PayPal, evil incarnate. Or not.
When news broke today that PayPal had frozen the account of the Courage To Resist foundation (which gives donations to the Bradley Manning legal defense fund), all internet broke loose. Everyone was yelling “I’ll withdraw my whole $5 and watch them go out of business” “fuck paypal, I’m done with them,” thinking the freeze was a move related to WikiLeaks.
But it turns out it wasn’t anything of the sort. Courage To Resist simply set their account up incorrectly and PayPal asked them to fix it. This is PayPal’s official statement on the matter:
“Today’s temporary limitation of the Courage to Resist organization’s PayPal account is due to PayPal regulations requiring non profits to associate a bank account to their PayPal account. It is nothing to do with Wikileaks. Back in December 2010, we permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action. This is not the case with Courage to Resist.”
Calm down, everyone. I usually agree with the internet hivemind, but this time all the overreacting going on is just stupid. I mean, if they’re not willing to comply with all of PayPal’s policies it’s well within PayPal’s rights to deny them service. And none of it has anything to do with WikiLeaks.
