partnered with the nonprofit organization the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL). According to the announcement, Paypal is researching transactions
settled on the payment network that allegedly fund hate groups and
extremism.
Paypal to Study Transactions With the Anti-Defamation League
A report
from Reuters notes that Paypal is studying transactions that involve
“extremists” and that fund “hate movements.” The company will
investigate and disrupt the financial flows that support specific hate
groups and alleged “anti-government organizations.” The announcement
notes that the initiative will be completed via ADL’s Center on
Extremism.
According to Paypal’s chief risk officer and executive vice president
of risk and platforms, Aaron Karczmer said the company has been working
on “sophisticated systems” that help curb illegal activities.
the ADL announced its partnership with Paypal on Twitter, the thread
got a massive number of responses criticizing the ADL’s practices.
Karczmer hopes this previous knowledge and the current systems can
help create a “positive social impact.” The centralized payment
processor has been known to censor transactions for quite some time. In
2010, Paypal froze the account tethered to the whistleblowing web portal Wikileaks and caused an uproar.
The combination of Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and others using a
financial blockade against Wikileaks was controversial and the actions
drove the website to accept bitcoin donations. In 2016, male escorts in the UK leveraged bitcoin to bypass Paypal censorship. In 2019, Paypal stopped servicing Pornhub models and by January 2020, Paypal suspended all Pornhub accounts. In September 2020, Paypal’s sophisticated infrastructure censored merchants selling tardigrade merchandise.
Extremism Considered a Slippery Slope and Debatable
The ADL’s definitions of extremism and hate are also quite debatable.
For instance, five years ago the ADL classified the famous Internet
frog meme “Rare Pepe” as a hate symbol. This caused the meme to get
blockchained and turned into an immutable collection of non-fungible tokens.
Moreover, the ADL’s definitions of anti-government organizations
being dubbed extremists are also considered extreme by those who believe
in libertarianism and think that governments are currently corrupt. The
latest move by Paypal and ADL has already been criticized by activists, libertarians, and even bitcoiners.
“Bitcoin derives its value from censorship resistance,” a Redditor on
the subreddit r/bitcoin said on July 26. “Paypal, your days of
forced-relevance are over,” the individual added.
The former American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) director, Ira
Glasser, explains how banning hate speech is a never-ending slippery
slope. “When people say they want to ban hate speech, what they mean is
they want to ban speech that they hate,” Glasser stressed in an interview. “But if you allowed something called ‘hate speech’ to be banned, then the only important question would be ‘who decides?’”
The report concerning the ADL and Paypal partnership explains that
the payment processor has already been taking action against “extremism”
over the last several years. The announcement also notes that Paypal
and the ADL will be working with select civil rights organizations.
Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s CEO, sees the partnership as a window of
opportunity.
“We have a unique opportunity to further understand how hate spreads
and develop key insights that will inform the efforts of the financial
industry, law enforcement, and our communities in mitigating extremist
threats,” Greenblatt said in a statement.
source link : https://news.bitcoin.com/paypal-plans-to-study-transactions-that-fund-extremism-anti-government-groups/
