PayPal says it has banned all Infowars-related sites for promoting hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions
PayPal will no longer do business with Infowars, according to a post on the conspiracy theory site this morning.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Infowars ban extends a pattern PayPal had already established: in August 2017 it and Apple Pay disabled support for sites selling items glorifying white supremacy (a joint crackdown on white-supremacy commerce), making payments infrastructure the choke point of choice for policing extremist content. Two months after this ban, PayPal widened the net to political organizations themselves, cancelling accounts of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, Tommy Robinson, and anti-fascist groups alike (cancellations that hit both right-wing and antifa accounts).
What makes the sequence analytically important is where it led: by 2020 PayPal terminated the account of web host Epik, which housed domains for the Proud Boys and Gab (the Epik termination), showing the enforcement moving up the stack from individual merchants to the infrastructure serving them.
First-order effects
- Infowars loses its ability to accept PayPal payments across all related sites, forcing Alex Jones' operation to route donations and merchandise sales through alternative processors or direct methods.
Second-order effects
- Banned organizations consolidate onto providers willing to serve them — the same dynamic that later made Epik the host of record for Proud Boys and Gab domains before PayPal cut Epik off too, pushing the deplatforming fight from merchants to infrastructure providers.
Third-order effects
- Payment networks are becoming de facto content regulators with no appeals process or consistent standard — a role PayPal itself struggled to formalize, as its 2022 proposal to fine users $2,500 for misinformation was withdrawn within a day after criticism over how such speech rules would be enforced.
The trend: Financial platforms are assuming editorial gatekeeping power over who can transact online, with each ban expanding enforcement from individual sites to hosts and networks.