PayPal says it will cancel accounts of Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, Tommy Robinson and a number of anti-fascist groups like Atlanta Antifa and Antifa Sacramento
Colin Lecher / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is PayPal extending a deplatforming campaign that began with the 2017 suspensions of high-profile alt-right accounts across PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon, and continued through its ban of all Infowars-related sites two months ago. What is new here is the symmetry: alongside the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, and Tommy Robinson, the cancellations hit anti-fascist groups like Atlanta Antifa and Antifa Sacramento, framing this as an ideological-neutrality policy rather than a one-sided purge.
The move also lands ten days after Facebook banned the Proud Boys and Gavin McInnes following the October New York attack on protesters, meaning the group is losing its social platform and its payment rail within the same month — a coordinated squeeze by separate companies acting on the same events.
First-order effects
- The named organizations and individuals lose their ability to accept donations and process payments through PayPal immediately, cutting off a primary fundraising channel for both far-right and antifa groups.
- PayPal takes on direct political-bias accusations from whichever side feels targeted, a backlash it already weathered after the 2017 alt-right suspensions.
Second-order effects
- Other payment and banking providers face pressure to match the enforcement — a pattern already visible when Square, Chase, and PayPal pulled services from the Proud Boys-affiliated store 1776.shop — making any single processor's decision a de facto industry standard.
- Deplatformed groups are pushed toward harder-to-police alternatives like cryptocurrency and sympathetic infrastructure, which is exactly the dynamic behind PayPal's later termination of web host Epik over its digital currency service.
Third-order effects
- Financial infrastructure is consolidating into the de facto moderation layer of the internet: when platforms, hosts, and processors act in sequence, access to payment rails becomes the binding constraint on what movements can operate — enforced against extremists of every ideology, not just one side.
- If the multi-company cascade becomes routine, the practical question shifts from whether a group violates one company's terms to whether any mainstream provider will serve it at all, raising due-process questions regulators have yet to address.
The trend: Payment processors are becoming the internet's most consequential gatekeepers, with PayPal repeatedly setting the template that banks, crowdfunding sites, and rivals then follow against extremist groups across the political spectrum.