PayPal has demonetised the account of the Free Speech Union, a British organisation that defends people who have lost work and been cancelled for expressing opinions.
The U.S. online payments system PayPal has closed the account of the Free Speech Union (FSU) as well as the news and opinion site The Daily Sceptic without a clear explanation, a move which their founder Toby Young called “a new low.”
Non-Conformist Views
“This feels like an escalation in the ongoing war against free speech by Big Tech. It’s one thing to shut down and demonetise accounts for expressing non-conformist views, that’s nothing new, unfortunately. But in this case, PayPal has shut down the account of an organisation that defends people who express non-conformist views. That’s a new low,” Young told The Epoch Times in an email.
Columnist and associate editor of The Spectator Young started the FSU in 2020 to support self-styled defenders of free expression. It says that its members have “been sacked, cancelled, penalised, harassed or attacked by outrage mobs for exercising their legal right to free speech.”
The organisation has supported the author Gillian Philip, who was cancelled by the publisher HarperCollins in 2020 when she tweeted her support for JK Rowling, to a British rail conductor who was sacked when he questioned “black privilege” in an online diversity training.
In the same year, Young also started The Daily Sceptic, a successor to Lockdown Sceptics, to challenge science-based stories that “often appear to be rooted in a covert political agenda” such as lockdown policy, COVID-19 restrictions, the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines as well as Net Zero.
The withdrawal of PayPal is proving a challenge as the FSU charges members £2.49 a month, accepts donations, and a significant amount of members’ recurring membership fees are processed by the company.
Writing in The Daily Sceptic, Young said that he’d received a notification on Thursday afternoon last week from his personal PayPal account informing him that it was being shut down because he’d violated the company’s “Acceptable Use Policy.”
He then got notifications for The Daily Sceptic and FSU PayPal accounts that they too had been shut down and for the same reason.
His subsequent appeals were unsuccessful and he said that the only clue as to what might be going on was a message sent from PayPal on the now-closed Daily Sceptic account, which read:
“PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance. We regularly assess activity against our long-standing Acceptable Use Policy and carefully review actions reported to us, and will discontinue our relationship with account holders who are found to violate our policies.”
Young said that he defies anyone to point to an article on his sites that promotes “hate, violence, or racial intolerance.”
He said he suspected the closure of the accounts could be down to a number of reasons including questioning transgender ideology, raising questions about COVID-19 vaccines, and articles critical of the mainstream narrative about the Ukraine war (though it has published several articles defending Ukraine).
New Law
Young told The Epoch Times that the FSU will be campaigning for a new law in Britain to make it illegal for financial companies to withdraw services from customers “for purely political reasons.”
“Provided you haven’t said anything unlawful, your political views should be a matter of complete indifference to financial services companies,” he added.
Britain’s former Brexit minister and FSU Advisory Council member Lord David Frost wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that PayPal’s decision to close the accounts was a “very worrying development.”
“The Financial Conduct Authority should look into this urgently. Meanwhile, don’t leave a balance in your PayPal account, as we now know it can just be confiscated,” added Frost.
The Epoch Times contacted Paypal for comment.