PayPal Backtracks On New Policy | 10.11.22

The online payment system PayPal is facing a barrage of criticism after the company announced

users could be fined thousands of dollars for spreading misinformation.

We should make that unthinkable and we're going to make that illegal once we take back Congress

in the White House certainly. Now PayPal is apologizing for the confusion. We have the details

on the back and forth. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor in Chief John Bickley.

It's Tuesday, October 11th, and this is Morning Wire.

Carrey Lake is a rising star on the right, but her bold rhetoric is making her a lightning

rod on the national stage. We unpack her background and her platform for Arizona.

This is a grassroots movement in Arizona unlike anything anyone has ever seen before in this

state. And there is no stopping us.

Rising crime combined with a shrinking police force is forcing Los Angeles to get creative

when it comes to officer recruitment. We'll tell you about the sizable housing bonuses

the city is offering. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to

now. In an economy as volatile as this one, it's important to have control when you're making a

big purchase, like a new car. That's where Morning Wire's new partners over at Carzing come into

play. Carzing is an online shopping website with millions of listed vehicles. By partnering

with credit agencies, lenders and dealerships, Carzing provides you with everything you need

before stepping foot into a dealership. Their innovative technology and financial tools let you

instantly prequalify online without affecting your credit score. Once you find your dream car at your

ideal budget, all you have to do is bring your save deal voucher with you to the dealership to finalize

your next ride. All you got to do is visit Carzing.com slash wire today to skip the guest work

and find the best deals near you. That's Carzing.com slash wire. Paypal, which owns Venmo,

unveiled a new policy to find users $2,500 for spreading misinformation, causing a storm of backlash

this weekend and forcing the company to quickly pull the policy and issue a statement. Here

to tell us more about the policy and how PayPal is explaining it is daily wire culture reporter

Megan Bassham. So, Megan, a payment processing company, finding its customers for speech,

it disapproves of is pretty shocking on its face. Is that really what the new policy entailed?

Hey, John. Well, to put it bluntly, yes, the new terms banned, sending, posting or publishing.

Any of what PayPal is calling messages, content, or materials that promote misinformation.

Now, it didn't define what specifically constitutes misinformation, but if PayPal felt that a user

had violated the policy, it could find them at $2,500. And that was set to take effect on November 3rd.

Now, their user policy already had some speech prohibitions for bidding hate, intolerance,

and discrimination, but this new updated policy expanded that to specifically address speech

directed at what they're calling protected groups. And that would include gender identity

and sexual orientation. So, in that case, it would be unclear how, say, Christian users who might

express religious convictions would be treated if PayPal felt they were in violation of that policy.

So, what's the reaction, Ben, to this obviously controversial policy?

Well, not too surprising. It's been pretty overwhelmingly negative. A lot of conservatives,

as you might expect have criticized the company, Tennessee's Republican Senator,

Marsha Blackburn, for instance, commented quoting here,

PayPal is censoring speech. If you don't listen, they will steal your money.

We cannot allow this to happen. But a lot of people who aren't associated with the right

also spoke out against it. One of PayPal's founders, David Marcus,

no relation to our daily wire contributor. Well, he tweeted Saturday,

it's hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to PayPal's new

AUP goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money

if you say something they disagree with. An Elon Musk reply that he agreed with that, by the way.

And Marcus wasn't the only one connected to PayPal out slamming the company,

like Masters, who is a Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona,

has been famously backed by PayPal founder, Peter Teele. And here's what he told Fox News on Sunday.

We need to disband their rights. We need to ban companies at that level. At that size,

especially if they're touching banking or if they're in social media, we're going to ban these

companies from discriminating against users because of the political content of their speech.

That's how we treat the phone company, right? So, the issue of big business becoming politicized

was already a major issue energizing Republicans going into the midterm elections. This PayPal

story is likely to only increase that voter enthusiasm. But PayPal's issue to statement

it says this is a result of an error. Is this a reversal? Well, they are calling it a reversal.

They're saying that it was a misunderstanding and they are not finding people for misinformation.

The company put out a statement saying that the notice that included information about that

fine went out by mistake and it said it's working to correct the policy pages and apologize

for any confusion. But so far, it hasn't offered explanation for how or why this $2,500 fine

was ever proposed in the first place or how it got inserted into the acceptable use policy.

And they haven't said if they're only ditching the misinformation fine or if that new

discriminatory speech standard is also going to be withdrawn. All right, so some major questions

still to be answered. What has the impact of all this attention been on PayPal? Well,

as you might imagine, it hasn't been good. People all over social media were posting images

showing that they'd close their accounts and PayPal's stock price immediately dropped more

than 5% Monday morning, which was an underperformance compared to the rest of the tech market.

It does seem like a startling new development in the financial sector. Have we seen any similar

penalizing policies like this? I don't think we've seen anything this broad in the U.S., but I

wouldn't call it unprecedented. To give you one example, go find me notoriously froze millions of

dollars and donations from the Freedom Convoy trekkers in Canada. And in fact, the Canadian

government even froze some of the trekkers bank accounts. So there is that. Well, I think a lot of us

are going to be taking a little closer look at the terms of service before we click that agree box.

Thanks for the story, Megan. Anytime. That was Daily Wire Cultural Reporter, Megan Basha.

Carrie Lake is vying to be the next governor of Arizona, but she's not without controversy.

The longtime TV news anchor is well known for her charisma in hardline stance on illegal immigration,

but she's also stirred up debate with her rhetoric around voter fraud.

Here to give us the background on this Arizona fire brand is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce.

So Tim, I'm seeing articles about Carrie Lake everywhere. Just yesterday, the Atlantic

referred to her as Trumpism's new leading lady. Tell us about her background.

Hey, Georgia. Carrie Lake grew up in rural Iowa, the youngest of mine children.

She studied journalism at the University of Iowa before moving on to work at new stations in

Iowa and New York before settling in Arizona. She joined the team at Fox 10 as a weekend anchor

and stayed there for 22 years. She left the station in early 2021 announcing a retirement in a video

posted to the media platform rumble in March that year. The video now has close to 2 million views.

Here's a snippet of what that sounded like.

Sadly, journalism has changed a lot since I first stepped into a newsroom.

And I'll be honest, I don't like the direction it's going.

The media needs more balance in coverage and a wider range of viewpoints represented in

every newsroom at every level and in each position.

Now, what is her political background?

Lake does have a mixed political past. She was reportedly a member of the GOP up until 2006,

at which time she registered as an independent. Two years after that, she registered as a

Democrat and supported then Senator Barack Obama in his first presidential run.

But according to her colleagues, Lake became more engaged with conservative politics around 2015

when former president Trump first announced his run for office. She was an early Trump supporter

and by most accounts of genuine one, his slogan about fake news resonated with her experiences

a news anchor. She also liked that he was a political outsider who rejected political correctness.

So voters will have to decide whether they buy her authenticity on that.

Right. So she resigned from local news in March of 2021. How did she transition into politics?

Yeah. Three months after dropping a retirement video, she announced to run for governor.

Due to her name recognition, she had a pretty substantial head start on the campaign trail.

Her main platform from the start was a hardline stance on immigration and skepticism about

the fairness of the 2020 election in Arizona. She branded herself early on as the mag

early backing pretty quickly. Now, you hinted at this before, but what are her key issues?

Immigration and election integrity are two big issues. Lake's immigration plan is one of the

most aggressive in the country. She wants to declare an invasion and use the national guard to

arrest and deport migrants caught crossing the southern border illegally. I spoke with Lake recently

about her immigration plan. Here's what she had to say. I don't want to send illegal immigrants

and illegal aliens to monsters they knew that Chicago. It's found to watch, you know,

them complain about 50 illegal aliens. We're dealing with hundreds of thousands. It's not millions.

We want to stop them at the border, which is my right to do as a governor.

Now, the elephant in the room and something that a lot of these publications have been

seizing on is Carrie Lake openly questioned the 2020 election in Arizona.

Yeah, here she is in January at a rally with former president Trump. That election was

rotten to the core. We all know it, right? You know that, right? The media knows it and the

left knows it and they're trying to make us just accepted and we will not accept that.

You don't steal our vote. When I am governor, we will drag that back out into the sunlight

and we will close every single loop hope that allows them to cheat. We're not going to let them

cheat anymore. So, she really goes all in on her positions. Right, she's confident, which is

part of her appeal to voters. Most recently, she made some headlines for trying to force her

opponent Katie Hobbs to debate. Katie, I'm speaking directly to you. You claim to care about the

people of Arizona. Prove it. Debate me. You name the time and you name the place. I will allow you

to choose the moderator. Hell, I'll even let you write the questions. Ask me anything. Hobbs

is so far refused. Here's her explaining why. I have no desire to be a part of the spectacle

that she's looking to create because that doesn't do any service to the voters of Arizona to

hear from us where we sound on the issues and how we would govern. Well, Carrie Lake has been

running a wild west style campaign right now. The race looks like it's neck and neck. We're just

going to have to wait and see what Arizona voters think. Tim, thanks for reporting. Thanks for

having me. That was daily wire reporter, Tim Pierce. Los Angeles is battling both a crime wave

in a police shortage, but the city is struggling to recruit new cops due to the high cost of

living. Local Angelinos are now pooling their own money to offer new cops thousands of dollars

in rent subsidies to work in their city. Daily wire investigative reporter Mariah Lorty is here

with the details for us. So Mariah, tell us about this rent subsidy program. Hi, Georgia. So this

program is called Housing for Hires. New LAPD hires can get huge rent subsidies of up to $24,000

over two years for housing in Los Angeles. And this money is not coming out of the LAPD budget.

It's coming from private donations to the LAPD foundation. New LAPD officers usually get a starting

salary of about $80,000. So a $24,000 rent subsidy is the significant boost. That should help

with the high cost of living in LA. According to one analysis, the Los Angeles metropolitan area

now has a median rent of over $2,200 up from less than $950 in 2019. That's a jump of nearly

16%. Now, how significant is the police shortage in LA right now? Well, in August, police chief

Michael Morris said the force was down about 176 officers. The total police force in LA is over 9,000.

More concerning, though, the chief said the number of applications coming in has gotten smaller.

In real terms, this is resulted in slower response times across the city. Meanwhile,

violent crime is up significantly. As of the end of July, homicides in LA County had risen 30

percent since 2020 to more than 200 homicides so far this year. Shooting victims are up 43

percent since 2020 to nearly 800 victims. As we've reported before, shoplifting has also become a

huge issue. Police say a big driver of the crime spike is LA District Attorney George Gaskoan's

policies which tend to favor being lenient on criminals including violent repeat offenders.

Well, it's not just LA. I understand California is now competing with other states for police officers.

Right, even within the state, there's fierce competition for officers. For example,

Redding, California, which is north of San Francisco is offering $40,000 signing bonuses for new

officers. So that gives you an idea of how desperate they are. But other states are vying for officers

as well. Ethica, New York is offering $20,000 signing bonuses. Seattle is offering $30,000 for

experienced officers. So the big question now is whether these generous perks are going to be enough

to offset the frustrations and the dangers of working as a cop in LA. Right, we'll continue to

follow this. Marie, thanks so much for reporting. Thanks, Georgia. That was daily wire investigative

reporter, Marie de Lorty. Another story we're tracking this week. North Korean officials say recent

missile launches were in fact the simulated use of tactical battlefield nuclear weapons,

specifically designed to hit potential South Korean and U.S. targets. North Korean leader Kim Jong

Eun, signaled Monday that he would continue with the provocative missile tests. Thanks for listening

to Morningwire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation.

If you love our show and you stand with our mission, please consider subscribing,

leading us to five star rating. And most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend.

Well, thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more of the news you need to know.