It seemed pretty obvious as it was happening – but now there appears to be proof that PayPal was punishing users for their Covid-era speech that didn’t align with official narratives.
One of the critics of pandemic mandates that got “debanked” is UsForThem founder Molly Kingsley, who has been told by PayPal that her account got frozen because it was used to receive donations, and that was found to be outside the payment giant’s “acceptable use” rules.
The parent campaign group and Kingsley were vocal critics of obligatory Covid vaccination of children, forcing them to wear face masks, as well as school closures.
And now PayPal has spelled it out. The Telegraph reported the account was terminated because of “content published by UsForThem relating to mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations and school closures.”
PayPal had to reinstate the account less than a month after it was shut down in September 2022 because UK’s financial regulator FCA intervened. This was not the only account targeted, that belonged to groups and individuals opposed to Covid restrictions, but when they got shut down, PayPal chose not to officially explain why.
Among those affected was Toby Young, a free speech advocate who’s Daily Skeptic blog was critical of Covid mandates, as well as lawyers gathered in the Law or Fiction group who shared similar views, and said that depriving them of access to their money on PayPal was a China-style “blatant assault on free speech.”
The information PayPal has come out with now regarding UsForThem and Kingsley was revealed in (legal) pre-action phase documents, which also show that the company spent four months leading up to the September 2022 account freeze putting together “a dossier of information about Kingsley.”
That dossier included quotes from her book, The Children’s Inquiry. Around the same time, the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit – known for trying to suppress speech about lockdowns that was skeptical of the official line – was carrying out surveillance of Kingsley’s social media activity.
PayPal is now refusing to comment on what it calls “individual customer accounts” but the company claims its approach is objective and not politics-driven.
However, Kingsley believes that PayPal “appears to have admitted what we had suspected all along: that it was engaged in politically motivated debankings of those of us who criticized the government’s response to Covid, and the lockdown narrative in particular.”
“For more than two years, PayPal has resisted my efforts to uncover what happened,” the campaigner added.
