PayPal delists gay sites

October 23, 2004 11:09 AM

Not porn, just gayPayPal suddenly delists queer sites: “[H]e raised objections to PalPal’s action, saying his organization’s aim is to educate the public on ways to avoid AIDS. He said PayPal never responded to his concerns.... PayPal sent [another site owner] a reply saying the company would consider reinstating his account if he submits a statement promising to ‘remove the book covers wherein individuals are touching each other’ ”
posted by joeclark (25 comments total)

"Red Hot has never considered its content obscene or adult." Might want to get ride of the page with videos of naked people (gay and hetero) making out.
posted by smackfu at 11:34 AM on October 23, 2004

Not all payment services, just PayPal. John Kenneth Fisher suddenly cancels PayPal account.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 11:53 AM on October 23, 2004

Not saying its right but I do believe it is PayPal's right to decide who they wish to have as a customer.

That said, I will very likely be looking for another option to pay for my auctions as it is my right to vote with my wallet and let PayPal know that I do not approve of their moral code.

The charge too much anyway.
posted by fenriq at 11:55 AM on October 23, 2004

fenriq gets right in line after John Kenneth (not too closely, don't want to further offend the puritanical sensibilities of PayPal) to cancel his account as well.
posted by fenriq at 11:57 AM on October 23, 2004

PayPal is not trustworthy anyway. Too many people have had too many problems and the policy changes have just became stranger and more problematic after they joined the great internet auction beast.
posted by bargle at 12:11 PM on October 23, 2004

Question: Are banks legally allowed to up and cancel somebody's account because they don't like that person's business? I'm not being facetious -- I don't know the answer to this question, but I suspect that they can't. Another question: Is PayPal legally recognized as a bank? I know they say they're not a bank, but really, they are. They're facilitating transactions, they're storing funds for people, they are a bank. So what, if anything, is the legal ramification of this type of action?
posted by aaronetc at 12:13 PM on October 23, 2004

I don't agree with Paypal's decision. However, I think this is a very poorly worded post. I thought the article was going to tell me that Paypal said they were going to drop all porn/adult sites and then simply dropped the gay porn sites. This isn't the case at all. They indeed dropped all porn sites (gay and straight) and also have been going after non-adult, queer-oriented sites.

This of course is still bad, but hardly the same thing. Maybe I'm just reading too much into your linked line but that's what I inferred from it.

I love Paypal and use it a few times a week. However, this is exactly the type of nonsense that makes me curious about other online services. Unfortunately, when I've tried things like Bidpay and whatnot, they've been overly convoluted or complicated, not to mention hardly widespread. What other services are worth checking into?
posted by dobbs at 12:19 PM on October 23, 2004

What a ridiculous story. Paypal is bozo.

Dobbs,

I'm hopeful things like Bitpass will become more robust as a means to buying things online like a pre-paid calling card.
posted by Peter H at 12:25 PM on October 23, 2004

All right, PayPal suddenly delists three specific queer sites. Better now?
posted by joeclark at 12:36 PM on October 23, 2004

This should send readers a BIG GIANT RED FLARE and I'll proceed to explain why I personally see it as troubling

1. Part of Paypal(Ebay) business is sale of transaction services, either financial transaction service (Paypal payments) or auction services (Ebay)

2. More transactions (sales) = More potential revenues for Paypal

3. Paypal has NO financial interest in stopping transaction or preventing them from happen ; actually, anything that stops or stalls the sale is dangerous for Paypal financial interest.

As revenues from transaction is the most important, if not the primary and only source of revenue for Paypal (and an important one for Ebay), we can safely assume that:

a. something scared Paypal, something troubling to them
b. so scary that they decided to risk reducing their own revenues instead of facing the trouble !
c. but as reduction of profit is a menace for any business they decided to send a message to the bookmaker telling
them to REWRAP the book (change its cover) so that they can again enjoy the profit from transaction.

Therefore, if Paypal believes rewrapping the book is sufficient to restore the sale, the wrap of the book is probably what they're having problems with.

This is very important: Paypal is just telling the author " look, we don't care about what you write, no problem with the actual book content...we have another problem, we can't sell your book if the wrap contains two half naked individuals...pretty please rewrap it"

Which leads to the obvious question: how comes Paypal, a financial service business, have problem with nakedness ?
It is no secret that ,in contemporary markets, sex help sales ; therefore Paypal should be more then happy to associate its business with other business selling sex related goods.

Why did the same Paypal send the email telling the author to just rewrap ? It's evident it's not Paypal having problems with nakedness, otherwise they would have not sent the "please rewrap" email.

Who scared Paypal into giving up part of their profits ? Why was this book targeted and by who ? Who is powerful enough to scare Paypal with lost business / negative propaganda and have a trouble with nakedness ?So big a trouble they probably menaced Paypal with negative consequences and is important enough to be recognized by Paypal as a _real trouble_

Certainly no ordinary Joe... Draw your own conclusions....pray if it helps you.
posted by elpapacito at 12:44 PM on October 23, 2004

Pay pal sucks. I hate it to death. This is only another reason to hate it.
posted by Busithoth at 12:45 PM on October 23, 2004

eBay sucks. I hate it to death. Their daughter company PayPal is only another reason to hate it.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 12:48 PM on October 23, 2004

Wow, that's a nice conspiracy theory, elpapacito.

Or maybe Paypal gets a lot of chargebacks on porno sites, which negates point 3.
posted by smackfu at 12:48 PM on October 23, 2004

smackfu: conspiracy theory ? it's pure business reasoning..were are the abducting ufos and men in black, did you see them outside your home recently ? Want a tinfoil hat ? I'll sell you one for an one time price of $9.99

About chargeback : customer may also choose (afaik) to chargeback before the charge actually happens (but I guess it depends on each credit card issuer contractual regulations ) or to start chargeback after the actual charge has been completed.

Paypal has no interest in preventing the transaction (sale) from happening, but may have an interesting in pre-empting chargebacks. I don't see how asking the bookmaker to change cover could pre-empt chargeback, can you ?
posted by elpapacito at 1:37 PM on October 23, 2004

I've a secret theory that eBay is populated mainly by china doll collecting, plush selling, bible bashing Republicans. PayPal are simply looking after business by ensuring that they don't upset any of God's own people.
posted by seanyboy at 1:45 PM on October 23, 2004

seanboy: I've got an addedum to your secret theory, see if it fits : there's a sekrut group, so sekrut I don't even know if it exists, called "the wordoclasts" . They consider any written word a blasphemy because words contain root of unwriteable evils ! Maybe, let me stress maybe, Paypal will stop business with those evil ones who dare write books with words ! Obviously, that's for the good of business and will not affect society at all, not even marginally.
posted by elpapacito at 1:57 PM on October 23, 2004

I really don't like paypal -- but what can I use instead?
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 3:58 PM on October 23, 2004

I think elpapacito's theory sounds right.

If it were the owner of PayPal who was somehow prejudiced against this sort of thing, he or she, would likely go much further than merely insisting on a cover cover-up.

It seems more like they're trying to tip-toe around someone else's prejudices to avoid pissing them off and bringing down regulation on themselves.

I've already taken a life-long commitment to never using PayPal in their current form, because of their lax attitude to the problems inherent in their system. Their latest decision is a cherry on that cake (and if that reminds them of an engorged nipple, tough luck for them).
posted by Blue Stone at 4:23 PM on October 23, 2004

To play the devil's advocate for the moment, PayPal is completely justified in taking pretty much whatever action it chooses to. Their TOS are very vague and open, and for a reason -- if they weren't, they would get taken for millions. Fraudsters completely swarm around services like PayPal, and they have to be able to defend themselves against chargebacks. PayPal still has to answer to their credit card processor (or if they do their own processing, to the credit card companies themselves), and that's what's motivating them in cases like this. Not to mention $30-40 chargeback fees.

I used to work for another payment site similar to PayPal, and despite the fact that we were far more restrictive about things than PayPal is, we still got fraud (or attempted fraud) all over the place. Any service that allows people to transfer funds in any form is a potential target. Why do you suppose "automated" bank and wire transfers take 3-4 business days? If they wanted to make them instantaneous, they could -- except that would make things a lot easier for fraudsters.

PayPal's business model isn't really sustainable in the long run. I'm surprised they've lasted this long.
posted by neckro23 at 10:14 PM on October 23, 2004

This may have something to do with Ashcroft's stepped-up war on porn, (which has, astonishingly, stayed beneath the radar this year). I can't say for sure. (If you look, you can find porn webmasters complaining that the Bush administration is shutting down their every avenue of payment. Drain the swamp, indeed.) Watch out for next year: the name's "Bluenose" Buchanan, apparently.

But I actually suspect it's just a hazard of doing business with Paypal, who as neckro23 points out has a healthy fear of chargebacks. Porn sites -- no matter how well managed -- are notorious for having chargeback rates as much as TEN TIMES a typical merchant, and the reason is obvious: "Honey, I have no idea how that got on our credit card statement. I'll give them a call RIGHT NOW." That reaction would apply to tame gay sites, as well.
posted by dhartung at 12:45 AM on October 24, 2004

As revenues from transaction is the most important, if not the primary and only source of revenue for Paypal

I had an interesting conversation with a PayPal employee a while back. She said that their business model isn't based on the fees, it's based on earnings from investing the float. Fees are mostly PayPal's way of encouraging people to leave their money in the system longer.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 1:38 AM on October 24, 2004

I had an interesting conversation with a PayPal employee a while back. She said that their business model isn't based on the fees, it's based on earnings from investing the float. Fees are mostly PayPal's way of encouraging people to leave their money in the system longer.

That makes them very much like a bank, then, or at least that's how banks used to sustain themselves. Now there's a lotta fees involved ... though I honestly don't know if that's a major source of revenue or if they simply do it because they can.
posted by krinklyfig at 1:54 AM on October 24, 2004

elpapacito's post seems pretty convincing. There are enough religous pressure groups in the States that his theory sounds quite reasonable. To take his argument futher, what will happen as more and more of our financial transactions become electronic. Will there come a time when anyone and anything not acceptible to the religous elite become outcasts, unable to survive in the electronic world because their very existence is deemed blasphemous or immoral? At the very least that would make a good plot for a dystopian SF tale.
posted by Meridian at 3:50 AM on October 24, 2004

Will there come a time when anyone and anything not acceptible to the religous elite become outcasts, unable to survive in the electronic world because their very existence is deemed blasphemous or immoral? At the very least that would make a good plot for a dystopian SF tale.

Equilibrium?
posted by JakeEXTREME at 9:07 AM on October 24, 2004

Yahoo has shut down their paypal clone, and I'm not sure any alternative has a very wide audience. From a small business perspective, Paypal wasn't my first choice for transaction provider/merchant account, but it's the only one that's affordable at the tiny volume of sales we do. (Compared to say, a retail outlet, or a well advertised website.)

Traditional merchant accounts can cost upwards of $200 a month...a fee totally out of reach for anyone not doing 4k+ a month in sales. And most of them are very wary of doing business with companies, like mine, that don't have a retail footprint.

I'm not all that fond of Paypal, but I don't see a lot of alternatives.
posted by dejah420 at 11:25 AM on October 24, 2004