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I wrote for Singal-Minded (non-paywalled) on the topic of PayPal suspending accounts for what appear to be politically motivated reasons. I describe my experience with PayPal suspending my own account a few years ago, and how I managed to get it back:
PayPal, like many other companies, have a mandatory arbitration clause in their user agreements that require you to "agree" to waive your right to sue them in court if you have a dispute. I took PayPal up on the offer to settle our shit via arbitration but we never got that far because they quickly caved. I was prompted to write about all this after I met Colin Wright and offered to help him deal with his own PayPal bullshit. From my perspective, he refused my help but nevertheless kept writing opeds about the issue and soliciting donations. I heavily insinuated that he was intentionally holding on to his victimhood status as a grifting strategy. Turns out, I was wrong.
As best as I can tell, virtually nobody thinks to try to address the issue of politically-motivated corporate censorship with the tools already available to them. Not even FIRE talked about arbitration dispute resolution. This leads me to think this a low-hanging fruit counter-attack that's just ripe for the taking.
Edit: I found out about another instance of someone taking a company to arbitration and winning. See also the hacker news thread, esp. thathndude's posts where they explain how hiring an attorney (even one that doesn't do anything) can result in absurdly higher settlements.
There are two main reasons an organization like FIRE doesn't use arbitration: (1) it does not set any legal precedent and therefore the outcome is basically only relevant to the specific case at hand, and (2) arbitration is often more expensive than litigation because you must pay the arbitrator's fee, which is typically $1000-$2000 per day.
I echoed the exact same concern about the lack of transparency in arbitration. Do you have a source on how arbitration is more expensive than litigation? It makes sense that arbitrators would be more expensive than judges who are paid a public salary, but that wouldn't be the full analysis. After all the most common benefit cited for arbitration is that it's much cheaper overall when you take into account the full costs (including attorney's fees) because the process is significantly less cumbersome than traditional courts. And in the specific context of whether consumers should initiate arbitration more, the cost is irrelevant if the companies are the ones footing the bill.
Still, I don't expect FIRE to use or even advocate for arbitration, but when they issued a statement on PayPal this is what they said:
I asked FIRE for specific proposals to improve due process and appeals they had in mind but they never responded. EFF/ACLU/FIRE can write all the letters they want, but companies have no reason to pay attention. Maybe someday they'll manage to pass some legislation that addresses this issue, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. So meanwhile, why not tell people about the tools already available?
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