PayPal Has Been Featured In Black Mirror Episode

Former PayPal executives, commonly known as the “PayPal Mafia,” have criticized the payments company for its recent debanking practices. One co-founder has called the freezing of cash “totalitarian,” while another has compared it to a Black Mirror episode.

The payments technology giant has received criticism for its de-platforming practices, which reportedly involve an abrupt process of freezing funds, paying fines, and engaging in tense negotiations to unlock the accounts of its users for a variety of reasons, despite recently becoming more crypto-friendly.

The Free Press (TFP) reported on December 14 that Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal in 1998 and led it until 2002, stated that the company’s mission has considerably changed away from its founding goal of granting global people broader access to financial services.

“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice,” Thiel noted, adding that:

“There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.”

Thiel is referred to informally as the “Don” of the well-known “PayPal Mafia,” a collection of founders and former workers, including Elon Musk, who have since founded or worked at other significant digital companies.

David Sacks has also criticized PayPal’s deplatorming tactics

Sacks claimed in an interview with TFP that PayPal, led by its current CEO Dan Schulman, is attempting to capitalize on the woke culture trend by kicking out users who have opposing viewpoints.

“The CEO [Schulman] has got like every woke award you can win,” Sacks said, adding:

“It’s a symbiotic relationship—he implements their agenda, and, in exchange, they give him awards, and that furthers advancement up the corporate totem pole of woke capitalism.”

Just a few of PayPal’s prominent deplatformings include the closure of accounts linked to the Freedom Phone startup, which focuses on censorship-free journalism, Consortium News, the Free Speech Union, and the lockdown skeptic blog The Daily Sceptic. All of which might be considered to have a political rightward slant or at the very least to have divergent opinions.

Elon Musk, the current CEO of Twitter and the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, responded to the article from The Free Press by claiming that the social media site has turned into an episode of Black Mirror, a British television program that typically depicts some sort of dystopian future where people are controlled by technology.

Due to the network’s decentralization and resistance to censorship, crypto proponents have of course pushed the “Bitcoin cures this” narrative despite the possibility of deplatforming being there for some users.

The business also controversially implemented $2,500 fines in October for users who “promote misinformation” or anything that poses hazards to “user safety and welfare.” These two criteria were vaguely defined.

Both the general public and prominent individuals, including PayPal Mafia members like former PayPal President David Marcus and former CEO Musk, strongly opposed the decision. Then, on October 11, PayPal swiftly retracted that regulation and claimed an administrative error was to blame.

But other doubters think the rule has been covertly reinserted into the business’s user agreement and acceptable usage policy.

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