PayPal appears unsure whether it should participate in the current crusade against online “disinformation” or not.
First it closed the PayPal accounts of the Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union, and even the personal account of their founder Toby Young, and then, two weeks later, it restored them. Then it announced that it would be docking $2,500 from anyone who uses its services in connection with “promoting misinformation” and then, two days later, it again reversed course and announced that this language was never intended to be included in its new Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).
It was not intended to be included? Well, where did it come from then?
Could the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation and its Digital Services Act (DSA), about which I wrote in my last Brownstone article, have something to do with PayPal’s skittish forays into “combatting disinformation?” Well, yes, they could, and you may rest assured that EU officials or representatives have already had a word with PayPal about them.
As discussed in my previous article, the Code requires signatories to censor what is deemed by the European Commission to be disinformation on pain of massive fines. The enforcement mechanism, i.e. the fines, has been established under the DSA.
PayPal is not, for the moment, a signatory of the Code. Furthermore, since it is neither a content platform nor a search engine – the potential channels of “disinformation” targeted in the DSA – it is obviously not in a position to censor per se. But the very first commitment in the “strengthened” Code of Practice unveiled by the European Commission last June is dedicated precisely to demonetisation.
Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the business models of the most prominent signatories – Twitter, Meta/Facebook and Google/YouTube – this commitment and the six “measures” it comprises are mostly related to advertising practices.
But the “Guidance” that the Commission issued in May 2021, prior to the Code’s drafting, explicitly calls for “broadening” efforts to defund alleged purveyors of disinformation and contains the following highly pertinent recommendation:
Actions to defund disinformation should be broadened by the participation of players active in the online monetisation value chain, such as online e-payment services, e-commerce platforms and relevant crowd-funding/donation systems. (p.8)
PayPal, the online e-payment service par excellence, was thus already in the Commission’s sights.
Somewhat illogically, given their own emphasis on advertising and the fact that an advertising-based revenue model and a donation or pay model would ordinarily be regarded as alternatives, the signatories of the “strengthened” Code thus pledged to
…exchange best practices and strengthen cooperation with relevant players, expanding to organisations active in the online monetisation value chain, such as online e-payment services, e-commerce platforms and relevant crowd-funding/donation systems…. (Commitment 3)
But the outreach to PayPal has not only occurred via third parties like the Code signatories.
In late May, shortly after the text of the Digital Services Act had been finalised – but before the European Parliament had even had the opportunity to vote on it! – an eight-member delegation from the parliament was dispatched to California to discuss the DSA and the related Digital Markets Act (DMA) with relevant “digital stakeholders”.
In addition to Code signatories Google and Meta, the “host list,” so to say – since the parliamentarians were to be the guests and they were inviting themselves! – also included PayPal. (See the delegation report here.)
Curiously, Twitter was not included among the companies and organisations to be visited, perhaps because of the turmoil unleashed by Elon Musk’s takeover bid. But, as touched upon in my prior article, Thierry Breton, the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, had already paid a visit to Musk in Austin, Texas earlier in the month to have a word with him about the DSA.
No less than three of the delegation’s eight members – Alexandra Geese, Marion Walsmann and delegation head Andreas Schwab – were German, whereas Germans only account for around 13% of the total members of the parliament. This stark overrepresentation is telling, since Germany has undoubtedly been the prime mover behind the EU’s censorship drive, having already adopted its own online censorship law in 2017 with the express motivation of “combatting criminal fake news in social networks” (p. 1 of the legislative proposal in German here).
The German legislation, commonly known as “NetzDG” or the Network Enforcement Act, threatens platforms with fines of up to €50 million for hosting content that infringes any of a variety of German laws that restrict speech in ways that would be unthinkable and unconstitutional in the United States. It is also the source of the Twitter notices that many Twitter users will have received informing them that their account had been denounced by “a person from Germany”.
As noted above, PayPal is not presently a signatory of the Code of Practice on Disinformation. On July 14th, however, just nine days after the passage of the DSA, the Commission issued a “Call for interest to become a Signatory” of the Code. The call is explicitly addressed to, among others, “e-payment services, e-commerce platforms, crowd-funding/donation systems.” The latter are identified as “providers whose services may be used to monetise disinformation”.
Evidently not satisfied merely with “deplatforming”, the Commission has thus made clear that the next frontier in its combat against “disinformation” is attempting to defund dissenters who, despite their discrimination by or banishment from the major online platforms, have managed to preserve a place in the online discussion thanks to platforms of their own.
PayPal, moreover, will know that the “exclusive” – in effect, dictatorial – powers that the DSA confers on the European Commission include the power to designate the “very large” online platforms that are susceptible to incurring the massive DSA fines of up to 6% of global turnover. PayPal will easily satisfy the “very large” size criterion of having at least 45 million users in the EU, but it is obviously not a content platform.
Nonetheless, this appears not to be so obvious to the European Commission. For the Commission press release on the call for signatories treats it precisely… as a content platform! Thus, the press release refers to “providers of e-payment services, e-commerce platforms, crowd-funding/donation systems, which may be used to spread disinformation”. Huh?
In the meanwhile, on September 1st, the EU has opened a specially-dedicated office or “embassy” in San Francisco to conduct what it itself describes as “digital diplomacy” with U.S. tech firms. The “ambassador”, Commission official Gerard de Graaf, is reportedly one of the drafters of the DSA. Perhaps he will be able to explain the intricacies of the DSA to PayPal – or even already has. PayPal headquarters are, after all, just a stone’s throw away in Palo Alto.
In any case, PayPal has been put on notice, and, with it, so too have dissident websites that depend on user support for their survival. Ignore the EU at your peril.
This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe. Follow him on Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com.
Stop Press: How did PayPal end up at the centre of Silicon Valle’s culture wars? Matthew Field explains in the Telegraph.
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Wasn’t moderna 3x the dose?!?
It’s high time people were arrested.
The reports are beginning to penetrate the mainstream, and they won’t stop coming. There have been too many victims.
yes, 100mcg vs 30mcg for Pfizer.
Two years too late – Fauci is obviously under the “protection” of “powerful friends” and Johnson always has Carrie as his alibi !
Has Whitty got a new job to go with his Knighthood for “Services Rendered”?
Whitty will probably end up at the WHO – he’s always been a Billy Gates man.
How much longer can these f*****s pushing the jab keep their heads up their arses? Time to take some action against anybody saying they are ‘safe and effective.’ Safe and effective, my arse.
The City of Wolverhampton Council says: “The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective and approved. It gives you the best protection against the virus and is saving lives.”
Corona ad seem to be gone from Reading. At least, I don’t remember seeing one for the last couple of days.
Obviously a Council subjected to ‘Virologist Entryism’!
They’re just functionaries repeating ad nauseam what the official Government policy is. There will have been close to zero due diligence done in any local councils on Covid.
The jab kills….. who knew
What I meant was ‘WHO knew’
It doesn’t seem to kill young people very well – Billy Gates must be riling at the inefficiency of his first eugenics exercise!
I’m beginning to get the feeling from reading the latest posts, that we are starting to go around in circles. I always believed that covid-19 was plucked out of thin air, the only ingredients being timing, location, a convenient test and a mRNA vaccine. Everything thereafter relied entirely on governments around the world panicking. Well here we are 2+ years on, a frightened, enfeebled and medicated nation of the compliant, present company excepted. Someone else can finish off
Well here we are 2+ years on, a frightened, enfeebled and medicated world of the compliant, present company excepted.
FTFY
I am far more cynical than you. I am of the belief that the PTB know full well that each ‘crisis’ they create will be exposed as fraud fairly quickly, so they have a long list for ‘bait and switch’ purposes. War in Ukraine, inflation, climate heating, food scare, they’ve got them lined up one after another. I’ve seen through every single one of them already, but most people haven’t. They’re too busy paying for the mortgage and getting their children to sports practice and the like….
The tin foil hat wearer in me has wondered for some time whether the script will ultimately be flipped on these vaccines. There seems to be a concerted effort to sink the West. What better way to do that than to inject ~80% of the population with a toxic substance and then gradually reveal the harm. Think of the lawsuits. Lockdowns, vaccines and Russia sanctions have one thing in common – financial self-immolation. I wonder why.
A part of me thinks the whole Shanghai narrative is to give the West one last push towards mRNA. I heard people saying the reason China was in such a bad way was because they had inferior non mRNA vaccines.
There’s a concerted effort (actually, rather a distributed effort) of every clown with a chip on his shoulder to frame some debate as Either my way or the apocalypse.
There was a report from NZ saying just that. The person writing the article had spoken to a member of the “elite” who revealed to them that the plan was for the population of the west to overthrow their governments once they realised what had been done to them. Then one world government would take over.
Sorry link lost.
I can’t actually see riots or wars speeding up moves towards world government. It’s during the relative peace of the past 30 years that it’s made particularly rapid progress. See the 2018 book ‘Giants: the Global Power Elite’ by Prof. Peter Phillips.
I also highly recommend James Kunstler’s 2020 book ‘Living in the Long Emergency’. It’s the sequel to his 2005 book ‘The Long Emergency’. It went to press late 2019 so by coincidence it excludes COVID. This is useful, because you can see how the world post-peak oil faced enormous financial / economic problems and how COVID fitted in as a convenient story. to hide what was really being done, i.e. organising a reset of the currency.
I can’t see them doing that, isn’t it more likely they want digital control so we can’t overthrow them.
I don’t know, the globalists don’t want national governments. A tsunami of litigation and near-civil war could easily lead to outside (globalist UN) intervention being ‘needed’.
If 5 million people march on Westminster with the sole intention of murdering 500 MPs, digital control won’t stop them.
It’s nothing to do with China. The rich of the West have their money invested safely all over the place, far away from ‘Western’ nations. They buy land in South America, the Caribbean, Europe (if they are American). They will have their futures safeguarded even if there is war and revolution in the lower 48. They’ve never been patriots, they just use patriotism to keep the people dupable. The European ‘elites’ are just the same.
We need our MPs to make EUAs illegal.
Giving pharmaceutical companies immunity from prosecution during a rushed rollout of novel drugs should have been a red flag to anyone – certainly to our MPs.
Only if they had a modicum of integrity and intellect.
Sadly, they have neither.
Democracy red in tooth and claw. Lol.
Especially when there’s fraud!
It has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy against public health!
The. Ministry of Truth deals in propaganda.
The Ministry of Love deals in torture.
The Ministry of Plenty deals in shortages.
The Ministry of Public Health deals in…
The Ministry of Public Health deals in unprotected sex with syphilis sufferers….
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while; an interview with the US’s most cancelled man:
Exclusive Interview: Robert Kennedy Jr. Destroys Big Pharma, Fauci & Pro-Vaccine Movement — Yandex video search
Actually, EUAs used properly are an essential part of a proper response to disease crises. The problem is not an EUA per se, it is the entirely corrupt, dysfunctional, criminal classes in the pharmaceutical industry, in the money world, in Westminster and the media that makes it problematic.
But let’s be clear: if I had been PM, with a PhD and seven years virological postdoctoral experience, allied to working in the commerical biopharma space for a while, had prevented EUAs for Covid vaccines, if I had allowed controlled trialling of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, budesonide etc etc, you can be sure that I would have been bumped off by Gates et al.
What we need is to kick Gates, Soros and all their organisations out of the UK, out of Europe, out of everywhere. We need to withdraw all recognition of the WHO so long as Gates is an investor. We will not allow Gates to have any contact with the Department of Health, nor will he have any influence on UK health policy. Cambridge University and all other UK universities will be told that accepting Gates money is incompatible with receiving a single penny of UK public money and that the Gates Scholarship programme must be thrown out due to the evil of its benefactor.
Pfizer’s exclusivity deal with Israel probably doesn’t seem like such great idea to their shareholders after all in hindsight. But thank you, Pfizer, for allowing us to pinpoint exactly how much harm YOUR product caused in YOUR own ‘personal lab.’
What’s important is we realise the Everdemic is not over, never will be, and we should get our fourth dose – and schedule the fifth – and particularly get the young doses up as it’s the best way to protect them.
On what scientific basis can you say that.
I’m hoping that this is sarcasm.
If I were working in the Cabinet Office I would be writing:
“Nothing to see here – move along. Oh. look! There’s a squirrel…”
and then going out to buy booze for the next party…
That is exactly what the Government , the Judiciary, the MHRA , 80 % of MPs and the Police have been doinhg for two years – isn’t this just a bit suspicious?
If you were working in the Cabinet office, you would have to put up with Mark Sedwill coming to poke his oar in, thinking that the current incumbent must fall into line with his MI6 and Goldman Sachs schemata…
just reading about Troponins. A way to test for heart stress. Apparently jabs increased levels by insane multiples. Just to put it into context, a normal level of troponin in the body is <0.05. 1-4 is heart attack risk. Jab takes level to 35
The law of unintended (or intended) consequences!
I remember Hugh Pym (PPE Oxford), the BBC’s ‘health editor’ saying on the today programme after Novak Djokovic’s interview, “What more evidence does he want?”. Perhaps, Hugh should be sent this and asked to reconsider his question.
What more evidence do we want to demand that Hugh Pym be sacked without a reference?
Next door neighbour. Found dead from heart attack a week back. 60ish, a bit overweight but normal for his age.
Husband of Covidian acquiantance. Died in his sleep. Heart attack. c45, a bit overweight but normal for his age.
One of my best friends. c 45. Pericarditis after being boosted. In hospital for a week. Better now.
Many people (most) rationalise these events as things that ‘just happens to men of a certain age’. What they are overlooking is that these are sufficiently rare such that if a factor comes along that causes more of these events, then the likelihood that it was the cause is very high. So yes, I’m happy saying that it was the vaxx that did it (most likely).
Out of the blue today my daughter said something along the lines of ‘I want to go and get my vaccine in ABC town. Becky at school said that they give out biscuits once you’ve had it’. This was only about 15 minutes after I found out about one of these events so I almost blew my top.
I don’t think overweight people do get more heart attacks. Dr Malcolm Kendrick has looked into this. There’s a phenomenan called the obesity paradox. People who are naturally thin can also suffer diabetes and cardiovascular problems.
You get tea and biscuits after you donate blood. That’s a more socially useful activity.
Shops also SELL biscuits.
The cardio vascular damage of a single packet of high fructose biscuits will be less than a jab though.
https://realclimatescience.com/2022/04/twitter-doubling-down-on-their-evil/
See what happens when you put things like this on twitter
I just had to visit an acquaintance of a friend, to collect something he had spare and was giving away. The first thing he said as I entered the house was: ‘You’re OK, we’re all vaccinated’. I said something to the effect that I couldn’t care less about COVID. My only worry was his two large dogs which were jumping madly up and down.
He gradually got the message that I wasn’t that keen on dogs but seemed to think I was
1 irrational to be worried about dogs almost the size of a human
2 irrational not to be worried about COVID.
Had the dogs been vaccinated though?
Did anyone notice when they mentioned Hancock flooding care homes with asymptomatic patents they are perpetuating the asymptomatic myth.
Has it turned out to be a myth? Have you got a good link for that, please?
You don’t need a link. You know it. Can you give someone a cold when you don’t have a cold?
In Lala Covid Lieland anything is possible – except the vax protecting you from the virus.
It has never been demonstrated to exist since Whitty invented it . Or do you have evidence to the contrary?
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/a-few-new-papers-are-brewing?s=r
Jessica Rose on the sudden death category in VAERS.
Safe to say, sudden death is happening and being reported at rates higher than ever before (big surprise) as per VAERS, and although it is being reported for individuals ages 50+ with more prevalence, it is not limited to a specific age group.
Check out the graph for the percentage of cases of sudden death by the days post vaccine. phew!
“Killer Jab”? Exactly how much more evidence is needed?
Front page news? BBC lead story ? No …pushed aside .
Evil stalks the Land of Lies !
its Also very weird how hepatitis is mysteriously on the rise among youngsters.
Israel should remember that that one resurrection on their turf has an asterisk beside it.
So there were fifty excess deaths in 3 months in a population of 3-4 million (depending how the demographics of a population of 8.9m people works out)?
It does seem a bit of a waste of money to spend multiple millions vaccinating a healthy population just to kill 50 of them. It’s no good health-wise and pretty useless as a eugenics exercise too!
Why not just spend the money handing out free condoms instead?!
It’s where the money goes that’s the point. Pfizer etc
Oh it is much worse than this. Simply read the 1,250,000 adverse event reports in the USA and 22,000 deaths post vaxx cdc VAERS reports. Adverse events range from transverse myelitis, thrombocytopenia, strokes, atrial fibrillation,heart attacks, Bell’s palsy, guillian barre, reactivation of dormant viruses such as shingles, serious lung infections, blindness, tinnitus, serious skin eruptions, miscarriages, abnormal menstrual bleeding, reoccurrence of cancers, including pancreatic, ovarian, lung, breast, unsteadiness, vertigo and many more. Did you know Pfizer just released in their data dump, six pages of adverse events from their trial data. More people died in the trial arm than the control group. If you took these vaccines, you should be concerned.