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Bias Alert: Activist – This story revolves around a likely activist movement at a major U.S. tech company. We have attempted to remain neutral on whether or not this activism was a good thing in order to allow you to read the facts and make up your own mind. We do include an opinion on this matter clearly demarcated and easily skipped over by readers.

Bias Alert: One-Sided – This story uses a quote from a known conservative journalist. The quote was supplied by the company involved and was published unaltered. None of the author’s opinions are included.

The internet went wild when the world’s largest payment service, PayPal, launched a new Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and started notifying users about it over the weekend. The reason why is the new policy would have allowed PayPal to fine any user or business $2,500 for using speech they disagreed with including not supporting ideas like kids being gender fluid or non-binary.

The tech community was first alerted to this when ex-PayPal employee David Marcus revealed it on his Twitter around noon today.

“It’s hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to. But @PayPal’s new AUP 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. ” – David Markus

Essentially the policy gave PayPal a broad power to determine if a user or business using PayPal had spread misinformation in order to make a sale or obtain funds via PayPal and if it was determined to be so by PayPal and PayPal alone then they would debit the $2,500 fine from the users account.

Texan and Tech billionaire Elon Musk agreed with David Marcus that this was a heinous thing to do to users

Elon and David weren’t alone. Zero of the replies or quote tweets we could find appeared to agree with PayPal’s new AUP.

According to an article by Caroline Downey for Yahoo! News, PayPal quickly walked back this new AUP and even claimed it was never meant to go live. The statement PaypPl put out about the incident read in part:

“An AUP notice recently went 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. Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused” – PayPal statement to National Review

WARNING OPINION INCOMING: – IGNORE THIS IF YOU WANT TO MAKE UP YOUR OWN MIND We strive to keep our opinions out of articles and only cover facts, but the above quote is clearly PR damage control spin (in our editorial opinion) meant to smooth things over with a riled up internet across both sides of the American political aisle. The most interesting part is when they state “this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy” note that PayPal didn’t deny drafting this addition to their AUP and they couldn’t deny that it actually went live. This points to the likelihood that internally someone at PayPal gave this change the greenlight and worked on it for some time, likely to appease activist employees or even an activist executive demanding that PayPal force users to abide by their ideological stances. We have seen this type of behavior increasingly out of big tech and big corporate America and it often has the support of senior executives, board members, and CEOs. For example Disney’s CEO appears to be highly supportive of their gender ideology movement and both Google and Apple have made concessions to activist staff in recent past. Other companies that have been hit with this include Microsoft, Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and others.

An AUP is also a really official document and the ability to update it is likely limited to a select few people inside of the company, the updates are probably overseen by a select few managers or executives, and the drafting of changes likely goes through a rigorous process across the company’s operations, legal, and marketing teams. Before changes are given the greenlight there are probably several energized and robust discussions about it and a lot of work done to estimate the downstream impact on users, revenue, and even share price.

Finally, we know the change happened on the morning of Saturday October 8th. Silicon Valley tech workers famously barely work while at work during the weekday and instead enjoy the abundance of lavish gifts, recreational activities, and food offered by tech companies (when they go to the office of course). It seems highly out of place for someone used to these working conditions to wake up early on a Saturday morning and make this change.

There is every chance that this AUP change made it through almost all of the internal ranks at PayPal and was cut at the last second, then taken live by an activist employee when no one was looking. Most likely that activist employee, probably a senior manager of some kind, either hoped that this would win over the last few executives holding out or that it would bring a lot of attention to their cause and rally more tech workers in California to their side. /END OPINION

PayPal has had a long and checkered history of taking funds from users and either not giving them an explanation or making it something vague. This new AUP though took things to an entirely new level and gave the company the broadest set of powers ever to take money from users, though at least we can breathe a little since they only wanted to take money from a user’s PayPal accout not from their bank accounts or credit cards.

Thanks Y’all
This article is partly based on the journalistic coverage of Caroline Downey from National Review via Yahoo! News. We used Caroline’s article to validate facts found on Twitter and cited a quote she recieved from PayPal directly. We highly recommend reading her full article here: PayPal Pulls Back, Says It Won’t Fine Customers $2,500 for ‘Misinformation’ after Backlash

PayPal is headquatered in San Jose, California

PayPal’s stock is down -53.74% so far this year and has lost $104.77 per share in value since the start of the year.


Featured image is the PayPal logo

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