I was chagrined to find that I was unable to use PayPal to make a one-time payment to support blogger Naomi <removed>. I had never heard of her until she appeared in the vlog of serpentZA (a SA national in China who posts about his daily life). I would not normally contribute to her since I have only watched a handful of her videos, but once I viewed the video addressing her conflict with “VICE” and her subsequent banning from Patreon, I felt compelled to give her at least some monetary support. She had selected SubscribeStar to replace Patreon. Since I was unfamiliar with the site, I used DuckDuckGo for some basic research. I was astounded to see articles attacking an entire platform based on a few of the personalities using it. I would be VERY surprised if objectionable users (at least to some groups) could NOT be found using any large platform, including eBay, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, and most web-hosting companies. So I can’t overstate my surprise to find that I can’t use PayPal on SubscribeStar. At first I thought that SubscribeStar might be so new that they had not yet set up PayPal but apparently PayPal has banned the entire platform rather than individuals which, to my US sensibilities, is either incredibly lazy or an immoral suppression of free speech. Bottom line: I had begun to move all my recurring online payments to PayPal and always tried to use it over other payment platforms like AmazonPay, since PayPal was the pioneer in the field; that ends now (I canceled a couple of hundred dollars of recurring payments last night and will transition the rest slowly, unless the situation is rectified).
I don’t think many Westerners (like me) can appreciate the perilous nature of life in Communist China. Chinese video authors must be careful of what they show and of every word they speak; specific common words have been banned from searches/posts, as well as images like Winnie-the-Pooh (because their current leader has been compared to him). It’s possible that fear for her life or livelihood led her to take the action she did, after exhausting all other avenues she could think of, when she believed “VICE” had broken a pre-interview agreement on boundaries. Regardless, Patreon banned her because her action violated their TOS (and while I feel Patreon was within their rights, I think a temporary suspension might have been more appropriate, given China’s draconian laws and her age).
