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Comment by wallace_f | Hacker News Reader

>“To comply with government regulations, PayPal is required to review certain transactions.”

For mentioning the word Iran. Terrifying.

I guess the best to hope for is that the Institute for Justice or the ACLU pick this up and sue for their free speech rights. But even then, the only consequence would be taxpayers burdened to pay up.

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They were doing this long before last week.

2019: https://www.newsweek.com/venmo-flags-payments-persia-allows-...

2016: https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/venmo-reportedly-blocking-...

2014: http://valleywag.gawker.com/venmo-racial-profiling-account-f...

I am aware. Even going back in history, I find most are surprised to know even Abraham Lincoln really went after journalists and the press.

Anyways, I don't know why I was downvoted. Hopefully not because people disagree with that hope.

I don't see how you could make the case that PayPal donation messages are different than FB posts or tweets, in that the platform has every right to remove whatever content they want. I also doubt the financial industry regulations are caught up and can weigh in on this issue.

Free speech doesn’t apply to private entities.

These filters exist due to legal requirements (and paypal has gotten into legal trouble for not filtering Iran-related transactions well enough in the past), so it's not quite that simple

There’s no legal requirement to filter transactions with this message:

> “Thanks for all your excellent work and especially the Gray Zone’s coverage of the murder of Soleimani and war with Iran. You fellows are so insightful and brilliant.”

There’s zero indication that this might be an Iran-related transaction.

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