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PayPal Could Be Legally Prevented From Banning People For Their Political Views

New law would end discrimination.

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PayPal could be prevented by law from banning people over their political views, after the company faced a backlash following its decision to terminate the accounts of several high profile groups.

Although PayPal has been banning conservatives and right-wingers for years, its recent move to terminate accounts operated by the Free Speech Union and other groups in the UK that opposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates has apparently been a step too far.

Following the controversy, dozens of Conservative Party MPs, including Michael Gove, David Davis and Sir Iain Duncan Smith, signed an open letter to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Business Department demanding that PayPal be legally barred from imposing discriminatory practices.

The letter asserts that it is “hard to avoid construing PayPal’s actions as an orchestrated, politically motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views on these topics within the U.K.”

This morning, the London Times also published a powerful piece by Jawad Iqbal which highlighted the dangers of allowing PayPal to abuse such powers.

“This is censorship by corporate diktat: the company sets its own rules and interprets them as it sees fit. It appears oblivious to the notion that it is wrong in principle to withdraw vital services from people because of their political views. Would it be acceptable for a supermarket to refuse to serve a customer because of their politics or for a high street bank to refuse to make a payment to a company it deemed politically objectionable?” asked Iqbal.

After questions were asked in Parliament about the issue, a new law could be on the cards that would put an end to PayPal’s crusade against dissident viewpoints.

“Conservative backbenchers are considering launching an amendment to upcoming financial legislation in the House of Commons that would ban companies from freezing campaigners’ accounts,” reports the Telegraph.

“One source said ministers are likely to accept the amendment to the law because Conservative backbenchers will support it.”

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has also demanded answers from PayPal.

The familiar old argument from leftists, who apparently now vehemently support monopolistic transnational corporations using their might and vast resources to impose censorship, is that “PayPal is a private company and can ban who it wants.”

However, at least in the UK, that isn’t strictly true.

PayPal is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which mandates “All firms must be able to show consistently that fair treatment of customers is at the heart of their business model.”

Fair treatment of customers clearly isn’t at the heart of PayPal’s business model, it’s literally the exact opposite.

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“Something Very Dramatic Has Changed”: Matt Taibbi Says Democrats Ditched Free Speech

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Independent journalist Matt Taibbi – of recent “Twitter Files” fame – has exposed the fact that civil liberties are no longer popular among Democrats. Taibbi appeared on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo” to reiterate his perspective that the modern Democratic Party no longer represents the values of the everyday American. 

“About all of this — Matt, how do you feel about all of this? I know before you started discovering this bad behavior, you identified as a Democrat, and now you’ve got all of your friends, quote-unquote, in the media attacking you for exposing this,” Bartiromo asked.

“Yeah, it’s funny, I mean, I was raised in a traditional ACLU liberal, I believed in free speech all my life. That was one of the things, frankly, that attracted me to the Democratic Party when I was a kid, the idea that we were the party that believed in letting everybody have a say, and we’ll just make a better argument, and that’s how the system works,” Taibbi said.

He continued, “Apparently, something very dramatic has changed in politics in America, and there’s been a shift. There’s no question about it anymore, that now the parties have had a complete reversal on how they read these issues.”

Taibbi leads a team of journalists, including Michael Shellenberger, who have been given access to Twitter Files, revealing a startling network of government agencies, think tanks, and Twitter personnel coordinating efforts to attack the First Amendment. 

What we’ve learned from the Twitter Files is the ever-expanding coalition of groups working with the government and social media to target and censor Americans, including government-funded organizations.

Twitter files are chilling in the details and show how Democrats have weaponized government and colluded with corporations to wage war on the First Amendment. 

The modern Democratic Party is not the same one that your parents or grandparents were members of in the past.It’s obsessed with starting World War 3 in Ukraine, eroding the First Amendment, dismantling the Second Amendment, and normalizing ‘woke’ culture.

What caused such a significant shift in the party in just a few short years?

And what kind of blowback will Taibbi get for telling these truths?

This post was originally published at Zero Hedge

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White House Tried to Censor Private WhatsApp Messages About Vaccine Skepticism

Alarming leaked emails reveal attempted level of intrusion beyond public forums.

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Matt Cardy via Getty Images

Leaked emails show that the White House was intent on pressuring messaging platform WhatsApp to censor private conversations about ‘vaccine skepticism’.

The revelation is perhaps even more alarming than the Biden administration’s efforts to shut down dissent on public social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, because the lobbying pertained to information exchanged between as a few as two people.

The leaked emails were featured in a Substack article written by journalist and author David Zweig.

From March 2021 onwards, Rob Flaherty, the Biden White House’s Director of Digital Strategy, demanded WhatsApp owner Meta explain the actions it was taking to intervene in private conversations about the COVID vaccine between WhatsApp users.

“If you can’t see the message, I’m genuinely curious—how do you know what kinds of messages you’ve cut down on?” Flaherty asked.

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Flaherty and Andrew Slavitt, then the White House Senior Advisor on the Covid Response, wanted to set up phone calls with a Meta executive a “couple of times per week” if necessary to oversee the censorship.

“I care mostly about what actions and changes you’re making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse,” Flaherty wrote on April 9, 2021.

“I still don’t have a good, empirical answer on how effective you’ve been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters,” he added.

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The White House wanted non-public messages about vaccine skepticism to be brought “under control,” a chilling interference in private encrypted conversations.

“What, exactly, was he hoping to get Meta to do?” asks Zweig.

“It was obvious from the start that WhatsApp’s interface didn’t allow for the granular control Flaherty appeared to desire. And his smiley face response suggests he well understood this. Yet he kept badgering the Meta executives anyway.”

Meta was seemingly unable to satisfy the Biden administration’s demands, perhaps wary that directly censoring people’s ability to communicate with their own friends and family would have represented a massive public relations disaster.

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Sam Harris: Conservatives “Should Not Have Opinions” On Ukraine, Vaccines, Climate Change

“You’ve got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others, who should not have an opinion on these topics”

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Steve Watson

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Leftist ‘thinker’ Sam Harris declared last week that conservatives should not be allowed to voice their opinions on issues such as the war in Ukraine, climate change, or vaccine safety.

Making the remarks on a podcast, Harris’ argument is that conservative commentators are making a living out of “not caring” and thus should not be allowed to influence anyone else’s opinion.

“We’re swimming in a sea of misinformation, where you’ve got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others, who should not have an opinion on these topics,” Harris proclaimed.

He continued, “There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or climate change, or the war in Ukraine, or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right?”

She’s not a relevant expert on any of those topics. And what’s more, she doesn’t seem to care, right?” Harris continued, adding And she’s living in a culture that has amplified that not caring into a business model, an effective business model, right? That is something very Trumpian about all that.”

Watch:

This is all very rich coming from someone who previously admitted he supported the suppression of reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop immediately prior to the election, if it would prevent Donald Trump from being reelected.

Indeed, Harris went as far as saying “Hunter Biden could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared.”

Harris later pathetically claimed that the New York Post’s reporting on the story was accurate only “by accident.”

After he received backlash for the remarks, Harris rage quit Twitter and is still absent from the platform, refusing to even entertain debate or opinions antithetical to his own:

Given that she was used as an example by Harris, Candace Owens responded:

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