🏛️ Financial deplatforming becomes the next big political fight

“If you try to deny Americans their right to access the new economy, we see no reason for your company to get any bigger. We're going to oppose every acquisition you ever do. ... I'm predicting right now that financial deplatforming is going to be the big hot potato, political hot potato over the next year. This is the next wave of censorship.”

“I wrote a piece called the No Buy List where I basically you had companies like PayPal and some of these other financial firms were starting to deny service to customers, to users based on their political affiliations. ... if this equity auditors tells you, well, look, I don't think it's equitable to allow these conservative groups to, you know, be a user of your product. Well, what's the company going to do? They're going to have to listen to that. ... And that is a plausible scenario, given that it's already occurred.”

“And you know, what was PayPal doing? I wrote a story for Barry Weiss, for her substack about how PayPal was taking the lead in financial deplatforming. They were working with the ADL and the SPLC to kick to identify groups to kick off their platform. So that's what management was spending their cycles on figuring out how not to grow, how to kick people off their platform and trying to figure out how to get more people on it. ... You can waste your management cycles on stuff like that. Now their stock is down 25%.”

“wrote a piece for Barry Weiss' substack talking about how financial de-platforming would be the next wave of online censorship ... What I could not have predicted is that it would occur in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north and that the reprisals would be directed by the government itself, not just a consortium of private actors.”

“The idea that you can deep platform one or the other or fire them from their job or prevent them from having access to the money that they've earned or preventing other people from donating money, that's really, it's a really low bar. ... And I think when you normalize this kind of behavior, it's a very slippery slope.”

“And they're not just doing it on speech. They're also taking away your right to engage in payments, in transactions, to earn a living. And unless we stop this now, it'll keep going.”

“we've seen sort of random decision making that seems arbitrary by a lot of these technology companies, and the payments companies. Friedberg was mentioning Visa and MasterCard earlier in the group chat.”