Will I be PayPal’s downfall?

Dan Schulman, the president and CEO of PayPal, gave an interview earlier this year entitled: ‘The thing that separates good companies from great ones: trust.’ He told the audience that companies need to do more than deliver an outstanding product to build trust. In addition, they need to ‘stand up for social issues that are important’ and ‘do the right things to help create a better world’. Ironically, it is precisely because PayPal has been energetically pursuing this agenda that trust in the company is beginning to evaporate.

I don’t think it’s too vainglorious to say that PayPal’s current difficulties began in the middle of last month when, without any notice, it closed the accounts of the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic, both of which I run, as well as my personal account. Getting any coherent explanation out of the company as to why it had done so proved difficult – it kept coming up with different reasons. The nearest I got was when someone in the company’s ‘executive escalations’ department – a name straight out of a dystopian thriller – sent me a message that contained the following sentence: ‘PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance.’ He didn’t give any examples, so it was impossible to mount a defence. Had someone at Pay-Pal decided the Free Speech Union’s defence of people challenging fashionable orthodoxies, like J.K. Rowling, was promoting ‘hate’?

In effect, PayPal would be a digital version of the Taliban’s religious police, issuing swift, on-the-spot beatings

A week later, after the company’s decision to de-platform me had been almost universally condemned, with Jacob Rees-Mogg citing it as an example of ‘cancel culture’, all three accounts were magically restored. But the damage had been done: how could PayPal’s customers trust the company not to do to them what it had done to me, only without the happy ending?