PayPal halts payments for UK disinformation companies
UsForThem & Daily Sceptic among minimum of 6 Ltd companies
In a bold move PayPal has blocked its service to a number of companies linked to disinformation groups. The known companies are
Daily Sceptic, run by Toby Young, writer Will Jones is also a member of disinformation group HART, however he does not declare this in articles where he promotes HART as a third party. Originally Lockdown Sceptic founded in April 2020 at the start of the UK lockdown it has since widened its scope from covid disinformation to include other subjects such as climate change denial.
Free Speech Union, also run by Toby Young, the group was also established in 2020 through a group of contrarian academics at Cambridge University. Peter Thiel’s chief of staff Charles Vaughan flew to the UK to assist in establishing the organisation. Others involved with the Free Speech Union include James Orr, Arif Ahmed, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson and Nigel Bigger. James Orr’s Trinity Forum has direct links to the Republican Party
UsForThem, founded in May 2020 with the assistance of Allison Pearson (Daily Telegraph and member of the self titles Brexit Battalion of journalists) and Ellen Townsend (Pandata,HART, PCRclaims & Collateral Global), was launched in the Telegraph and receives PR support from Ed Barker (Johnson leadership campaign, CRG MPs, Conservative Way Forward, Legatum, Vote leave etc). The group has campaigned against every effort to reduce covid transmission in children including vaccination.
Law or Fiction, Stephen Jackson’s sceptic lawyers organisation has been one of the legal groups of choice for sceptic groups, bringing a number of failed legal challenged to court whilst raising tens of thousands of pounds in the process. Law or Fiction are affiliated to the World Freedom Alliance, an umbrella organisation for anti-vax groups promoting the Nuremberg 2.0 narrative.
UK Medical Freedom Alliance, anti-vax group founded by Liz Evans in December 2020, the group is part of the World Freedom Alliance network and contains members of the World Doctors Alliance which created the WFA. Liz Evans sits on the advisory board of RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense, one of the main organisations in the world providing seed money for anti-vax groups as covered in the Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s Disinformation Dozen report. Liz Evans is also a member of HART and Us For Them’s website provides links to resources on the UKMFA’s site.
Gays against Groomers, a US based group that claims to represent “A coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children” who others describe as an anti-trans hate group. The group has also had another payment account Venmo cancelled as well.
The founders of the limited companies sanctioned by PayPal have taken to the media to complain about cancel culture. The Spectator, The Times Telegraph, GB News and Talk Radio have all provided founders of these groups sympathetic interviews questioning PayPal’s decision on the grounds of it being an attack of free speech.
However, PayPal have not removed anyone’s right to free speech to voice their views, they have removed the ability to monetise those views through their payment service, other payment services are still available, Us For Them have already switched to using a service called Stripe.
Disinformation?
Toby Young has suggested PayPal’s actions are due to his challenging of “official narratives” on covid, climate change and trans rights.
The UK based groups had recently misrepresented the UK’s immunisation body JCVI’s decision to not offer covid vaccination to children who did not turn 5 before the start of September 2022. The decision was promoted as a halt to all 5-11 vaccination and safety concerns were suggested. This led to disinformation groups making all sorts of false claims about deaths in children and was amplified further by Simone Gold of America’s Frontline Doctors.
Around a week before this the limited companies were also involved in amplifying another piece of disinformation that went viral around the world. An old NHS document from 2020 was shared by Norman Fenton of disinformation group HART saying vaccination wasn’t approved for pregnant women, the document had been updated in April 2021 after enough data had been collected for approval. The scale of audience the disinformation reached led UK authorities to have to put out official statements across social media in an effort to counter the misleading claims.
The groups have taken to social media to call for others to #BoycottPayPal. Previously Toby Young had defended the right of a bakery to refuse to make a cake for customers who had asked for a pro LGBT+ cake, arguing that private companies have a right to refuse who they serve, yet now a similar decision impacts him there is uproar that a private company has decided it does not want to provide its service to other private companies whose messaging it doesn’t agree with. However, while its being assumed disinformation put out by these groups is the cause of PayPal’s decision, this may not be the case, there are other reasons the payment service might choose to close an account.
PayPal’s Reasoning
Interviewed on TalkTV by Julia Hartley-Brewer, Us For Them founder Molly Kingsley said she had been notified by PayPal three weeks before at the start of September, quoting PayPal’s correspondence, “After a review of your account activity we’ve determined you are in breach of acceptable use activity due to you account’s activity”. Us For Them have been notified their funds with PayPal have been frozen, they might be returned in 180 days.
Hartley-Brewer suggested the move by PayPal was suspicious and said the government should get involved, and would raise the issue with the UK’s new Health Secretary later that day.
A spokesman for PayPal said the company was not able to comment on individual accounts but said the company was not discriminatory and “does not take decisions lightly” on shutting down accounts, pointing out that the company has more than 400 million customers with a range of viewpoints. The company’s acceptable use policy covers a “broad range of actions”, including “spreading misinformation about the covid vaccine and “hate speech”. It is worth noting that Kingsley has called for the imprisonment of those responsible for the covid vaccine being offered to children.
Its interesting that it has taken Us For Them and others three weeks to make PayPal’s actions public, Kingley claims she has not sought to appeal or challenge the decision and has instead just moved to another service. Threats of litigation have previously been Kingsley’s modus operandi, from the initial challenge against the UK government regarding school closures to legal letters sent to individual school leaders for recommending their students wear masks.
She even notified epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani that she would be contacting her lawyers in regards to Gurdasani raising Kingley’s involvement in the Safer to Wait campaign. The legal action never materialised, most likely due to the emergency of articles written by Kingley promoting Safer to Wait and Alison Pearson of the Telegraph writing in an article how Ros Jones of HART was running the Safer to Wait campaign on behalf of Us For Them.
So it’s a surprise that PayPal is not being challenged legally or through its appeals process when previously these groups have been content to make challenges that never had a chance of success. Are they worried that a failed appeal might make the disinformation amplified by these groups more widely known to the public, or was PayPal motivated by concerns that had nothing to do with content? There are other organisations putting out the same content who have not been sanctioned by PayPal, and the inclusion of US based Gays Against Groomers alongside the UK groups doesn’t match the pattern.
The PayPal decision had gained such attention because it is such an unusual course of action for the company. A more common reason for PayPal to cancel accounts is due to concerns around financial activity. Did PayPal’s internal systems discover something that raised red flags? For instance if PayPal had identified a questionable source of donations its likely they would block all recipients of that source.
Previous Concerns
Open Democracy have previously reported concerns about the funding of the Recovery Alliance which is thought to be an umbrella group supporting Time For Recovery and Us For Them who had joint PR campaign and open letter in 2020.
“The Electoral Reform Society has previously warned about unincorporated associations “potentially masking many separate donations through a single entity”, and pointed out that they have “few legal reporting requirements”.
Jess Garland, director of policy and research at the Electoral Reform Society, told openDemocracy: “Unincorporated associations are another giant hole in the sieve that is Britain’s party funding rules, letting ‘dark money’ flood into our political system.
“There is a glaring lack of transparency that only fosters distrust and – often justified – fears over who is secretly steering our political debate.
“Voters have a right to know who is influencing our politics. It’s time for transparency and openness, to fix the rot and restore faith in politics.”
Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, also criticised the role of unincorporated associations in political donations, saying there are “too many dark corners for donors to hide”.
“It is far too easy to evade the rules on donor disclosure through the use of murky unincorporated associations. Despite reforms a decade ago, it is still nearly impossible to learn who is really making political contributions through these secretive clubs.
“To bring dark money out of the shadows we should have greater sight of all political donations worth over £500.”