PayPal has admitted to debanking a children’s rights campaigner after she spoke out against mandatory Covid vaccines and school closures.
The company told Molly Kingsley, founder of the parent campaign group UsForThem, that her account had been terminated in September 2022 due to “the nature of its activities”.
Her account was amongst other individuals and organisations who had their accounts shut down after they questioned the government’s policies during the pandemic.
PayPal has now admitted for the first time that Kingsley’s account was locked for “content published by UsForThem relating to mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations and school closures”.
Her account was amongst other individuals and organisations who had their accounts shut down
They said that since the organisation was receiving donations via the app, it went against their “acceptable use” policy.
Kingsley set up the group to campaign against school closures along with other government policies such as forcing children to wear face masks and vaccinate rollouts.
In documents shown during pre-action correspondence, PayPal also disclosed that from May to September 2022, the company compiled information on Kingsley, including excerpts from a book she co-authored titled The Children’s Inquiry.
One quote from the book cited read: “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.’”
MORE LIKE THIS:
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.”
Kingsley’s PayPal account was one of several to be shut down during the pandemic. It was reinstated 22 days later following an intervention from the Financial Conduct Authority.
Law or Fiction, a group of lawyers against lockdown also had their account closed as did Toby Young, a free speech campaigner.
At the time, Paypal was accused of failing to explain why they were shutting these accounts, prompting a backlash from users who pledged to boycott the app.
At the time, Paypal was accused of failing to explain why they were shutting these accounts, prompting a backlash from users who pledged to boycott the app
Getty
Kinsley said: “PayPal appears to have admitted what we had suspected all along: that it was engaged in politically motivated debankings of those of us who criticised the government’s response to Covid, and the lockdown narrative in particular.”
“For more than two years, PayPal has resisted my efforts to uncover what happened.”
A paypal spokesman said: “We are not able to comment on individual customer accounts; however, we base all reviews of our customers’ use of PayPal services on their compliance with our policies. We apply an objective approach to these reviews, one that is not driven by politics.”
+ There are no comments
Add yours