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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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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:

I called, emailed, and waited on hold, but never got a straight answer from PayPal’s customer service drones. They endlessly repeated that I had violated PayPal’s acceptable use policy as if it were some mantra. If I asked for any detail whatsoever, their response had the tone of a schoolteacher frustrated at having to explain repeatedly to the same kid that crayons should not be shoved up one’s nose. I knew what I did to get my account deleted, apparently. If I wanted to hear it from them, I’d need a court order.

I took inventory of my options.

Here is what I did not have: money in the account, any serious reliance on it, or any wisp of nostalgia for the 14 years we shared.

Here is what I did have: too much free time and a whole heap of pettiness to propel things forward.

So I made a crazy decision. I read PayPal’s User Agreement.

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.

Colin has brought up the issue publicly multiple times since then (writing about it in Quillette and the New York Post for example), but he never responded to my email until I reached out to him for comment on this piece. He did share correspondence with me where prominent free speech attorneys told him, in an apparent contradiction to my claims, that he had no viable legal recourse to getting his account reinstated. I had transmogrified into a gadfly in his mentions, heavily implying Colin was intentionally choosing not to solve the problem, but I was off-base with my insinuation. Colin was bombarded with countless random people (besides just me) offering their one weird trick to solve the problem, and he had no reason to believe any of them knew something that experienced advocates did not. Colin has now initiated dispute resolution with PayPal using the steps I gave him, and I’m intensely curious to see how it will play out.

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.

You can go to or threaten arbitration against PayPay because

  1. You are a lawyer and you don't have to pay a lawyer to have a half a chance at winning and

  2. Paypal is a financial company and can't be quite as brazen as companies which don't touch the users money

Both your explanations are reasonable. Still, it wouldn't hurt if people tried to put up a fight more often with more companies. That would give us useful information.

I conceded that my legal background definitely gave me a strong edge here, but I think that was primarily in reducing the intimidation factor. Arbitration is intended to be a departure from the procedure labyrinth and inscrutable legalese that you find in traditional courtrooms. I would love to see how someone who isn't a legal professional wrangles with this process but I could not find any examples in my search.

Arbitration is intended to be a departure from the procedure labyrinth and inscrutable legalese that you find in traditional courtrooms. I would love to see how someone who isn't a legal professional wrangles with this process but I could not find any examples in my search.

My mom was involved in an landlord/renter arbitration proceeding. Not sure if you only care about paypal arbitration. The outcome was very frustrating, maybe because as someone without much experience with the legal system what we thought was a clear win turned out to be a total loss.

She had a lease with an apartment. As part of the enticement to get her to move in they offered the garage attached to the apartment as a free part of the lease. Everything is fine. Lease renewal comes up. Instead of sending her a lease with the attached garage as a paid addition, they resend her the original lease that had the garage as a free add on. She thinks 'awesome' proceeds to sign the lease and not pay for the garage. If they had asked her to pay for the garage up front, she would have chosen to just not have the garage.

Anyways another year is up and they haven't received payment for the garage. They ask her to pay, she refuses cuz it wasn't in the lease. It goes to arbitration. My mom loses she is ordered to pay.

In my mind the landlord fucked up and sent the wrong contract. The judge says 'hey they sent the wrong contract, but you (to my mom) probably understood which contract they meant to send, so pay the correct contract'. Which I guess is fair. But I never got the sense that it would happen in reverse. Like if the landlord sent the 'pay for the garage' contract the first year instead of the 'garage is free' and then realized their mistakes, they could have taken my mom to court and still won. And the judge would have said something like 'hey you (to my mom) should really be careful about reading contracts, you signed it and you agreed to pay even if it wasn't made clear to you in the initial verbal agreement'. The reason I got this sense, is that just about every case before my mom's was also decided in favor of the landlord.

I don't get the sense that arbitration is 100% going to be in favor of the company. But I do get the sense that it is going to be about 90% in favor of the company. And going through a bunch of effort for that slim 10% chance of victory doesn't seem worth it.

This situation is exactly what the "Statute of Frauds" is for. For real estate contracts, usually including leases, what's on paper is supposed to be what counts. One problem with doing it otherwise and trying to read the minds of the parties is it's very easy for the judge to apply the "you should have known" rule or the "this is what's on paper" rule depending on which party it favors.

But I do get the sense that it is going to be about 90% in favor of the company.

I think @ymeskhout's original article said 94-99% in favor of the company.

I really don't get the outcome of her case, it frustrated me that they could just throw out the contract as written in favor of the person that wrote the contract. At that point why even bother having my mom sign a contract? They treated it more like a "terms of use" agreement. Like unless you move out you agree to whatever the company wants within some "reasonable" restrictions of what the company can ask for.

Have you not been to court? The laws on paper really don't matter until you're at a fairly high level (and have a lawyer). At the low levels, everyone in the system knows what's supposed to be and will brook no argument. The defendant is always guilty; the corporation is always right.

I've luckily not been in court very much, but that incident has certainly brought me that level of cynicism about things.

The annoying thing about this incident is that the cost of hiring a lawyer was probably going to be most of the cost of paying for the garage.

You're right about the intent behind "statute of frauds" although minor quibble is that it only applies to rental agreements longer than a year. But even where SoF does not apply by default, any contract can include something similar through an "integration clause" that says nothing outside the four corners of this written agreement counts (e.g. oral modification, or some other verbal promise).

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