PayPal today put out a statement that it works to ensure that its “services are not used to accept payments or donations for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance. This includes organizations that advocate racist views, such as the KKK, white supremacist groups or Nazi groups.”
After extensive convos w/ @ColorOfChange – @PayPal will stop processing payments for a set of hate groups & leaders https://t.co/SMCuYQzpAi
— Rashad Robinson (@rashadrobinson) August 15, 2017
Rashad Robinson, the executive director of the social justice nonprofit Color of Change, told Fast Company his organization had been in discussions with PayPal since February “about a set of groups that should have been on the outside of their policies, but weren’t,” and that as a result of those conversations, several new groups had been banned from processing payments. PayPal’s statement referred to its “longstanding, well-defined and consistently enforced” policy–which it last updated in 2015–of barring hate groups, but did not make mention of changes to that policy nor to the addition of new groups on its banned list.
Robinson said “policy and practice are two different things, and the reason [PayPal] put that statement out today is because we are full steam ahead on moving this campaign to the next level.”
In an email response to a Fast Company request for comment, a PayPal spokesperson wrote, “As we do with many external groups, we had conversations with Color of Change regarding organizations that they brought to our attention for possibly violating our policies. We did take action on a number of sites in the last several months. We also regularly assess activity against our Acceptable Use Policy and discontinue our relationship with account holders who are found to violate our policies.”
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