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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.
You can go to or threaten arbitration against PayPay because
You are a lawyer and you don't have to pay a lawyer to have a half a chance at winning and
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.
I have two (anecdotal, sadly) examples - 1. Medicare disputes, and 2. Alcohol license administrative hearings.
(1) When I was in law school, I briefly worked an externship as the equivalent of a judicial clerk in the Department of Health and Human Services' Medicare Appeals Division. My primary job was to work up the administrative appeal case files for the Administrative Appeals Judges to look over and make a decision on. MAD got tens of thousands of appeals every year (despite being the third appellate layer of administrative bureaucracy concerning Medicare coverage decisions), but only had nine or ten AAJs at the time, so naturally we had to triage the cases. The ones without legal representation got priority, so every casefile I saw was an "unrepresented beneficiary."
Their appeals came in on everything from unevenly-scribbled letters, to perfumed stationary, to erratic, bullet-point-ridden emails. The exact same thing happened to them as one might expect - they got steamrolled. They didn't know the guidebooks that were used to make the determinations, weren't familiar with the procedural regulations, and even in a nominally non-adversarial process where everyone involved was bending over backwards to be charitable and understanding of these factors (or at least was making convincing mouth-noises to that effect), they lost, and lost, and lost. I finally checked out when I saw a case involving sticking an unrepped-bennie with tens of thousands of dollars of medical transportation costs because his doctors and durable power of attorney didn't know that a smaller local hospital had just started performing a complex heart procedure the guy needed (in fact they hadn't even mentioned it on their webpage as an offered service yet), and so referred him to a major city teaching hospital which was known to perform the procedure - while the bennie himself was completely unconscious and in such bad health that hospice care had been considered. Too demoralizing.
(2) In my current practice, I work a lot with state alcohol licenses. My state, like most, has a separate law enforcement agency that deals exclusively with alcohol licenses and alcohol-related crime, and within their sphere they are nearly omnipotent. I represent a lot of clients in administrative hearings before the Department where there's some accusation that my client has done something wrong, and so deserves to have their license suspended or revoked. I don't win much (as I said, nearly omnipotent), but the poor licensees I see try to handle the disciplinary process without an attorney? Again, steamrolled. And administrative proceedings, like arbitrations, are supposed to be stripped down, less-legalistic processes accessible to the layman. The problem is that the agency does keep a stack of lawyers around to represent themselves at these hearings (before their own judges, natch), and the laws and processes are written so broadly (in an attempt to be approachable and easy to understand for the laity, mind), that the agency can do whatever it wants. The successes I have are precisely because my legal training puts my clients on something resembling the same informational plane as the enforcement agency.
Now, I'm not a great attorney - Yassine is almost certainly better than me from pure experience if nothing else, and he probably is baseline smarter than me too - but I'm not a moron, and my experience tells me that no modern legal process, no matter how "informal" or "accessible" it is supposed to be, should be touched by a layperson without at least getting some advice or contextual information from an attorney..
Unfortunately one of those legal processes is "finding a lawyer". Which is why a lot of people when faced with a lawsuit will ignore it, end up with a default judgement, and dodge collection as long as they can rather than even attempt to fight it. The task is just too daunting and the chance of success (against someone who does know the system) next to nil anyway.
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