Cryptocurrency: PayPal Censor Bans IndyMedia Services and Users

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PayPal's IndyMedia Wipeout

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/paypals-indymedia-wipeout

In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without
explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual
journalists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites
Consortium and MintPress.

Each received a variation of the following message:

Unlike many on the list, Consortium editor Joe Lauria succeeded in
reaching a human being at the company in search of details about the
frozen or “held” funds referenced in the note. The PayPal rep told him
that if the company decided “there was a violation” after a half-year
review period, then “it is possible” PayPal would keep the $9,348.14
remaining in Consortium’s account, as “damages.”

“A secretive process in which they could award themselves damages, not
by a judge or a jury,” Lauria says. “Totally in secret.”

Consortium, founded by the late investigative reporter Robert Parry,
has been critical of NATO and the Pentagon and a consistent source of
skeptical reporting about Russiagate, as well as one of just a few
outlets to regularly cover the Julian Assange case with any sympathy
for the accused. Ironically, one of the site’s primary themes involves
exploring disinformation emanating from the intelligence community.
The site has had content disrupted by platforms like Facebook before,
but now its pockets are being picked in addition.

This episode ups the ante again on the content moderation movement,
toward the world hinted at in the response to the Canadian trucker
protests, where having the wrong opinions can result in your money
being frozen or seized. Going after cash is a big jump from simply
deleting speech, with a much bigger chilling effect. This is
especially true in the alternative media world, where money has long
been notoriously tight, and the loss of a few thousand dollars here or
there can have a major effect on a site, podcast, or paper.

As MintPress founder and executive director Mnar Adley points out, the
current era of content moderation — characterized by private platforms
either overtly or covertly working with government to identify
accounts for censure — really began with PayPal’s historic decision in
2010 to halt donations to Wikileaks. In that case, PayPal acted after
receiving a letter from the State Department claiming the site’s
activities were illegal.

“PayPal banning donations from WikiLeaks really set up the blueprint
for today’s censorship,” Adley says.

Lauria believes PayPal is basing a potential claim on his company’s
funds on a list of restricted activities in its service agreement that
includes providing “false, inaccurate or misleading information.” He
notes, of course, that “false” is “what they think is false, that is,”
which is troubling for a pair of big reasons.

One is the ongoing possibility of government or law enforcement
involvement in fact-checking decisions, as PayPal announced just last
year it would be cooperating with authorities in a content moderation
campaign. The other is that the thread connecting the recent affected
accounts — which include the former RT contributor Caleb Maupin and
the host of the Geopolitics and Empire podcast Hrvoje Morić, among
others — is that they’re all generally antiwar voices, who’ve been
critical either of NATO or of official messaging with regard to the
Ukraine conflict.

Alan McLeod of MintPress is one of the writers who received the notice
about improper “activity” in his account. He assumed at first there
had to be a mistake.

“The claim that my activity is ‘inconsistent’ with their user
agreement is complete nonsense because I literally haven’t used my
PayPal account since at least August of 2021,” he says. “I actually
assumed [the suspension] was because it’d been inactive for too long.”

McLeod’s most recent article is entitled, “The NATO to TikTok
Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?”
In it, he laid out a long list of “former spooks, spies, and
Mandarins” hired by TikTok:

    While simultaneously being the Content Policy Lead for TikTok
Canada, Alexander Corbeil is also the vice president of the NATO
Association of Canada, a NATO-funded organization chaired by former
Canadian Minister of Defense David Collenette… Another NATO-linked new
recruit is Ayse Koçak, a Global Product Policy manager at the company.
Before joining TikTok last year, she spent three years at NATO…

If this is what qualifies as “false, inaccurate, or misleading
information,” while CNN, MSNBC, and Fox’s daily rollout of ex-military
analysts with undisclosed lobbying ties is upheld as the
unobjectionable truth, it’s more or less finita la commedia for
independent media. “I guess writing about big social media outlets
being staffed with former NATO officials might be controversial,”
McLeod quipped.

The experience of MintPress exemplifies the logistical Whac-a-Mole
controversial publishers have to play now in order to survive as
businesses. In addition to the PayPal ban — which hit McLeod, Adley,
and one other former Mint contributor, forcing the company to stop
paying its writers via the platform — MintPress last month saw two of
its fundraising campaigns on GoFundMe shut down. According to Adley,
the outlet was able to receive about 90% of donations across a
two-year campaign before they were abruptly cut off. At least GoFundMe
didn’t try to keep “damages,” as several thousand dollars earmarked
for MintPress were instead returned to donors.

Adley believes the chief crime of MintPress is that it exists as an
alternative to monolithic messaging surrounding issues like Ukraine.
Moreover, she believes it’s in trouble with PayPal not for being
false, but precisely for printing true uncomfortable things, like
McLeod’s NATO-to-TikTok story, or Dan Cohen’s recent piece about the
150-odd Western public relations firms working with Ukraine’s Foreign
Ministry. Several of these MintPress pieces about Ukraine have gone
viral in recent weeks.

“We name the names, we break through the propaganda, we show the
profiteers,” Adley says. “There’s so few of us left that do that, and
I think that’s why we’ve become a target.”

As is the case with a lot of these accounts, MintPress falls out of
the mainstream on whole ranges of issues. It’s come under heavy fire
for its coverage of Syria, for instance. A lot of political moderates
will struggle to connect with its point of view. This however is the
whole point of alternative media, whose brief is to explore themes the
traditional press won’t or can’t. If traditional news consumers feel
comfortable reading them, these sites probably aren’t doing their jobs
correctly. Censorship of them is especially concerning if law
enforcement plays any role, since these are among the last media
concerns to evince any skepticism about national security messaging.
Unfortunately, there is reason to suspect this is the case.

On July 26th of last year, PayPal announced a new partnership with the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to “fight extremism and hate through the
financial industry and across at-risk communities.” In describing the
arrangement, PayPal talked about a third actor — the government:

    PayPal and ADL have launched a research effort to address the
urgent need to understand how extremist and hate movements throughout
the U.S. are attempting to leverage financial platforms to fund
criminal activity. The intelligence gathered through this research
initiative will be shared broadly across the financial industry and
with policymakers and law enforcement.

While companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter at least
occasionally explain why prominent accounts have been suspended,
neither PayPal nor the ADL will comment about how suspensions and
confiscations of companies like MintPress and Consortium fit into
their efforts to head off “criminal activity.” I reached out this week
not just to the media relations offices of PayPal and the ADL, but to
figures quoted in last year’s announcement, including ADL’s Jonathan
Greenblatt and PayPal Chief Risk officer Aaron Karczmer, getting no
response anywhere.

The ADL’s silence is particularly galling because some of the
suspended accounts have written extensively about neo-Nazi movements
not just in Ukraine, but in the U.S. and in other countries, including
Russia. McLeod only just recently published a thread on the Nazi
symbols worn by soldiers on both sides of the Ukraine conflict:

    Lol. This article from German outlet Die Welt, 'the lie of the
neo-Nazi battalion' is all about downplaying Nazis' role in the Azov
Battalion.

    But in the image ititself chose to illustate the article, there
are 3 separate unambiguous, objectively Nazi symbols.

    [Thread 🧵] pic.twitter.com/TNxsEW1a9y
    — Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) April 22, 2022

    Some person in the replies doing whataboutism and asking why I
don't highlight Russian Nazis. Well, I do. https://t.co/v0GOMmNyxo
    — Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) April 22, 2022

Is the ADL really interested in suppressing these voices? Why will
they not answer questions on this front? At the very least, the ADL
and PayPal should both explain the nature of their relationship to
“policymakers” and “law enforcement.” Are they getting recommendations
on whom to suspend from authorities? How do they identify sites for
censure? So long as PayPal takes money from customers without
guaranteeing they will explain suspension or confiscation decisions,
or at least deigns to answer media queries about its decisions, media
outlets should probably think twice about using their services.

PayPal was sued earlier this year by three other account-holders for
similar freezing of accounts without explanation. One of the original
complainants was Chris Moneymaker, winner of the 2003 World Series of
Poker, who claimed PayPal placed a hold on $12,000 of his money (the
firm ultimately returned the funds, according to Bloomberg). The
litigation involving the other complainants is still pending. PayPal
meanwhile has periodically cut off other controversial media outlets,
on both the left and the right. A former Infowars employee named David
Knight, for instance, saw his independent broadcast show cut off last
year, ironically after he broke with Alex Jones over the Stop the
Steal issue.

All of this is going on at a time when the Biden administration just
announced the formation of a dystopian “Disinformation Governance
Board,” preposterously headed by a bubbly former Kennan Institute
fellow, Nina “The Singing Neoliberal” Jankowicz. In a detail Jonathan
Swift couldn’t have written better, Jankowicz — who once cited the
author of the greatest news hoax of our generation, Christopher
Steele, as an expert on the “evolution of disinfo” — last year put out
a video of herself as the “Mary Poppins of Disinformation.” In it, she
sang a variation of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” featuring
lines like:

They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note

And not support their lies with our wallet voice or vote…

    You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation 💁🏻‍♀️
https://t.co/eGV9lpctYn pic.twitter.com/WVQFA2bPmq
    — Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) February 17, 2021

As many have pointed out, this is a literal nanny singing about the
joys of the nanny state, in a song that includes lines about using the
“wallet” to starve speech. There’s a fine line between parody and
horror, and we’re tumbling fast to the horror side.


https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/28/caitlin-johnstone-being-anti-war-isnt-easy/
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/30/rachel-maddow-plays-glenn-beck/
https://consortiumnews.com/assange-hearing/
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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-11945875
https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/multiple-fake-news-sites-are-using-paypal-raise-money-violating-its-terms-service
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https://natoassociation.ca/about-us/alexander-corbeil/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayse-k/
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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/the-inside-story-of-one-websites-defense-of-assad
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/paypal-partners-with-adl-to-fight-extremism-and-protect-marginalized
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tag/neo-nazi-factions/
https://t.co/TNxsEW1a9y
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1517526318426243073
https://t.co/v0GOMmNyxo
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1517531962096898049
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-13/paypal-sued-for-freezing-customer-accounts-without-explanation
https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-massive-purge-is-underway-at-alex-jones-infowars
https://twitter.com/libertytarian/status/1334251713247780871
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3472471-bidens-mary-poppins-of-disinformation-the-perfect-nanny-to-tidy-up-mess-of-free-speech/
https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1291692143262814209
https://t.co/eGV9lpctYn
https://t.co/WVQFA2bPmq
https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1362153807879303171