PayPal once tried to fine users $2,500 for "promoting misinformation." That was the proposed policy — twenty-five hundred dollars docked from your account for saying things PayPal's content team didn't like.
That same company is now asking the FDIC to approve its application for a bank charter.
The application, filed through PayPal Bank as a proposed Utah-chartered industrial loan company, has been working its way through regulators since March. PayPal sent its initial letter to the FDIC on March 16. The FDIC formally accepted the application on June 9. And as Just The News reported on November 6, PayPal has been busy revising its public story about what happened over the past decade-plus of politically motivated account shutdowns.
The record is not ambiguous. Roughly 20 documented incidents of politically motivated account actions have been identified. Moms for Liberty — debanked. Consortium News — debanked. Gab, the alternative social media platform — debanked. U.K. Free Speech Union founder Toby Young — debanked. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist whose crime was being gender-critical — debanked. Joy in Liberty, a Christian organization — debanked.
PayPal's new line is that its updated policy, effective November 4, "make[s] clear what has always been the case" — that the company reviews accounts based on activity, not religion or politics. Mara McNeill, president of PayPal Bank, wrote in a September 15 letter to the FDIC that the revised policy provides "added protection against unfairly debanking customers based on their religious and political viewpoints."
Read that carefully. "Added protection" against something that, according to PayPal, was never happening in the first place. The company is simultaneously claiming it never debanked anyone for political reasons and implementing new rules to make sure it doesn't debank anyone for political reasons.
The Alliance Defending Freedom isn't buying it. ADF senior counsel Jeremy Tedesco filed an opposition to the charter application in July, arguing that PayPal's more-than-a-decade track record of shutting down accounts over viewpoint differences should disqualify it from holding a banking license. The ADF filing laid out the pattern: religious organizations, conservative voices, and political dissidents cut off from their own money with no meaningful appeal process.
Regulators have noticed the broader problem, even if PayPal pretends it's someone else's. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson warned PayPal directly on March 26. Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould has flagged debanking across the financial sector. President Trump signed an executive order on debanking in August 2025 specifically because companies like PayPal had turned financial services into a political weapon.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has been pulling this thread for months, investigating how financial platforms became ideological gatekeepers. PayPal's name keeps coming up.
The company's founders include Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — both Trump allies who left the company long before it became the industry leader in canceling people's financial lives. The debanking era belongs to former CEO Dan Schulman's tenure, when the platform decided that processing payments wasn't enough and policing thought was part of the business model.
PayPal's revised policy acknowledges the protections "are an important step toward preventing the unfair debanking of its customers." An important step toward preventing something the company says it never did, codified in a policy update timed to land two days before the FDIC reviews the application.
The $2,500 misinformation fine was eventually walked back after public outrage. The account closures were not.