According to a report by The Telegraph, PayPal told Molly Kingsley, the founder of USForThem, that her account was closed in September 2022 because of “the nature of its activities.” During the pandemic, USForThem campaigned against policies such as school closures, mask mandates for students, and mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for children.
The company admitted for the first time since the account was frozen that the decision was related to the "content published by UsForThem relating to mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations and school closures.” PayPal further claimed that the donations UsForThem received through its service were against its “acceptable use” policy.
PayPal also revealed through documents disclosed during pre-action correspondence that it compiled a dossier of information on Kingsley which included excerpts from a book she co-authored, per The Telegraph. The dossier quoted a line from the book The Children’s Inquiry that 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.'”
Other groups faced similar actions. Law or Fiction, a group of lawyers critical of lockdown measures, also had its PayPal account closed. The group described the move as “a blatant assault on free speech, as practised in China.”
At the time of the account closures, PayPal failed to provide a rationale for its decisions. This sparked many users to participate in a boycott against the company.
“PayPal appears to have admitted what we had suspected all along: that it was engaged in politically motivated de-bankings 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,” Kingsley said.
In response, a PayPal spokesperson stated, “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.”
