Every so often, a corporation appoints itself as Big Brother Censor of certain types of books. The newest player in this game is PayPal, which currently has a monopoly over Internet cash transactions.
If you recall, they also cut off donations last year to Wikileaks Julian Assange. In fact, there’s an organization called PayPalSucks.com that details why you shouldn’t use Pay Pal for any of your Internet transactions – and part of the problem is their credit card policy. But that’s another story.
According to The Independent: “Last week, without warning, PayPal wrote to every major self-publishing website, announcing that henceforth it will refuse to process payments for clients that sell books which contain certain types of what it regards as obscene content.”
So PayPal has essentially appointed itself as Grand Inquisitor about what is obscene. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has struggled for fifty years to do that. In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart tried to define hardcore porn this way: “I’ll know it when I see it.” Apparently, PayPal is using that same baseline.
According to this website about obscenity and the Supreme Court’s history in trying to define it, the edicts handed down in 1973 by Justice Burger in Miller v California, are still in effect today:
“(a) whether the ‘average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, one of the largest epublishing sites in the world, says PayPal’s decision has resulted in the withdrawal of about a thousand novels of the 100,000 he stocks. As he told The Independent, “Regardless of whether you or I want to read these books, this is perfectly legal fiction and people have a right to publish it. It surely isn’t for some financial services company to control what is written by an author.”
Take at look at the list of banned books maintained by the American Library Association
Here’s their list of top 10 books banned in 2010:
And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson;
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley;
Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Lush, by Natasha Friend
What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie
Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
Amazing, isn’t it? Here we are in 2012 and a book like Brave New World makes this list. Or The Hunger Games. Or Twilight.
So what’s next for PayPal? Banning cash transactions for movies they think are obscene? For art? Jewelry? In an official statement, PayPal issued a statement that “the decision does not represent an effort to impose a morality on the reading public.”
Really?
PayPal will no longer get any business from me.
OK. Here goes: If TPTB want to censor ANYTHING, they need to take a good long look at the social networ most used by young children, ie, FACEBOOK. I have an eleven year old granddaughter and the material on her facebook page is pornographic to the worst degree. These children are allowed to go on these social networks and put false years of age, pretending to be older. My middle granddafughter, 13 at the time, was contacted b y a FORTY-YEAR-OLD person who SAID she was a woman, turned out ot be a man, a predator. My granddaughters are all beautiful, and that isn’t prejudice. Censorship has its place, and it isn’t on PAY PAL. It’s on these social networks that are getting children attacked, stalked, beaten, raped, kidnapped, killed. There MUST be an answer somewhere! Yes, it’s definitely up to parents to monitor their children’s computer use. But….parents aren’t always available, and there need to be blocks in place to avoid these catastrophes. But censoring the things adults use and read,…..a thousand times NOOOOOOOOO.
I have has an ebay bus for about 12 years now and it just got worse and worse with all their “rules” and “regulations”…. I have over 4,000 feedbacks and I literally think i got maybe 5 negatives in all with all those transactions. And they were all some BS claim… As an ‘Out of Work’ actor and a ‘Stay at Home Father’ this is how I earned an income for all these years. With the tax law last year, thanks to the present administration! that means if you sell over 200 products or over a certain amount of money they want taxes on something that may have been taxed 2 times already (say someone bought it, taxed once… then you got it from a flea market etc… taxed again…. then you sell it on eBay… taxed 3 times)…. Well that isn’t the worst… the worst came this year when Paypal started to HOLD MY MONEY till someone got said product.
Ok say I sell something and shipping was $100.00, they were even making me (someone with over 4,000 transactions) fork out the money. Then someone had the upper hand to break it or just not want it after they got it and leave it my problem, and possibly the loss of my money. Also like 2 years ago they changed it where SELLERS, SELLERS could not leave negative feedback!
I am opening my own flea market business, and i would suggest everyone start selling and buying on the Flea Market type level and get off the Internet, back into the small mom and pop shops, before it’s too late.
I am personally done with eBay and Paypal. And this is just the CHERRY ON THE ICE-CREAM! I hope people wake up to things like this (that really matter IMO) before it’s too late!
It’s time we take back America and not worry about what’s happening in other countries IMO!
Quark – it sounds like a total nightmare. I read some of the comments under the paypal sucks site; they sound similar to what you experienced. Holding your money till someone gets their product is simply wrong. Imagine if the big guys had to do that – Amazon, Exxon, BP, etc
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I do have a Pay Pal account and only used it just yesterday,and although I won’t close it, because I use it when I’m dealing with people I don’t know.I will certainly be minimizing my transactions with these fascists.
And I think I should get myself a copy of “1984” before that hits their
banned book list.-)
“PayPal Sparks Furor Over Limits on ‘Obscene’ E-Books,” by Alistair Barr, San Francisco (Reuters), 7 March 2012.
Thanks for the link!
I can’t believe that Ehrenreich’s book is “banned” by the American Library Association……….that’s pretty clear rightwing bias. The book has not one sexual episode, but plenty to say about inequity and poverty. Here’s one of the descriptions of the book: “Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour?”
Paypal has made a bad move. And this repression going on is really scary…………
I don’t think the bans came from the ALA. My understanding is they maintain lists for each year of banned books. But take any of the book on that list- why would they be banned by any organization?
Okay. Here’s the link. While I am sorry it is a huge wav file, that is because I am providing the entire speech and the questions and answers afterwards. So this is the full context.
That said, to make things easier, my count says the relevant material, as quoted accurately in the WND piece, begins at 45:13 and ends minutes later. If you can figure out what the “[unintelligable]” part is, please let me know and I will give you a H/T for that.
Transcript:
45:13 The only other challenges that I’m aware of are are these two, and I talked to the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom about it. I said oh my god I’m listed on [unintelligible], and they said because this was such a big deal, and because the book was actually removed, whereas as many of these titles that get challenged, some get challenged but not removed, that that is how it made it onto the list for this year, so it’s the Burlington County cases that we’re aware of right now. 45:41
OK, thanks!
You may have a point. Just know that the ALA’s 2010 list of “banned books” was a faked list used to promote the ALA’s political agenda at the expense of the LGBT community, and I recorded one of the listed authors revealing essentially that.
Thanks for the link. World Net Daily is an extreme right wing publication, so I don’t know how much I would believe of anything they say.
I understand. Know, however, that what they reported was based on the recording I made of the author admitting the ALA faked its list, at least in 2010. And she made that comment in response to a gift question I asked about what it felt like to be 9th on the annual ALA list. WND did not take my word for it. It wanted to hear that recording, I provided it, and based on that recording made the report it did. You can listen to the recording as well. Let me know if you would like me to link it here.
I would definitely like to hear it. Can you send the link? Thanks!
This is so disturbing.
I don’t use PayPal but just the thought that someone can arbitrarily do this!
What has happened to free speech? Our forefathers would be so upset at how we have perverted what they saw for this country.
Thank goodness for free speech here and sane people!!!!
The Internet is dangerous to governments and the like, so I’m sure censorship will gradually creep in bit by bit. The problem is that ‘we’ deal with very big companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal and eventually these will be manipulated, if they aren’t already being so.
In December there was the case where Facebook Banned the Irish Town name of Effin for Being ‘Offensive’ see here. Amusing at first but it shows the level of censorship already going on.
Thanks for the link, Mike.
I really hate Paypal but I can’t find another company that does the same thing. I am almost at my $5,000 spending limit and either have to give them my account information or use their credit card – which I refuse to do. The only problem is that some companies – especially books and DVDs from small independent writers ONLY use Paypal. As for censorship – I am shocked that those titles are banned from libraries. If you have any doubt about the very subtle take over of our minds and country, just put all of the threads together and take a look at the tapestry – from education, healthcare, banking, an erosion of our civil rights, a militaristic police force, the list goes on.
For self-published authors who use smashwords, for instance, paypal is the only choice. Through barnes and noble, you can have them do direct deposit for whatever they owe you on sales.
I just saw this as a quote in one of my groups.
When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.
John Adams
No one said it better until Orwell.
Ray
Great quote!
What the hell is happening to this country? “Brave New World” banned! Insane! Creepy.
I think that even harry potter was banned at one point.
I never used PayPal in the first place, but now I’ve got a bonafide reason not to. This is just unbelievable. But then again, much of what is happening in my country today is beyond my understanding. I know I can come over here for a bit of reasonable thinking.
oops – my human spell-check wasn’t quite awake above and “impost” should be “impose” although the former might actually be just as appropriate in the context – and then, still again, had to undergo that rigid requirement to prove my own humanity – and both times, failed to do so the first go round – i knew nica and i were spirit sisters!!
Impose certainly fits!
Would that be impost as a tax, duty or handicap or would it be Pay Pal is dumb as a post? I belong to several reader/writer groups and on every one I have found authors protesting Pay Pal.
I have a banner I found that says, “Burn censors not books.”
Ray
I want a t-shirt that says that, Ray!
interesting their statement that the new policy doesn’t represent an effort to impost morality on the reading public – wonder what they call it – well, actually i don’t wonder – it is what it is – and i will be terminating my own account and will pass the word to all i know – thanks so much for the info – i’d no idea –
[ps – i had to check a little box above just now to prove that i am “human” so this comment may not make it through the rugged qualification stage…just sayin’…]