PayPal has admitted that Molly Kingsley, a prominent children’s rights campaigner, was “debanked” during the pandemic after speaking out against school closures and mandatory vaccines. The Telegraph has more.
The U.S. online payments giant told Molly Kingsley, founder of the parent campaign group UsForThem, that her account had been terminated in September 2022 owing to “the nature of its activities”.
Hers was one of a handful of accounts that were frozen by PayPal, all of which belonged to individuals or organisations that questioned the government’s policies during the pandemic.
Now PayPal has admitted for the first time that Ms Kingley’s account was frozen owing to “content published by UsForThem relating to mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations and school closures”.
The firm said that since UsForThem was receiving donations via PayPal, this contravened its “acceptable use” policy.
Ms Kingsley set up the parent group UsForThem, which campaigned during the pandemic against school closures as well as other government policies such as forcing pupils to wear face masks and a mass vaccine rollout for children.
In documents disclosed during pre-action correspondence, PayPal also revealed that from May to September 2022, it compiled a dossier of information on Ms. Kingsley, including excerpts from a book she co-authored called The Children’s Inquiry.
One quote the dossier cited from Ms. Kingley’s book said: “Some may maintain that restrictions applied to children were a necessary evil. We say that a public health paradigm which strives to protect adults without weighing up the costs to children is the very antithesis of ‘public health’.
Another said: “In our new world, children with mask exemptions were often forced to wear a lanyard or other symbol, signalling their disability to the rest of their cohort.”
Ms. Kingsley’s PayPal account was one of a number to be frozen during the pandemic. It was reinstated 22 days later, following an intervention from the Financial Conduct Authority, which requested an “urgent explanation” from PayPal for its actions.
Law or Fiction, a group of lawyers against lockdown, was also hit with a PayPal account closure and described the move as “a blatant assault on free speech, as practised in China”.
Toby Young, the free speech campaigner, who had set up a blog called the Daily Sceptic in 2020 to scrutinise lockdown, had his account frozen too.
At the time, the U.S. payments firm was accused of failing to explain why the accounts were cancelled and not specifying what each of the organisations has done wrong.
The move prompted a backlash from PayPal users as hundreds announced they would be boycotting the company and cancelling their accounts as a sign of solidarity.
During the pandemic, Ms Kingsley also had her social activity monitored by the Counter Disinformation Unit, a government team which worked with social media companies in an attempt to curtail discussion of controversial lockdown policies.
Worth reading in full.
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This is a very important reminder to everyone like myself who’d forgotten about the Debanking Scandal. I thought it was all over, but from this article, it’s still going on quietly in the background.
Likewise, we pulled out of PAYPAL when the news broke at the time, but this is a timely reminder and hopefully more people will abandon them. Likewise Give send go I think it was who froze the truckers accounts in Canada. I don’t use them anymore.
My wife and I immediately dropped Paypal when Toby Young was ‘debanked’ and we persuaded as many family and friends as possible to also leave Paypal. Whether it had any effect, I cannot be sure but I do know that it caused us no inconvenience by doing so.
Yes, I’ve dropped PayPal too.
Forget pandering to IRA murderers, if Sir Two-Tier needs to feed his lawfare fix, then bring in a law criminalising political de-banking and whip all the Right Dishonourable Labour Members to vote for it.
Would keep Attorney General Lord Hermeutic out of mischief doing something honourable for a change.
Don’t hold your breath.
I can’t imagine this shower of shite ever doing anything honourable, they don’t have the capability.
Wonder what would happen if everyone who is sickened by this contacted PayPal and demanded for them to disclose any information PayPal had on them? Easy to do, costs nothing and perfectly legal under the Freedom of Information Act. And I mean if hundreds of thousands contacted them, nay millions – all at the same time. And I’m sure you can do it even if you are a past customer. Think I’ll try to send them a letter forthwith. Was it this lot that debanked Farage too. No matter, it’s the thought that counts. Reform have rather a lot of members now, don’t they?
Used to use PayPal, have not used them since they suspended TY’s account.
Same here tof.
Nor I.
My PayPal account was lapsed, but not closed. So I went to the effort of reinstating my login just so I could delete my account and leave a snotty comment.
Closed mine, told them why too.
The state in most countries is an opponent of tge people. We are back in the days of totalitarian monarchs.
We should be glad that Reform is a party that works within the democratic system and it is led by a a man who is libertarian inclined.
If the elites succeed in retaining office within Uniparty I fear the next challenger will not be at all pleasant. The outcome of that would be to take us back to unexplained disappearances from the Tower.
We have all the money and the voting power. Never forget that.
But not the will of the majority to do anything with it sadly. We are but few.
I read somewhere that it takes about 20% of a country to turn the tide against despots. I’m sure we have that but the 20% aren’t stirred enough by these despots maybe?
They are. They just need to realise that they have the power. There is a sense of hopelessness but once again, we have the power, and the taxes they appropriate to fund their horror-show, is ultimately our money.
Stop Debanking Opinions
My personal fair use policy resulted in me banning PayPal (after 20 years of use, thousands of transactions) when it banned Lord Toby.
They’ll never see another penny of my cash.
Same here.
And what punishment did Paypal receive? Nothing I presume. They should have been forced to pay the account holders a fine equal to what sum they had in their account at the time.
At the time I made a donation to the Canadian truck driver protest. That was returned. Not sure if they were debanked or their dictator led government had a hand in it.
Does Elon Musk still Run PayPal ?
ESG——Agenda Driven Government and their “Stakeholders” in big business deciding commie style who can participate in society. —This must be STOPPED
PayPal ….. is not your Pal.
Pals don’t punish you for disagreeing with them; they don’t go out of their way to make your life difficult; they don’t seek to control your speech or your actions.
There’s nothing “friendly” about PayPunish.
I closed my account when they debanked Toby/The Daily Sceptic and I won’t be re-opening it.
It’s a DEMOCRACY! Because of this, you are entitled to your own opinions! And we are entitled to punish you for that with whatever means happen to be at our disposal!
The liberal progressive democracy in nutshell. It’s going to be hard to find a historic political system were people weren’t entitled to their own opinions provided they didn’t mind getting punished for that. Methods of punishment in the 2020s differ from those of the 1940s. But that’s just because our rulers believe their methods to be more effective, not because they’re nowadays more friendly disposed towards those of their subjects who ‘need’ to get punished.
Molly, if you’re reading this, thank you for the work UFT undertook during the pandemic, especially the Scottish team. They kept me sane during a horrific period when most around me were captivated by the BBC.