The payment management application PayPal has discontinued their service to Toby Young and to two websites created by him: Free Speech Union, an organization that fights against censorship, and The Daily Sceptic, a hub for ideas opposed to restrictions on freedoms in the context of the fight against the pandemic.
Toby Young is a British journalist, educated in Oxford, who has worked for The Times, Modern Review (which he founded), and other British newspapers, such as The Sun on Sunday, Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator magazine, where he is an associate editor.
Young is an activist for freedom of school choice and freedom of speech. That is why he created Free Speech Union. Now he has been censored, not by the government, but by PayPal.
Personal and web accounts
Young himself explains this in an article published in The Daily Sceptic. According to the journalist, he received a notification to his personal PayPal account telling him that his service had been discontinued because he had violated their "acceptable use policy.”Since that policy refers to fraud and money laundering cases, Young thought it was a mistake.
Then he received service interruption notices from The Sceptic and Free Speech Union. It was then he realized it wasn't a mistake: "Now call me a cynic, but the chances of all three accounts violating the same policy within minutes of one another struck me as a bit implausible. Was something else going on?"
No one responds from PayPal
The journalist called PayPal's customer service and explained his case with his personal account. The employee told him that he had no idea what could have happened, but said he would forward his request to another employee higher up. Two days later, he received a message saying that he was being denied the opportunity to speak to an employee who could further explain.
He did the same with the PayPal accounts from his other two sites, with the same result. The company told him that they "would be holding the money in that account for up to 180 days while they decided whether he was entitled to 'damages' for his yet-to-be-explained breach of their Acceptable Use Policy."
Ideological reasons
Then, a new development occured that gave a clue into what kind of motives led PayPal to censor the two websites and to ban the journalist. Regarding Daily Sceptic, the company sent him the following message:
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.
Toby Young does not know which of the messages posted on that website or Free Speech Union might interfere with that policy. He challenges anyone to point him in the direction of a possible case. At least now it is clear that the reason for censorship is ideological.
Kafka in 2022: conviction without indictment
Since the company has not indicated which text they are referring to, Toby Young has been left with the judgment of conviction, but no trial. He is left without accusation either, since they do not indicate what content may have been offensive, or who it may have been offended to.
The journalist had the opportunity to discuss this case with GB News: "This is the new battlefront in the ongoing war against free speech… financial services being withdrawn from people.”
'This is the new battlefront in the ongoing war against free speech... financial services being withdrawn from people.'
Founder of the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic, Toby Young, speaks to Mark Dolan about payments to his organisations being blocked by Paypal. pic.twitter.com/umHgnj7s1a
- GB News (@GBNEWS) September 20, 2022
On the other hand, Young has looked further into PayPal's censorship activity, and found out that he is not the first. He mentioned two left-wing platforms,
Consortium News and Mint Press, which opposed Russia's war with Ukraine, as well as the U.K. Medical Alliance, which is critical of the Covid vaccine. He also mentioned the case of Colin Wright, a critic of trans ideology, who has also been censured by PayPal.
