Juno News - October 12, 2022


Lawton： No one should trust PayPal


Episode Stats

Length

6 minutes

Words per Minute

173.73413

Word Count

1,154

Sentence Count

7


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The big story I wanted to talk about today was PayPal. Now this is not a distinctly Canadian story
00:00:06.140 but it very much has a Canadian tie-in that I want to share with you here and if you missed it
00:00:12.960 what happened is a few days ago PayPal said it was going to impose a fine system where its users
00:00:19.640 so people that sign up to use PayPal which is this private payment transfer service it was going to
00:00:26.280 fine them $2,500 if they engaged in what PayPal determined was misinformation. Misinformation and
00:00:35.420 they said also other things there like hate speech and hate and all of that and if you read the actual
00:00:40.060 policy here it was an update to the user agreement that said any violation would result in liquidated
00:00:46.380 damages of $2,500 taken from your account and offending behaviors triggering this would be
00:00:52.520 anything that involves the sending posting or publication of any messages content or materials
00:00:58.580 that in PayPal's sole discretion promote misinformation. So if I post something
00:01:07.220 on my Twitter account PayPal could say we're taking $2,500 from your PayPal account and that's even by
00:01:18.000 the way saying that it is in fact misinformation which as we know is just absolutely fraught these
00:01:23.060 days and it's one of the most loaded politicized terms to say something is misinformation and this
00:01:28.280 is why it's so insidious and I'll talk about the Canadian political context here in a moment but
00:01:33.140 PayPal did this and instantly there's just this massive wave of people cancelling their PayPal accounts
00:01:39.100 closing their PayPal accounts. I have a dormant PayPal account which I suppose I should log on
00:01:44.420 and close myself. I don't have $2,500 in there for them to take away but now I'm wondering if I could
00:01:50.720 like start incurring PayPal debt if they just go around and say oh yeah this guy yeah he's been
00:01:56.600 misinforming so I'm gonna log in and find I have like you know minus $12,500 in my PayPal account.
00:02:03.760 So they've backtracked on this and they've said well okay yeah no this was misinformation we didn't mean
00:02:09.500 to it was accidental it was no nothing to see here so they've actually said that the policy itself
00:02:16.260 didn't exist they've said there was no policy it was an accident so they're not admitting
00:02:21.460 that they got caught and I could only assume the reason they're not admitting that is because
00:02:27.360 then they would have to find themselves $2,500 for for misinformation if that was I guess actually
00:02:34.100 no they'll have to find themselves anyway because no matter which way you slice it this is
00:02:38.160 misinformation on PayPal's part but it is an example of a company that's being shamed into
00:02:44.160 doing the right thing but I also think there's a tremendous point here where no one should
00:02:49.140 at this stage trust PayPal because PayPal has already said it does not value free speech
00:02:55.400 and one of the very founders of PayPal tweeted about this he said you know this is very difficult
00:03:01.960 to see for a company that he helped build go down this road and you know I understand that
00:03:06.880 wholeheartedly but I want to bring it into the Canadian political context here because one
00:03:12.920 thing that we saw earlier this year in the course of the truckers convoy was how going after people's
00:03:19.640 finances was seen as the silver bullet to going after people themselves it's called financial
00:03:25.120 deplatforming and whatever my libertarian bona fides tell me about a big tech censorship which is that
00:03:32.660 it's a terrible thing and something that we should resist in culture but I'm leery to find a government
00:03:38.480 regulation that solves this problem because you know you as an individual consumer make a decision to
00:03:43.920 have a Facebook account have a Twitter account and so on and we can debate and discuss this but
00:03:49.380 when we're talking about financial services and PayPal is a financial service it's one that you engage
00:03:56.020 with voluntarily but it's also voluntary in the sense that you may choose to have a TD account or choose to
00:04:01.920 have a CIBC account but you can't choose to have no banking in this day and age you can't choose to
00:04:06.860 have no bank account so financial services are one of those core core things that you cannot function
00:04:13.920 in this society without so when all of a sudden your financial service providers are telling you
00:04:19.840 you know what we are going to go after you politically and if you don't believe they will just take a look
00:04:25.460 at what happened last week to Toby Young now Toby Young is a free speech champion in the United Kingdom
00:04:31.000 he is the founder of the Daily Skeptic of the Free Speech Union and PayPal had suspended his account
00:04:38.360 for basically no legitimate reason and again they eventually backtracked on this but how can you ever return
00:04:45.960 from that if once you know that PayPal has you in its crosshairs and that the very lifeblood of your business
00:04:52.740 or perhaps even your personal finances could be in those crosshairs as well how could you ever go
00:04:58.180 back to normal and this is the problem I have when government gets into bed with big tech
00:05:05.100 and this is precisely what's happening in Canada with Bill C-11 it's what's happening with the
00:05:10.820 attempts by the liberal government to regulate misinformation and hate speech and to force
00:05:16.460 social media companies to basically be subservient to the whims of government on these things
00:05:22.900 remember government wants to just put this malign alliance in place between itself and tech platforms
00:05:29.340 so that if governments say something is hate speech the tech companies have to delete it
00:05:33.300 and it's not a big leap to get from there to misinformation where again if the government says something is
00:05:39.080 misinformation a social media company will have to take it off its platform and all of this is part and
00:05:47.420 parcel of a trend we're seeing which is just completely wholesale deplatforming completely trying to purge
00:05:56.960 people's digital existence and doing this in a way that makes it so that the government has the sole
00:06:03.900 authority on whether you get to have a voice or not and when you talk about these things it sounds
00:06:09.400 inherently conspiratorial it sounds like I'm talking about Justin Trudeau sitting in a room
00:06:14.240 saying well you know I'm gonna I don't like that Andrew guy I'm gonna press the button and then it's
00:06:18.260 like you know the old Austin Powers movies where just the floor opens up behind him and just I fall
00:06:22.580 through into the pit of water where the sharks are swirling around and stuff like that again I mean
00:06:28.140 that's not exactly the power we're talking about here but we are talking about a government that's
00:06:34.140 trying to make itself all-powerful when it comes to who can publish things online