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PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

204 points by aspenmayer 6y ago

ravenstine 6y ago
In the coming years, we may see the rise of separate economies based on political divide. I think this is where we are heading, and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments.
- gruez 6y ago
  >and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments. Perhaps, but how is this related to this story? Both epik and paypal are located in the US. If anything this points towards the internet being divided across partisan lines.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    "political divide" from the first sentence.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I think he is just comparing it to another way in which the internet is balkanizing.
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      This, but also in that I think internet balkanization, if it takes off, will only make it easier to further balkanize it into "micronations" for different ideologies, or corporate brands.
- tobylane 6y ago
  Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Cryptocurrencies as the current niche are hanging on, I suspect for as long as VMP permit them (ie buying bitcoin with a credit card). Everyone else, even Apple, go through them.
  - thesimon 6y ago
    > Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Bank transfer?
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    Separate economies don't necessarily have to be equal in capability. One may be the dominant while the other operates closer to being a black market, while not necessarily being an actual black market. Maybe it would be based on cryptocurrency, or a more traditional form of currency that is centralized but isn't USD, for instance. Or someone with a lot of money decides that having dominance over a new economy takes the opportunity and forms their own "competitor" to Visa, but it operates within the economy that Visa decides it doesn't want to be a part of. Then again, maybe Visa one day leaks enough customers that it decides it's not worth being as moralistic.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    It's really more of a bootstrapping issue than anything. You need to accept credit cards because that's what your customers expect to pay using. If your customers start to expect to pay using some cryptocurrency, what do you need credit cards for? First you have to reach a critical mass for the alternative payment system, but the more legitimate businesses that PayPal boots to the other side of the wall, the more mass there is on the other side of the wall.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Genuinely curious: if it’s a growth thing, how did PayPal get where they are today? I know eBay was involved, but not much more than that.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        First to market advantage, more or less. Also, it's even not so much PayPal as Visa and MasterCard, and how they got the way they are involves both politics and backroom dealings.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Will they be significant economies though? Gab and Epik are mostly about culture wars and conspiracy theories. How many people are actively involved in those?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    The history of explosive growth in tech platforms should make us very cautious about assuming small economies will stay small. It's been barely a decade since Facebook and Twitter were small platforms that didn't matter.
    - criddell 6y ago
      A decade ago Facebook and Twitter were small in a nascent industry.
      - Jtsummers 6y ago
        A decade ago Facebook had 500 million users. Not sure that's actually that small. It took them 2 years to double, and 5 years to double again (in 2017 they hit 2 billion).
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        That's how we see it in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't obvious that the industry was nascent. Many people saw them as strong competitors to Myspace and Friendster rather than anything fundamentally new; even once they got clearly past Myspace, it was quite common to hear people saying that the global demand for social media is probably saturated as they continued to grow. (And of course, it wasn't obvious that Myspace was a nascent industry either when they launched in 2003!)
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Facebook and Twitter don't require buying into any particular politics to join.
      - 6y ago
- golemotron 6y ago
  It happens a lot today. Advertising targets lifestyle cohorts, and political orientation is part of that. if you polled Uber and Lyft users you'd find that they have very different views of the world. Same with McDonalds and Chick-Fil-A. Last year, I was on an American Airlines flight and it was notable that they played up patriotism in a way that Delta doesn't.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    I haven't flown on American in ages. How do they play up patriotism? Like, if a soldier boards they announce it kind of stuff? Because I've seen that on Delta too.
- gman83 6y ago
  This kind of situation used to exist in the Netherlands prior to World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation I always found it crazy that my grandparents would tell me how there would be a socialist bakery and then a protestant bakery.
cft 6y ago
This is why the media establishment (Google, Facebook) hated Bitcoin so much. Because it gives financial viability to independent thought.
- carierx1 6y ago
  Exactly! Facists hate the tools of freedom.
- virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
  r/independent thought/rampant, virulent racism and white supremacy/
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    To be fair, it did both.
umvi 6y ago
Seems like PayPal had already cut off funding for Proud Boys over a year ago? The did the same for Antifa though, so at least they are somewhat consistent. This particular article seems less about Proud Boys and more about Epik using an "alternative currency" called "Masterbucks"... > The right wing has long accused tech companies of anti-conservative bias. Experts say the claims are unfounded. It's an interesting situation. Facebook particularly I would say has an overwhelming conservative bias. At least, I saw an article the other day on how the top X trending posts on Facebook are always dominated by pro-conservative pieces. However, I've also seen a ton of anti-conservative partisan fact-checking on Facebook (i.e. it's obvious the factchecker was doing everything possible to label an unfavorable article as "false" or "partly false" on a small technicality). So in my opinion, the situation is that (in the case of Facebook), the userbase and content is right-leaning, while the fact-checkers/employees are left leaning and are trying to combat their own userbase.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- some_furry 6y ago
  > [They] did the same for Antifa though, so at least they are somewhat consistent. I don't think this is a coherent statement. Antifa isn't an organization. The Proud Boys definitely is. If you're not familiar with the Proud Boys, this is a good introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZMWQDvZQZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZMWQDvZQZs
  - umvi 6y ago
    > Antifa isn't an organization Maybe not with centralized governance like Proud Boys, but PayPal definitely cut off payment processing for "Antifa Sacramento" and "Atlanta Antifascists" last year, I remember reading about it...
    - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
      I know it's difficult to comprehend but: Antifa is not an organization while "Antifa Sacramento" might be an organization.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
From the article: > According to one letter, penned by Epik’s SVP of strategy and communications, Robert Davis, PayPal inquired about offshore accounts, money transmission licenses, and "other queries related to cross‐border activities and law enforcement." > “[The questions] were absolutely absurd, and well outside of any knowledge or experience we have as a domain registrar,” said Davis. These sound to me like things PayPal very obviously should be asking of anyone using them to run a cryptocurrency. Interesting that they've taken down the masterbucks page now linked in the article and with the archived note about tax advantages, and moved it to masterbucks.com which their FAQ claims they control: https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/using-masterbucks/ https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/using-masterbucks...
- dashundchen 6y ago
  Yes, I think many people commenting here have jumped to react to the headline with their own political views, not the article. Perhaps the title should reflect it's over money laundering, not content of Epik's clients. Anyone who has read stories of or dealt with Paypal before knows they will cut off access if they even have an inkling of illegal activity happening. Their relationship with the banks and payment processors depends on it. So it's no surprise Epik advertising tax evasion using Paypal would get them terminated. Epik doesn't really help their case with the response letter, it's written in a unhinged fashion without any substantiation of their claims of censorship by "Paypal executives".
  - cft 6y ago
    That's called selective enforcement
    - lykr0n 6y ago
      It totally is. They're selectively enforcing their policy against people large enough to catch the attention of PayPal's Compliance Teams. Automated actions are taken against small accounts, Manual Enforcement will happen against large accounts.
- 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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steve76 6y ago
In politics people are to be either pampered or destroyed. And you never want to endure present pain to avoid future conflict. You will fight anyways and only be weaker. Best to walk away from it all. We should embrace it when people talk. Because people who talk are nothing. Right away you know they won't do anything because it's the people who are quiet, who you don't even know exist let alone don't see and hear are the ones that get you and are anything real. It doesn't belong to you, and people do this because they are desperate and will eventualy destroy themselves on their own. Behavior institutions, really sick people on a slow motion suicide, that's what you are dealing with and will ultimately run into. On a side note: Just my opinion, take it for what it's worth, isn't the absolute worst thing you can do for your health during the time of covid is to hit a crack pipe with an underage Ukranian prostitute? During the Charlamagne tha God interview, my former Vice President wasn't just parroting something he heard and had no understanding. He had full knowledge of what crack cocaine does to people. I guess it was anxiety or trying to probe the conversation because this was out there. But doesn't that make it even worse? Seeing how he has military intelligence capability and also sent a lot of people to prison decades ago while rewarding his own with hundreds of millions for the same thing. How can you control a covid pandemic when you cannot even control a family addiction, one of the easier ones too. Just bad habits and lifestyle more than anything. I know. Not below the belt either. At the top it's cut throat and he did it to other people.
dleslie 6y ago
To be clear: the domain registrar has been cut off. I doubt that Paypal is going to be consistent about this; _I suspect that_ illegal content and hate sites can be found in the registries of many major registrars. Still, it's a concerning development for anyone who may be using the same registration service as a future target. Edit: I missed that they are alleged to be laundering money.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  They got cut off because they’re suspected to be laundering money, and couldn’t fill out AML forms, not because they host hate speech.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Oh? My mistake for skimming the article. That is indeed a dumb move on their part.
  - gwright 6y ago
    I think there is room to talk about what is an appropriate due process and/or orderly shutdown process for someone operating internet infrastructure such as a payment processor, ISP, registrar, etc. Perhaps the registrar should have been taken over by some sort of court-appointed receivership, for example? The difficulty here is that there has been no judicial process, just PayPal making a corporate decision based on their contract. I'm not saying that Paypal wasn't justified, just wondering if there might be a way to minimize collateral damage.
    - nemothekid 6y ago
      When it comes to potentially laundering money, the SEC doesn't give you a lot fo time for "orderly shutdown process". You should have gotten your documents in order before the SEC starts knocking on your door.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      It was Epik’s responsibility to do an “orderly process” when they started acting as a money transmitter, it’s not PayPal’s job to compensate for Epik’s failure to comply with the law. The consequence for failing to comply with legal requirements are often sudden and disrupting; Epik really should have planned for this. Continuing to service Epik despite a failure to follow AML laws actually exposes PayPal to risk, which is why they did a hard cutoff and not a phased shutdown. “We thought they were money laundering and kept serving them for a few weeks” is how you get prosecuted too.
freeone3000 6y ago
They chose to not participate with PayPal, and invent their own currency, and in exchange, PayPal stopped dealing with them. Their questions were fairly basic KYC form-letter questions anyone selling a financial service should be able to answer - if they couldn't, they might be in trouble with the SEC, not just PayPal.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  And yet this entire thing is going to turn into an ugly left vs. right culture war, even though this is probably more about KYC regulations.
  - some_furry 6y ago
    Fortunately, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894248
    - umvi 6y ago
      Fought by a tiny minority, yes, but that tiny minority can stir up enormous amounts of large scale contention and discord.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      That "tiny minority" still has an outsized impact. The pareto principle applies to pretty much everything.
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        That's as much to be attributed to the asymmetry between destruction and creation as it is to the pareto principle.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    To be fair: the headline is quite clearly crafted to deliberately invite the culture war, and the clicks that come with it. The article itself rejects the premise in its very first sentence.
kenforthewin 6y ago
If some of y'all put the time you spent into defending white supremacists and hate platforms in the name of free speech or independent thought instead into achieving a more just, anti-racist society we'd all be so much better off.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Seconded.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
  That's not how it works. If you don't defend the rights of even the worst to free speech, soon everyone's rights to speech will be in danger. In fact, it's these looked down upon speakers who need protection the most. No one needs the protection of the First Amendment to say things everyone agrees with.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
  Our society is the most just society the Earth has ever known. What exactly do you expect the folks of HN to do differently?
  - mmastrac 6y ago
    Sorry, that's a very weak statement and easily refuted. By what measure? The US ranks below Canada on the HFI. On many quality of life lists, the US is far below nordic countries. You may want to examine your circumstances and see if you'd still feel the same way if you were one or more of black, female, gay, or a persecuted minority (I'm assuming you are none of these, but feel free to correct me).
    - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
      It doesn't matter what the circumstances are. Your very post here proves my point more than any further elaboration on my part ever could. A mere 30 years ago, everything you just said here would have gotten _you_ banned from most clubs, small businesses, shopping centers, and religious organizations. Today, you get rewarded with a bunch of social media points for making statements like yours.
robinduckett 6y ago
Good.
drummer 6y ago
Is this the same PayPal getting into cryptocurrencies? If Sathoshi were dead they would be rolling in their graves now.
chaganated 6y ago
Gab is a non-entity, and McInness is a bad joke. PayPal has just given both of them 10,000x more credibility than they ever had. The Streisandining continues.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  So you're saying that telling people to shut up will not actually change their minds and make the world a better place? I don't like that. I'll give you a downvote, that will set things right!
draw_down 6y ago
Everyone loves free trade right up until it bites them.
JeremyBanks 6y ago
no quarter with the fascists
jasonvorhe 6y ago
This is good news, but I suspect the "censorship cancel culture" crowd will be chiming in soon.
- patrickaljord 6y ago
  Well, I mean, when they were banned from twitter, people said "build your own twitter", when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system", when they got banned from cloudflare they were told "build your own internet backbone" etc... At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra with big public contracts and ties to the government using public infrastructure paid by the people ban you from their services? I mean, imagine if this was happening to some people in China, people would immediately call it censorship, and rightfully so.
  - nojito 6y ago
    These sites aren’t being banned for their views but their blatant disregard for the terms of services for providers.
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      Are they? Some may be, such as proud boys and dailystormer may be afoul of some (vague) hate speech clauses. Others may not be. paypal and CC companies also shut down donations to wikileaks long ago (long before Trump was a thing). And even shut down donations to other foundations, such as the Wau Holland Stiftung of the Chaos Computer Club[0], that collected donations in part for wikileaks. My first real memory of paypal was paypal shutting down the account we used to collect donations to cover server costs for a forum we ran back in the day[1], without any appeals process and freezing all assets, effectively stealing the money[2]. I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much. [0] German, https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen-paypal-vor/ https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen... [1] the forums was a rather benign thing, just for chitchat, nobody sold anything, and it wasn't about anything illegal either. We never got an explanation from paypal, but the account shutdown coincided with a DMCA request for a single red carpet picture some user posted in a thread about the Emmy's. We removed that picture, by the way. [2] Paypal wrote that they would refund the money, but some of our members reported they never did get a refund. [3] I and some other people repeatedly reported a website selling child pornography for crypto (or for users submitting "original content"), mostly of the blackmailed-into-performing-lewd-acts variety targeting young teens and even pre-teens. While we had some success in getting domain registrars to nuke the domains in the past, this only lead to domain hopping, and finally the operator found a registrar that doesn't care (currently a Ukrainian company and .su/.pk domains). Every time the websites were behind cloudflare and every time cloudflare responded to our requests with "we're just a reverse proxy and forwarded it to the hoster" and didn't do anything. The current incarnations of those websites are still online a month later.
stevespang 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flp7gKg5G4E&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flp7gKg5G4E&feature=youtu.be
s9w 6y ago
I would say that there should be a source that at least tries to be neutral - but this seems to be the 'source'. Even with a cursory reading I stopped at 5 blatant lies. But who cares anymore
- gruez 6y ago
  >Even with a cursory reading I stopped at 5 blatant lies elaborate?
  - s9w 6y ago
    I can't. Argumenting for that side makes the mods come out punishing, saying it's flame baiting, not what this site es for etc.
rendall 6y ago
From the article's title: "Home to Proud Boys domain, Gab, and other right-wing sites posts unhinged letters after PayPal cuts ties" Unhinged is a very editorial stance, signaling how the author wants us to perceive the events of the story before even word 1 Does no one else feel resistant to this kind of nudging?
themgt 6y ago
This may or may not have been a political move, but the theme of certain partisans celebrating when their perceived enemies are deplatformed is disturbing, especially given the parallel phenomenon of politically inconvenient stories being termed "Russian disinformation" that's our societal imperative to suppress. It shouldn't require too much of your imagination to wonder if one day you will be on the wrong end of this corporate shunning. Jacobin for example is complaining Facebook is blocking their pro-Marxist posts on Bolivia. If your position is "the values enforced by these trillion dollar multinational companies will surely never come into conflict with my own!" you're a fool or a stooge. https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856 https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856
- sascha_sl 6y ago
  Are you allowed to celebrate if you (as a minority group, possibly individually) are materially hurt by these platforms? Also this is far from corporate shunning, these are deeply socially unacceptable positions too. PayPal already has a long list of things it deems unacceptable. When I worked for an artist community that had an NSFW section we got weekly threats from PayPal compliance, I don't think sites like Patreon fare much better there. I don't see how this is special. Getting banned from PayPal is far, FAR away from "being shunned by all corporations".
balozi 6y ago
Decentralize everything is a concept that should be taught as a fundamental life lesson to school children everywhere.
- enumjorge 6y ago
  We should also teach them not to fall for conspiracy theories, and how to read articles carefully.
  - glasss 6y ago
    They'll need to learn about credit and how not to get a payday loan first.
02020202 6y ago
"it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" is what the mouth-breathing morons usually spew all around the interwebz....until they come after your money, right?!
t0mmyb0y 6y ago
Is this another company protected by cloudflare? Is the protection free?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
perryizgr8 6y ago
Remember guys, PayPal Twitter Google Facebook aren't monopolies! You're free to create your own platform!

204 points by aspenmayer 6y ago

In the coming years, we may see the rise of separate economies based on political divide. I think this is where we are heading, and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments.

gruez 6y ago
>and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments. Perhaps, but how is this related to this story? Both epik and paypal are located in the US. If anything this points towards the internet being divided across partisan lines.
- edoceo 6y ago
  "political divide" from the first sentence.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I think he is just comparing it to another way in which the internet is balkanizing.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    This, but also in that I think internet balkanization, if it takes off, will only make it easier to further balkanize it into "micronations" for different ideologies, or corporate brands.
tobylane 6y ago
Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Cryptocurrencies as the current niche are hanging on, I suspect for as long as VMP permit them (ie buying bitcoin with a credit card). Everyone else, even Apple, go through them.
- thesimon 6y ago
  > Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Bank transfer?
- ravenstine 6y ago
  Separate economies don't necessarily have to be equal in capability. One may be the dominant while the other operates closer to being a black market, while not necessarily being an actual black market. Maybe it would be based on cryptocurrency, or a more traditional form of currency that is centralized but isn't USD, for instance. Or someone with a lot of money decides that having dominance over a new economy takes the opportunity and forms their own "competitor" to Visa, but it operates within the economy that Visa decides it doesn't want to be a part of. Then again, maybe Visa one day leaks enough customers that it decides it's not worth being as moralistic.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's really more of a bootstrapping issue than anything. You need to accept credit cards because that's what your customers expect to pay using. If your customers start to expect to pay using some cryptocurrency, what do you need credit cards for? First you have to reach a critical mass for the alternative payment system, but the more legitimate businesses that PayPal boots to the other side of the wall, the more mass there is on the other side of the wall.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Genuinely curious: if it’s a growth thing, how did PayPal get where they are today? I know eBay was involved, but not much more than that.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      First to market advantage, more or less. Also, it's even not so much PayPal as Visa and MasterCard, and how they got the way they are involves both politics and backroom dealings.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Will they be significant economies though? Gab and Epik are mostly about culture wars and conspiracy theories. How many people are actively involved in those?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The history of explosive growth in tech platforms should make us very cautious about assuming small economies will stay small. It's been barely a decade since Facebook and Twitter were small platforms that didn't matter.
  - criddell 6y ago
    A decade ago Facebook and Twitter were small in a nascent industry.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      A decade ago Facebook had 500 million users. Not sure that's actually that small. It took them 2 years to double, and 5 years to double again (in 2017 they hit 2 billion).
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      That's how we see it in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't obvious that the industry was nascent. Many people saw them as strong competitors to Myspace and Friendster rather than anything fundamentally new; even once they got clearly past Myspace, it was quite common to hear people saying that the global demand for social media is probably saturated as they continued to grow. (And of course, it wasn't obvious that Myspace was a nascent industry either when they launched in 2003!)
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Facebook and Twitter don't require buying into any particular politics to join.
    - 6y ago
golemotron 6y ago
It happens a lot today. Advertising targets lifestyle cohorts, and political orientation is part of that. if you polled Uber and Lyft users you'd find that they have very different views of the world. Same with McDonalds and Chick-Fil-A. Last year, I was on an American Airlines flight and it was notable that they played up patriotism in a way that Delta doesn't.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  I haven't flown on American in ages. How do they play up patriotism? Like, if a soldier boards they announce it kind of stuff? Because I've seen that on Delta too.
gman83 6y ago
This kind of situation used to exist in the Netherlands prior to World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation I always found it crazy that my grandparents would tell me how there would be a socialist bakery and then a protestant bakery.

cft 6y ago

This is why the media establishment (Google, Facebook) hated Bitcoin so much. Because it gives financial viability to independent thought.

carierx1 6y ago
Exactly! Facists hate the tools of freedom.
virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
r/independent thought/rampant, virulent racism and white supremacy/
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  To be fair, it did both.

umvi 6y ago

Seems like PayPal had already cut off funding for Proud Boys over a year ago? The did the same for Antifa though, so at least they are somewhat consistent. This particular article seems less about Proud Boys and more about Epik using an "alternative currency" called "Masterbucks"... > The right wing has long accused tech companies of anti-conservative bias. Experts say the claims are unfounded. It's an interesting situation. Facebook particularly I would say has an overwhelming conservative bias. At least, I saw an article the other day on how the top X trending posts on Facebook are always dominated by pro-conservative pieces. However, I've also seen a ton of anti-conservative partisan fact-checking on Facebook (i.e. it's obvious the factchecker was doing everything possible to label an unfavorable article as "false" or "partly false" on a small technicality). So in my opinion, the situation is that (in the case of Facebook), the userbase and content is right-leaning, while the fact-checkers/employees are left leaning and are trying to combat their own userbase.

deleted 6y ago
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some_furry 6y ago
> [They] did the same for Antifa though, so at least they are somewhat consistent. I don't think this is a coherent statement. Antifa isn't an organization. The Proud Boys definitely is. If you're not familiar with the Proud Boys, this is a good introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZMWQDvZQZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZMWQDvZQZs
- umvi 6y ago
  > Antifa isn't an organization Maybe not with centralized governance like Proud Boys, but PayPal definitely cut off payment processing for "Antifa Sacramento" and "Atlanta Antifascists" last year, I remember reading about it...
  - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
    I know it's difficult to comprehend but: Antifa is not an organization while "Antifa Sacramento" might be an organization.

mcintyre1994 6y ago

From the article: > According to one letter, penned by Epik’s SVP of strategy and communications, Robert Davis, PayPal inquired about offshore accounts, money transmission licenses, and "other queries related to cross‐border activities and law enforcement." > “[The questions] were absolutely absurd, and well outside of any knowledge or experience we have as a domain registrar,” said Davis. These sound to me like things PayPal very obviously should be asking of anyone using them to run a cryptocurrency. Interesting that they've taken down the masterbucks page now linked in the article and with the archived note about tax advantages, and moved it to masterbucks.com which their FAQ claims they control: https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/using-masterbucks/ https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/using-masterbucks...

dashundchen 6y ago
Yes, I think many people commenting here have jumped to react to the headline with their own political views, not the article. Perhaps the title should reflect it's over money laundering, not content of Epik's clients. Anyone who has read stories of or dealt with Paypal before knows they will cut off access if they even have an inkling of illegal activity happening. Their relationship with the banks and payment processors depends on it. So it's no surprise Epik advertising tax evasion using Paypal would get them terminated. Epik doesn't really help their case with the response letter, it's written in a unhinged fashion without any substantiation of their claims of censorship by "Paypal executives".
- cft 6y ago
  That's called selective enforcement
  - lykr0n 6y ago
    It totally is. They're selectively enforcing their policy against people large enough to catch the attention of PayPal's Compliance Teams. Automated actions are taken against small accounts, Manual Enforcement will happen against large accounts.
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steve76 6y ago

In politics people are to be either pampered or destroyed. And you never want to endure present pain to avoid future conflict. You will fight anyways and only be weaker. Best to walk away from it all. We should embrace it when people talk. Because people who talk are nothing. Right away you know they won't do anything because it's the people who are quiet, who you don't even know exist let alone don't see and hear are the ones that get you and are anything real. It doesn't belong to you, and people do this because they are desperate and will eventualy destroy themselves on their own. Behavior institutions, really sick people on a slow motion suicide, that's what you are dealing with and will ultimately run into. On a side note: Just my opinion, take it for what it's worth, isn't the absolute worst thing you can do for your health during the time of covid is to hit a crack pipe with an underage Ukranian prostitute? During the Charlamagne tha God interview, my former Vice President wasn't just parroting something he heard and had no understanding. He had full knowledge of what crack cocaine does to people. I guess it was anxiety or trying to probe the conversation because this was out there. But doesn't that make it even worse? Seeing how he has military intelligence capability and also sent a lot of people to prison decades ago while rewarding his own with hundreds of millions for the same thing. How can you control a covid pandemic when you cannot even control a family addiction, one of the easier ones too. Just bad habits and lifestyle more than anything. I know. Not below the belt either. At the top it's cut throat and he did it to other people.

dleslie 6y ago

To be clear: the domain registrar has been cut off. I doubt that Paypal is going to be consistent about this; _I suspect that_ illegal content and hate sites can be found in the registries of many major registrars. Still, it's a concerning development for anyone who may be using the same registration service as a future target. Edit: I missed that they are alleged to be laundering money.

ashtonkem 6y ago
They got cut off because they’re suspected to be laundering money, and couldn’t fill out AML forms, not because they host hate speech.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Oh? My mistake for skimming the article. That is indeed a dumb move on their part.
- gwright 6y ago
  I think there is room to talk about what is an appropriate due process and/or orderly shutdown process for someone operating internet infrastructure such as a payment processor, ISP, registrar, etc. Perhaps the registrar should have been taken over by some sort of court-appointed receivership, for example? The difficulty here is that there has been no judicial process, just PayPal making a corporate decision based on their contract. I'm not saying that Paypal wasn't justified, just wondering if there might be a way to minimize collateral damage.
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    When it comes to potentially laundering money, the SEC doesn't give you a lot fo time for "orderly shutdown process". You should have gotten your documents in order before the SEC starts knocking on your door.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    It was Epik’s responsibility to do an “orderly process” when they started acting as a money transmitter, it’s not PayPal’s job to compensate for Epik’s failure to comply with the law. The consequence for failing to comply with legal requirements are often sudden and disrupting; Epik really should have planned for this. Continuing to service Epik despite a failure to follow AML laws actually exposes PayPal to risk, which is why they did a hard cutoff and not a phased shutdown. “We thought they were money laundering and kept serving them for a few weeks” is how you get prosecuted too.

freeone3000 6y ago

They chose to not participate with PayPal, and invent their own currency, and in exchange, PayPal stopped dealing with them. Their questions were fairly basic KYC form-letter questions anyone selling a financial service should be able to answer - if they couldn't, they might be in trouble with the SEC, not just PayPal.

ashtonkem 6y ago
And yet this entire thing is going to turn into an ugly left vs. right culture war, even though this is probably more about KYC regulations.
- some_furry 6y ago
  Fortunately, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894248
  - umvi 6y ago
    Fought by a tiny minority, yes, but that tiny minority can stir up enormous amounts of large scale contention and discord.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    That "tiny minority" still has an outsized impact. The pareto principle applies to pretty much everything.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      That's as much to be attributed to the asymmetry between destruction and creation as it is to the pareto principle.
- newacct583 6y ago
  To be fair: the headline is quite clearly crafted to deliberately invite the culture war, and the clicks that come with it. The article itself rejects the premise in its very first sentence.

kenforthewin 6y ago

If some of y'all put the time you spent into defending white supremacists and hate platforms in the name of free speech or independent thought instead into achieving a more just, anti-racist society we'd all be so much better off.

jacquesm 6y ago
Seconded.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
That's not how it works. If you don't defend the rights of even the worst to free speech, soon everyone's rights to speech will be in danger. In fact, it's these looked down upon speakers who need protection the most. No one needs the protection of the First Amendment to say things everyone agrees with.
AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
Our society is the most just society the Earth has ever known. What exactly do you expect the folks of HN to do differently?
- mmastrac 6y ago
  Sorry, that's a very weak statement and easily refuted. By what measure? The US ranks below Canada on the HFI. On many quality of life lists, the US is far below nordic countries. You may want to examine your circumstances and see if you'd still feel the same way if you were one or more of black, female, gay, or a persecuted minority (I'm assuming you are none of these, but feel free to correct me).
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    It doesn't matter what the circumstances are. Your very post here proves my point more than any further elaboration on my part ever could. A mere 30 years ago, everything you just said here would have gotten _you_ banned from most clubs, small businesses, shopping centers, and religious organizations. Today, you get rewarded with a bunch of social media points for making statements like yours.

robinduckett 6y ago

Good.

drummer 6y ago

Is this the same PayPal getting into cryptocurrencies? If Sathoshi were dead they would be rolling in their graves now.

chaganated 6y ago

Gab is a non-entity, and McInness is a bad joke. PayPal has just given both of them 10,000x more credibility than they ever had. The Streisandining continues.

gridlockd 6y ago
So you're saying that telling people to shut up will not actually change their minds and make the world a better place? I don't like that. I'll give you a downvote, that will set things right!

draw_down 6y ago

Everyone loves free trade right up until it bites them.

JeremyBanks 6y ago

no quarter with the fascists

jasonvorhe 6y ago

This is good news, but I suspect the "censorship cancel culture" crowd will be chiming in soon.

patrickaljord 6y ago
Well, I mean, when they were banned from twitter, people said "build your own twitter", when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system", when they got banned from cloudflare they were told "build your own internet backbone" etc... At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra with big public contracts and ties to the government using public infrastructure paid by the people ban you from their services? I mean, imagine if this was happening to some people in China, people would immediately call it censorship, and rightfully so.
- nojito 6y ago
  These sites aren’t being banned for their views but their blatant disregard for the terms of services for providers.
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    Are they? Some may be, such as proud boys and dailystormer may be afoul of some (vague) hate speech clauses. Others may not be. paypal and CC companies also shut down donations to wikileaks long ago (long before Trump was a thing). And even shut down donations to other foundations, such as the Wau Holland Stiftung of the Chaos Computer Club[0], that collected donations in part for wikileaks. My first real memory of paypal was paypal shutting down the account we used to collect donations to cover server costs for a forum we ran back in the day[1], without any appeals process and freezing all assets, effectively stealing the money[2]. I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much. [0] German, https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen-paypal-vor/ https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen... [1] the forums was a rather benign thing, just for chitchat, nobody sold anything, and it wasn't about anything illegal either. We never got an explanation from paypal, but the account shutdown coincided with a DMCA request for a single red carpet picture some user posted in a thread about the Emmy's. We removed that picture, by the way. [2] Paypal wrote that they would refund the money, but some of our members reported they never did get a refund. [3] I and some other people repeatedly reported a website selling child pornography for crypto (or for users submitting "original content"), mostly of the blackmailed-into-performing-lewd-acts variety targeting young teens and even pre-teens. While we had some success in getting domain registrars to nuke the domains in the past, this only lead to domain hopping, and finally the operator found a registrar that doesn't care (currently a Ukrainian company and .su/.pk domains). Every time the websites were behind cloudflare and every time cloudflare responded to our requests with "we're just a reverse proxy and forwarded it to the hoster" and didn't do anything. The current incarnations of those websites are still online a month later.

stevespang 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flp7gKg5G4E&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flp7gKg5G4E&feature=youtu.be

s9w 6y ago

I would say that there should be a source that at least tries to be neutral - but this seems to be the 'source'. Even with a cursory reading I stopped at 5 blatant lies. But who cares anymore

gruez 6y ago
>Even with a cursory reading I stopped at 5 blatant lies elaborate?
- s9w 6y ago
  I can't. Argumenting for that side makes the mods come out punishing, saying it's flame baiting, not what this site es for etc.

rendall 6y ago

From the article's title: "Home to Proud Boys domain, Gab, and other right-wing sites posts unhinged letters after PayPal cuts ties" Unhinged is a very editorial stance, signaling how the author wants us to perceive the events of the story before even word 1 Does no one else feel resistant to this kind of nudging?

themgt 6y ago

This may or may not have been a political move, but the theme of certain partisans celebrating when their perceived enemies are deplatformed is disturbing, especially given the parallel phenomenon of politically inconvenient stories being termed "Russian disinformation" that's our societal imperative to suppress. It shouldn't require too much of your imagination to wonder if one day you will be on the wrong end of this corporate shunning. Jacobin for example is complaining Facebook is blocking their pro-Marxist posts on Bolivia. If your position is "the values enforced by these trillion dollar multinational companies will surely never come into conflict with my own!" you're a fool or a stooge. https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856 https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856

sascha_sl 6y ago
Are you allowed to celebrate if you (as a minority group, possibly individually) are materially hurt by these platforms? Also this is far from corporate shunning, these are deeply socially unacceptable positions too. PayPal already has a long list of things it deems unacceptable. When I worked for an artist community that had an NSFW section we got weekly threats from PayPal compliance, I don't think sites like Patreon fare much better there. I don't see how this is special. Getting banned from PayPal is far, FAR away from "being shunned by all corporations".

balozi 6y ago

Decentralize everything is a concept that should be taught as a fundamental life lesson to school children everywhere.

enumjorge 6y ago
We should also teach them not to fall for conspiracy theories, and how to read articles carefully.
- glasss 6y ago
  They'll need to learn about credit and how not to get a payday loan first.

02020202 6y ago

"it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" is what the mouth-breathing morons usually spew all around the interwebz....until they come after your money, right?!

t0mmyb0y 6y ago

Is this another company protected by cloudflare? Is the protection free?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

perryizgr8 6y ago

Remember guys, PayPal Twitter Google Facebook aren't monopolies! You're free to create your own platform!