Jacob Rees-Mogg Warns PayPal Against ‘Cancel Culture’

Jacob Rees-Mogg has warned the U.S. tech giant PayPal to stop “pushing” its “political opinions” on the British public. The Telegraph has more.

Mr. Rees-Mogg, the Business Secretary, has waded into a growing row over cancel culture following PayPal’s decision to shut down the account of the Free Speech Union (FSU).

PayPal, the digital payments firm, closed down all accounts linked to Toby Young, the FSU’s founder. The group defends gender-critical academics and people who have lost work for expressing opinions.

In an intervention that will be welcomed by free-speech campaigners, Mr Rees-Mogg said: “Corporations such as PayPal should not take part in cancel culture and push political opinions on the British public.

“It is particularly concerning that it appears to have censored the Free Speech Union. They need to justify their behaviour.”

PayPal has declined to tell Mr. Young why his accounts are being blocked. In an email to Mr Young last week, the company said: “PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance.” But it did not give any specific examples of how Mr. Young had violated PayPal’s acceptable use policy.

Dozens of MPs – including former Conservative party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith and ex-cabinet ministers Michael Gove and David Davis – have written to Mr Rees-Mogg accusing PayPal of a “politically motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views”.

Mr Rees-Mogg’s backing will give impetus to backbench MPs to force through legal safeguards to prevent tech and financial services firms from blacklisting voices they don’t agree with. The MPs could seek an amendment to either the Online Safety Bill or Digital Markets Bill to prevent accounts being blocked for political or free-speech reasons.

PayPal’s chief executive Dan Schulman said as recently as last week that “major consumer brands” could no longer “avoid the cultural wars”, insisting that “the fight against any kind of discrimination” was a core value of the $100 billion tech company.

Mr. Schulman first rose to prominence in political circles when he announced that PayPal was withdrawing plans to build a global headquarters in North Carolina after the state passed a law that required people to use toilets or changing rooms that matched the gender on their birth certificate rather than the gender they identified with.

Mr. Young believes he is a victim of Mr Schulman’s new edict. Mr. Young said: “We did recently publish an article on the Free Speech Union website about the rights of individuals if an employer requests they declare their preferred gender pronouns and that might have attracted the attention of Dan Schulman or one of his trans-rights activist advisers.”

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: The Free Speech Union has created a template email that people can send to their MP asking him or her to raise PayPal’s censorious behaviour in the House of Commons and to ask the Chancellor and the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee to demand an explanation of PayPal and consider putting legal safeguards in place to stop this kind of thing happening again. Click here to send this email to your MP. Only takes two minutes.

Stop Press 2: Read an interview I’ve given to Disruption Banking about PayPal’s attempt to cancel me and what we can do to stop it cancelling others.

Stop Press 3: Freddie Attenborough, the Communications Officer of the Daily Sceptic, has written an excellent piece for the Critic about the PayPal affair.