By Scott Bicheno

Payment processor giant PayPal has twice had to backtrack recently from an apparent attempts at censoring its users.

Late last week the Daily Wire reported on a raft of new PayPal policies, scheduled to be implemented on 3 November, among which were the ability to unilaterally take US$2,500 from the account of its users every time they violate its acceptable use policy. There were also some additions to the list of things deemed to be violations, including the promotion of misinformation.

Since misinformation is a very nebulous term, defined almost entirely by the person using it, the story attracted a lot of attention. But the real escalation was PayPal’s decision to start fining its users, thus putting any funds of theirs held by the company at immediate risk, without any clear recourse to the legal system or any other kind of due process. This remarkable move received immediate backlash, including from its former President and one of its famous founders.

That seems to have been enough to persuade PayPal into an immediate retreat, with the company sending the Daily Wire the following statement: “An [Accepted Use Policy] notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused.”

We’ll let you decide how plausible that statement is, but the supposed mistake was far from a typo. At the very least, presumably, it was something they were contemplating but hadn’t made a final decision on. It seems more likely, however, that it wasn’t a mistake and they just didn’t anticipate such a strong backlash, so have suspended the update to let the crisis blow over. Any subsequent attempt to introduce unilateral fines, especially for ill-defined infractions, will hopefully be treated with the same level of outrage.