PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon have suspended the accounts of high-profile members of the alt-right, causing a backlash and accusations of political bias
Blake Montgomery / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
The deplatforming of the alt-right had until now been a social-media story — most visibly when Twitter suspended Richard Spencer and other high-profile alt-right accounts in late 2016. This report marks the escalation to the money layer: PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon cutting off the same figures' ability to raise and receive funds.
That shift matters because payment rails are harder to replace than a Twitter handle, and the backlash and bias accusations the suspensions triggered preview the fight over who arbitrates acceptable speech when the chokepoint is financial infrastructure rather than a feed.
First-order effects
- High-profile alt-right members lose their primary crowdfunding and payment channels overnight, forcing them onto less established or harder-to-monitor alternatives for income and donations.
- PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon immediately absorb the political cost, facing public accusations of anti-conservative bias from users and politicians aligned with the suspended accounts.
Second-order effects
- Other processors and banks get pulled into the same decisions — a pattern the coverage confirms as Square, Chase, and PayPal later cut off the Proud Boys-affiliated store 1776.shop, and PayPal, Stripe, and Joyent dropped Gab after the Pittsburgh shooting.
- Right-wing networks respond by consolidating on alternative infrastructure, which is exactly how Epik became home to Proud Boys and Gab domains before PayPal terminated its account too.
Third-order effects
- Content moderation migrates upstream from social platforms to the financial and hosting layers beneath them, making payment processors de facto arbiters of who can monetize online speech.
- That structural role invites a lasting legitimacy fight — over due process, transparency, and accusations of political bias — that no single platform policy can settle, because each enforcement action like PayPal's later mass cancellation of Proud Boys and antifa accounts alike generates fresh claims of selective treatment.
The trend: Online speech enforcement is expanding from social media feeds down into the payment and hosting infrastructure that funds it, with each new provider forced to take a side.