This Should Be Illegal, But It Isn’t.

Many have experienced this.

C.W.Morton

Nov 05, 2024

Source : Made by the Author with Straico.AI. Prompt : Why Did You Ban Me, Algorithm?

It all started sometime around the year 1998, when a certain company we all know and love was born.

Our #1 Pal!

Though PayPal was small and mostly just a convenient payment system for Ebay, it grew into a major payment solution for everyone in very short time.

I had read horror stories about people having their accounts frozen with all of their working capital inside, people who more or less lost their businesses as a result or experienced abnormal hardship, and I had always thought to myself — surely these people were guilty of something that warranted that kind of response by PayPal.

Then there was a time when I thought maybe it was a problem of scale — that when a company gets too large, it’s support and communication are just strained and that’s that.

Well…..it’s not so simple.

Just google “Paypal froze my account”, and there are endless pages of results.

It’s all easy to ignore until it happens to you.

It seems like there is a trend that many large companies are starting to follow, and it’s not great for any of us.

This trend seems to aspire to create a sort of invisible technocratic government run by algorithms where no human can be said to be directly responsible for any action, so no accountability need exist, yet the net effects seem to be dealing selective harm to their customers with absolutely no re-course.

We are now 25 years into this experiment, and it hasn’t gotten any better.

What is worse, almost all of the companies that behave in this manner directly correlate to generating income somehow, and thus it creates a convenient way for unchecked interests to cut literally anyone off, on a whim.

No new laws needed, just …. “well, this is company policy”, + every company curiously instituting similar policies. Combine that with a world where management of resources is increasingly centralized (and that is the expressed stated desire of think tankers in the WEF, etc), and more and more people end up content creators for a living.

Ever lost your PayPal account without knowing exactly why?

I have.

It’s been 6 years since I lost both of my PayPal accounts on the same day in 2019. I even had a lawyer send them a letter, absolutely no response. I would likely have to sue them to get a response. Fortunately for me, l had just transferred my entire balance to my bank right before the froze them, so I had about $6 in there when they shut me out. Not worth fighting over.

At the time, I was running “Russian Asset” brand POD clothing store, which was a political middle finger to the people calling Tulsi Gabbard and others, “Russian Assets”.

If I had to guess, someone (or some keyword detector in the algorithm) didn’t like that.

That was the only thing going on in my life that was somehow different at the time the accounts were closed.

I opened that clothing shop, 3 months into it, I lost my social profiles for that shop, on the same day I lost my PayPal accounts.

Coincidence?

Probably not.

But — I truly have no idea, and that is the most frustrating thing about it.

As a result, I had to set up my own private merchant account, and though these can be difficult in their own way, they are regulated, and they cannot just cut me off without some kind of notice or communication, and very often they don’t practice anything like that unless it’s a law enforcement matter or they suspect fraud.

Which is totally reasonable. That makes me feel safer!

No other payment system practices cutting you off without a good reason, and without communication.

PayPal has written that into their terms, and boy are they serious about it!

I know that I will likely never be cut off by my merchant account unless I am involved in a crime or get insane amounts of chargebacks or use of fraudulent cards, which makes my future more predictable, at least for my business.

Even a bank account has to notify us, and communicate to us regarding why they made a decision that terminates an account.

PayPal stands like a shiny black pillar of total unaccountability and zero concern for those they effect.

Ever been demonetized on a platform without any kind of idea what happened?

Literally thousands of YouTubers have.

In almost all cases, it’s not just the sudden action that is surprising or outrageous. It is the total lack of communication from the entities imposing such measures. And it’s the fact that all of these companies enable their users to make livable incomes or more, and have the ability to kill it on a whim, and they don’t feel obligated even in the slightest to communicate about it.

Think about that for a second.

Until the year 2000 came around, most people in America could not conceive of a business which functioned in such a way.

Even if a company was difficult to deal with, they usually stated exactly why they dropped a customer, or a client, and especially where income was involved there was an expectation of some kind of communication.

And in many cases, where income was concerned, if not labor laws, some kind of contract enforcing terms that didn’t allow the individual consumer to be railroaded existed, and were normal and expected.

PayPal and YouTube (and others with policies similar) have flipped that completely around.

Their terms are nebulous, amorphous, and more or less set the stage for “whatever we say, and we don’t have to communicate anything”, it’s all there in black and white.

While I am building a YouTube channel that likely won’t have much issue since I teach software, I am steel leery of them, and don’t want to rely too much on YouTube for income.

When I wrote that story about Bullet Proof Income — I meant it.

Bulletproof Online Income?

C.W. Morton

September 6, 2024

When I first embarked to create a more passive online income, I had to wade through all of the same thick weeds and shiny objects that everyone else does.

Read full story

So far, the only income I have which I feel cannot be disrupted on a whim …. is decentralized crypto trading.

I’ve experienced lay-offs at the height of my tech career, I’ve lost PayPal accounts, and though I have not been demonetized on YouTube (yet), I have created new faceless automated test channels that seemed to have been dropped completely after using the wrong words.

It’s easy to blame yourself — and tell yourself your videos suck, when the reality may actually be that a keyword or something tripped the algorithm, and now your videos that were getting at thousands of views, are now almost never being seen.

The problem I have is not that a company can execise its own prerogative to ban a problematic account. It’s that there is no transparency, and no communication.

That sets the stage where everyone is walking on pins and needles to avoid tripping the censors, because their income may depend on it.

As a result, I love making content, but I won’t try to push it to the point where my livelihood depends on the income from it.

I simply have too much to say, and have no intention of walking on eggshells my entire life.

So far crypto platforms aren’t concerned with what my opinions are, and the decentralized world, there is no functional way to demonetize me even if I insulted their mother to their face.

I absolutely love that.