Sources: over the past week, Square, Chase, PayPal have pulled their services from 1776.shop, an online store affiliated with far-right organization Proud Boys
while they're a useful tool against white nationalists, they also are frequently employed to cut sex workers off from income. The key issue is governance: it's not clear what criteria processors are using. http://twitter.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : Terrible people, but should a highly centralized platform/industry — online payments in this case — be allowed to decide who's allowed to make a living? Every time we demand the platforms “do something” we want, we should at least consider what happens if they do it to us. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third wave of a pattern that began in August 2017, when PayPal, GoFundMe and Patreon suspended alt-right figures and Apple Pay and PayPal disabled white-supremacy storefronts, and continued with PayPal's November 2018 cancellation of Proud Boys accounts. What changed now is breadth: three separate processors — Square, Chase and PayPal — acted on the same merchant within one week, meaning 1776.shop has no mainstream card rail left rather than one fewer option.
The story matters because the criteria are invisible from the outside. The same infrastructure that cuts off the Proud Boys also cuts off sex workers, and as Stripe's ban on tarot-reading businesses showed, processors already decide what can be sold online at all — Dan Gillmor's governance objection is that no published standard governs either case.
First-order effects
- 1776.shop loses card processing from Square, Chase and PayPal simultaneously, cutting off the Proud Boys' merchandise revenue channel within days rather than forcing a migration between providers.
Second-order effects
- The merchant is pushed toward alternative settlement rails — the same dynamic that later saw right-wing sites cluster around Epik before PayPal terminated Epik's own account — concentrating deplatformed commerce on less-regulated intermediaries.
- Rival processors face a coordination problem: any one of them re-admitting the merchant absorbs reputational risk alone, which pushes the industry toward matching each other's bans by default.
Third-order effects
- If uncoordinated parallel decisions keep producing coordinated outcomes, private payment networks become the de facto licensing authority for online commerce — deciding who can earn a living without published criteria, appeals, or regulatory oversight.
- The gap between what processors enforce and what their policies state invites both legislative scrutiny of financial gatekeeping and growth in censorship-resistant payment alternatives pitched at anyone cut off.
The trend: Payment processors are consolidating into the web's default content-policy enforcement layer, with each high-profile ban normalizing the next and the absence of shared criteria becoming the central controversy.