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Dreamwidth Banned by PayPal in 2008 for Refusing to Censor Users
- guiriduro 9y agoPeople still use Paypal? Abandoned my account 2 years ago, never looked back.
- brink 9y agoWhat do I do if I want to purchase something off of eBay?
- gnicholas 9y agoYeah, PayPal has lost lots of users to new services like Venmo. Fortunately for PayPal, they own Venmo.
- wyager 9y agoThey banned me 10+ years ago for violating the ToS (which apparently included being over 18 years old). I probably would have forgiven this (I did break the rules, after all) except for the fact that they elected to keep my money for 6 months and collect interest in the meantime. However, that is what eventually got me into Bitcoin, so maybe I actually owe them some thanks for sucking so badly.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI'm gonna go out on a limb here and take what may be an unpopular position: If you're a financial services firm, you should be forbidden from refusing services to anyone who is not committing an illegal act. Services like PayPal are starting to sound like insurance companies prior to the ACA. If it's not illegal you should not be allowed to turn customers away.
- yock 9y agoDoesn't this open up the door to using legality as a proxy for morality? Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?
- mars4rp 9y agomorality is relevant, rarely people that is doing something that we think immoral see their acts as immoral too. "Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?" like a restaurant in south refusing to serve blacks? with restaurant you have at least some options, but with businesses with monopoly finding an alternative is very hard or expensive.
- EpicEng 9y ago>like a restaurant in south refusing to serve blacks? Which would be illegal as race is a legally protected status.
- Danihan 9y agoIsn't sexual identity / orientation protected as well? These companies are banning clients for simply talking about sex. That seems like a grey area but it's treading pretty close to discrimination in my mind. Then again, should Google be forced to put adsense ads on a porn site? Really murky territory.
- raziel2p 9y ago"About six months after opening, PayPal -- our payment processor at the time -- demanded that we censor some of our users' content (mostly involving people talking about sex, usually fictionally, in explicit terms) that was legal and protected speech but that they felt violated their terms for using PayPal." Seems reasonable to me.
- SquareWheel 9y agoTo me, too. Paypal isn't a government institution. They can choose who to partner with by whatever metrics they want.
- wyager 9y agoWhile I agree with this reasoning, I wish it was used consistently; on other issues, people here frequently bring up things like redlining or (hypothetical) refusal of services in rural areas as examples of why companies shouldn't be allowed to choose their customers.
- lr4444lr 9y agoAs far as I have ever found in the literature, redlining was an outcome of financial risk calculations, not based on discriminatory racial ideology.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wyager 9y agoThis is true, but people still took issue with it because (as far as I can tell) they believe anything that happens to end up effectively along racial lines is racist regardless of intent. This is also orthogonal to the question, which is whether businesses should be allowed to choose their customers.
- devrandomguy 9y ago
- donquichotte 9y agoTime to move to Stripe.
- nsxwolf 9y agoAnd they don't allow things like porn, gambling, and guns. I'm OK with payment processors setting their own rules based on their own ethics, but its a problem if all we have is this little oligopoly of choices. We need more choices.
- winslow 9y agoWhat's the reasoning for not allowing those things? Does it bring additional legal problems or something? I could see the issue with potential child porn or something like that but shouldn't a payment processor be siloed from any legal issues there?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- MBCook 9y agoI imagine MUCH higher fraud and chargeback risks. I think a lot of places won't deal with porn sites because of the 'fraud' (real or claimed) issues. Gambling may be illegal under US law, so I can see why you'd avoid that.
- eric_h 9y agoContrary to popular belief, gambling is not illegal under US law. In fact, certain types of gambling (horse racing) are explicitly protected by federal law, and generally gambling laws are up to the states (online gambling of all kinds is perfectly legal in NV and NJ). Betting online on horse races is explicitly legal in 30+ states, and not explicitly illegal in several more. Certain jurisdictions disallow online betting on horse races if you live within some radius of a local horse track. [Edit: to clarify, some forms of gambling are explicitly disallowed across state lines, but that ban does not have any impact within state lines]
- rdiddly 9y ago"It took us a few months to find a payment processor willing to take money for us without concern trolling about our users' immortal souls or whatever..." Pretty much the best line ever.
- ryandrake 9y agoI'd love to understand the business benefit to PayPal of censoring its customers, particularly when the content they are trying to censor is not "criticism of PayPal." Has PayPal actually measured some negative effect on its bottom line when people who use their service talk about sex?
- drewbuschhorn 9y agoFWIW My understanding is that (non-educational, etc) sexual content tends to have a much higher chargeback / dispute / resolution cost. It's always about the dollars and cents I guess.
- bcrescimanno 9y agoDisclaimer: I'm a PP employee. While it's complex (and I don't fully understand it all myself), the simple answer is risk management / fraud. Adult content tends to be extremely risky from a fraud and legal compliance perspective and companies like PayPal (and Stripe, and Google Checkout, among others) choose not to do business in this arena because the risk / reward model just doesn't justify it. Specifically, subscriptions to sites that offer digital adult content are not allowed per ToS: https://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/faq569 https://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/faq569
- JBReefer 9y agoNetflix certainly offers "digital adult content" in shows like Easy, movies like Below Her Mouth, but PayPal accepts their business. You can buy content on Amazon with PayPal, which sells a TON of out and out porn. Is it maybe more fair to say that small sites that offer adult content are not allowed?
- delinka 9y agoLikely it's those selling predominantly adult content. Amazon's offerings are not predominantly adult in nature. Nor are Netflix's. Presumably, if there's a higher occurrence of fraud with those merchants whose wares are predominantly adult in nature, processors consider these types of business more risky. However, they (processors) already have a tool at their disposal to combat fraud: the rate that's charged to the merchant for taking payments. My understanding is that riskier businesses tend to pay a higher rate for their card processing as kind of an insurance against (inevitable?) fraud. And then it would be my opinion that an account shouldn't get terminated except due to actual (excessive?) fraud.
- quoquoquo 9y agoHow is this allowed in Paypal policies?
- bcrescimanno 9y agohttps://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/faq569 https://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/faq569
- marksellers 9y agoAh yes, the eminent moral authority of PayPal.
- lawn 9y agoThis is a perfect use case for cryptocurrencies.
- rothbardrand 9y agoImagine if they had started taking bitcoin payments in 2009, 2010, 2011 or 2012? They wouldn't have to be worrying about their seed fund or keeping the doors open at this point.
- busterarm 9y agohttps://www.manilaprinciples.org/ https://www.manilaprinciples.org/
- dang 9y agoThe article is from April 2017. The title has been editorialized, which breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). On HN, submitters don't have special rights over articles and don't get to frame them for everyone else. Doing the latter, as this thread amply illustrates, amounts to controlling the discussion. Worse, the detail that was cherry-picked (presumably because censorship issues are a hot topic) refers to something which the article makes clear happened years ago. Making it sound like it happened today ("Dreamwidth Banned by PayPal for Refusing to Censor Users") was egregiously misleading. We take story submission privileges away from users who do this kind of thing, so please don't do it. I've added 2008 to the title above as a fire extinguisher. Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you're welcome to do so by posting a comment to the thread. Then your view is on a level field with everyone else's.
- petraeus 9y agoGood for PayPal, they are a private business and can choose who they will allow on their platform.