Defunding Hate: PayPal’s Regulation of Hate Groups

Abstract

The riot by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, generated a public debate about the role of platforms in policing users involved in violent hate speech. PayPal’s efforts on this issue, in removing services from some designated hate groups while continuing to serve others, highlights the challenges payment platforms face when they act, whether formally or informally, as regulators. This article examines PayPal’s policies and enforcement efforts, both proactive and reactive, in removing its services from hate groups in the United States. It pays particular attention to the surveillance and screening practices that PayPal employs to proactively detect users who violate its policies. The article argues that public calls for PayPal to identify and remove its services from hate groups raise critical questions about ceding broad regulatory authority to platforms and reveal the serious challenges of relying upon commercial enterprises to address complex social problems.

Expanding the debate about content moderation: Scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates

“…instance, platforms that function largely in the mobile ecosystem find that their standards must be aligned with that of Apple, otherwise their app may be dropped from their App Store. A service looking to be more flexible, progressive, or permissive might find itself constrained by a more conservative or capricious infrastructural provider; and rules implemented further down the stack are even less evident to users, and less available for critique (Tusikov, 2019).…”

Frameworks for Assessing Financial Censorship and Its Implications

“…Research related to the consequences of financial censorship for technologies such as social media, data analysis, and blockchain on financial innovation, customer's privacy, and competition in the U.S. financial services industry are the focus of DQ #5 (Yermack, 2017;Keats Citron, 2018;Sater, 2019;Tusikov 2019). To be able to monitor the types of purchases on the financial network, the Merchant Category Codes (MCC) should be revised to have finer definitions about the nature of the merchant.…”

“…Therefore, U.S. firms that want to financially censor hate speech take on the burden themselves. Detecting violations can be done proactively or reactively (Tusikov 2019). Developing AI algorithms to detect hate speech online in social media is an active area of research (Gitari et al, 2015;Gao et al, 2017;Cao et al, 2020;Paschalides et al, 2020).…”

“…For example, credit card companies in their terms of service reserve the right to discontinue service to any customer whose speech would hurt the credit card company's reputation (Henn, 2013). On the other hand, PayPal has terminated relationships with customers whose speech violates PayPal's "principles" (Tusikov, 2019). Patreon has an explicit list of what types of speech are and are not allowed.…”

Cranks, clickbait and cons: on the acceptable use of political engagement platforms

“…1 The CitizenLab has addressed the responsibility of international cybersecurity firms in democratic politics, particularly the use of exploits to target dissidents. 2 Tusikov (2019) most directly explores the question of acceptable use by analysing how financial third parties, like PayPal, have developed their own internal policies to not serve hate groups.…”