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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.
Excellent post. All it's missing is a callback to Beware Trivial Inconviniences. This is just the same idea from the user-end, right?
I think this point generalizes quite a bit more than people appreciate. An example from elsewhere in the Culture War might be the proliferation of suppressors in the Gun Culture. Acquiring a suppressor requires an onerous and intimidating amount of paperwork and red tape, so for a long time most people just didn't bother. But then people in the gun culture got together and built themselves something analogous to a GUI on top of the bureaucratic command prompt, a system to guide people through the process and, perhaps more importantly, reassure them that the process actually could work for them. Suppressor ownership exploded.
I'm skeptical generally of rules-based systems because it seems clear to me that rules cannot constrain human will. On the other hand, if the rules work, why not use them?
How embarrassing for me to have forgotten that link, it's perfectly on point. I don't think I fully appreciate how much of a setback a trivial hurdle can be. My economics brain thinks "durr cost went up by only 2.6%" which obviously does not reflect in reality for how people are really affected. So it's naive for me to think this can be solved as a call to action to individual users, it's just not at all a realistic ask. This does mean that the pendulum can swing back if you have someone doing the grunt work and creating an accessible tool. This NYT article from 2020 talks about how this happened with DoorDash, but it also talks about a startup called FairShake that tries to automate the dispute resolution process and makes money by taking a cut.
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