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.
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