en masse, or at least threatened to do so as hashtags indicating it trended across social media. The stock tanked. PayPal's former president David Marcus even panned the company, tweeting:

It's hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to. But @PayPal's new [acceptable use policy] goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity.

Then PayPal backtracked.

A spokesman said the updated policy had gone "out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy."

But no one should be confused. While the company might have accidentally released the policy, it still drafted it. That means it considered transforming itself from financial services company to arbiter of truth—policing Wrongthink and punishing the perps by pilfering their accounts.

How is PayPal equipped to separate fact from fiction? By what means would it assess whether its users are trafficking in the latter? What would rise to the level of punishable speech? That we even have to consider such hypotheticals is disastrous, but they are ones we could imagine emerging from any number of corporations.

Regardless of its pulled policy, PayPal had already indicated its position when it announced in July 2021 that it was partnering with the left-wing Anti-Defamation League. The two declared they would "fight extremism and hate through the financial industry and across at-risk communities" by developing research to "be shared broadly across the financial industry and with policymakers and law enforcement" on efforts by "extremist and hate movements" to use financial platforms to fund criminal activity.

While financial services companies of course ought to be on guard against criminal activity, "extremism and hate" is very much in the eye of the beholder. These beholders have a track record that makes clear they would almost certainly equate conservatism, or any dissent from the ruling-class consensus, as radical, dangerous, and perhaps worthy of censure.

The payment processor in fact had already put thought-crime provisions on its books, and apparently applied them in meting out punishment to dissident users.

PayPal's previous acceptable use policy called for fines of up to $2,500 per violation for those using the product to engage in "the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory."

In a time when the president has classified up to half the country as semi-fascist threats to the republic—and when a conservative movement calling for a colorblind society, upholding the rule of law, and fighting against ideological and identitarian discrimination in all of its manifestations is equated by our betters with bigotry, violence, and discrimination—one can imagine a policy such as PayPal's would be used to put the screws to ideological undesirables.

Consider who PayPal has punished in the past.

Just weeks ago, it allegedly shut down the account of "Gays Against Groomers," a self-identified "coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children."

Around the same time, PayPal also suspended the account of Great Britain's Free Speech Union, described as an "organisation which defends gender-critical academics and people who have lost work for expressing opinions," as well as that of its founder, and his website—all reportedly because of unspecified violations of the company's acceptable use policy.

PayPal's efforts would be consistent with the burgeoning trend, recently illustrated by the medical establishment's "gender-affirming care" jihad, for the public and private sectors to work hand in hand to promote radical gender ideology.

PayPal has pursued Wrongthink on other issues as well.

Months earlier it suspended the accounts of two leftist "alt" news sites without explanation.

One of the purged users thinks PayPal may have done so because of a purported violation of another restricted activity: "provid[ing] false, inaccurate or misleading information"—which would again be in the eye of the beholder.

PayPal's history of censorship dates back years to its purges of counterjihadists and other conservative accounts, as well as those of Christian crowdfunder GiveSendGo, which had facilitated legal defense funds for the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse and participants in the January 6 Capitol breach.

PayPal's pulled policy matters because it portends the weaponization of Woke Capital—like Big Tech—against Wrongthinkers. That weaponization targets both the mind and material. Given PayPal's past practices, and notable instances of alleged debanking or at minimum troubling signs of ideological targeting by financial institutions, the future of a social credit system with American characteristics may well already be here.

We should expect a growing push among financial services companies to police Wrongthink, and threaten those who engage in it.

The idea that dissenters could "build their own bank" might hold today. But we should also expect that a rush for the exits from incumbent firms towards new ones would be met with a series of regulatory roadblocks aimed at making it near-impossible to create a parallel financial ecosystem.

After all, the state deems dissenters deplorable dangers too.

If we assume that dissent on virtually every major issue is ultimately going to be cast by those in government, Woke Capital, Big Tech, and beyond as fake, or even hateful and violent, then the assumption has to be that every institution may well impose a standard like the one PayPal laid out, and seek to kill competition with the full force of the state.

This viewpoint discrimination poses a clear and present danger to the American system.

Those who wish to restore a free and open public square will likely need to use the force of law to achieve it, given the corruption of our civil society, and its loss of respect for free speech, and tolerance of dissent.

Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.