PayPal should be free to do whatever it wants with its business. That includes blocking access to customers for whatever rhyme or reason it deems relevant. Partnering with the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify who to block or ban, however, is not be such a great idea.
Care of Breitbart, quoting PayPal CEO Dan Schulman in the Wall Stree Journal,
“Businesses need to be a force for good in those values and issues that they believe in. It shouldn’t come from backlash or people taking heat on it, because then it’s in response, as opposed to the definition of who you are and then how you react to the context that you find yourself in,” the PayPal CEO expressed, adding that the Charlottesville rally in 2017 was a “defining moment” for PayPal to start blacklisting conservatives.
Schulman claimed it “was a defining moment for us as a company,” that was “difficult,” because, “the line between free speech and hate, nobody teaches it to you in college. Nobody’s defined it in the law.”
Businesses should be allowed to engage in custom with individuals who share their values but it sounds to me like Schulman is speaking about proactively banning people or organizations for speech that hasn’t happened yet. Denying them a service for speech they expect based on a predetermined bias.
Isn’t that a textbook definition of discrimination?
Be Careful About Who Draws Your Lines
As for hate speech ask the US Supreme Court. There’s no such thing.
[A]s Professor Eugene Volokh explains conclusively, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Americans are free to impose social consequences on ugly speech, but the government is not free to impose official sanctions upon it. In other words, even if the phrase “hate speech” had a recognized legal definition, it would still not carry legal consequences.
There is hateful or unkind speech. There is Speech to which we’d rather not listen — vulgar speech. But efforts to draw lines around our feelings as a way to legally silence expression will continue to crash and burn against the wall of the first amendment. Which is, in my mind, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman’s problem.
He’s engaging in the subjective parsing of words and ideas on a global platform. As noted above, he’s got no obligation to do business with anyone, but neither do they have any obligation to do business with him. The point here being, the purveyors of hate speech rhetoric, and groups like the SPLC, are on a mission to do away with the individual choice to agree to disagree. Their program includes a willingness to legislate the language (and by extension ideas and thinking) to fit into a straightjacket sewn from the cloth of their worldview and no other.
And PayPal has admitted to being on board with that strategy.