#opPayPal

When injustice becomes Law, resistance becomes Duty. - Thomas Jefferson
 
Many of you probably sense what I’m going to write about in this post. For the ones that are not informed: Remember when Visa, Mastercard and Paypal stopped supporting Wikileaks donations? Well it’s payback time.

The hackers group Anonymous called for a massive boycott on Paypal, asking people to close their accounts. Yes, the hackers group did a bit of a different hack attack this time – no DDoS attacks, this time it’s something completely legal. The reason:  A 20 year old girl arrested for hack attacks facing 15 years in prison and a fine of $500.000 while a rapist gets 11. And here is the fun part: Wikileaks supports them.

#opPayPal instantly became a trending topic on Twitter. Supposedly till now over 35.000 Paypal accounts have been closed. Additional motive for the people to close their accounts was not only that Paypal didn’t support Wikileaks donations, but supports KKK. People continuously complained throughout the day that they weren’t able to close their accounts, so they had to call and to this by phone. Paypal even removed the help page where instructions on how to remove your account were given.

The most interesting part today was not this trending topic though. It was watching how eBay’s stock fall over 3% at the end of the day. Now I don’t have a clue how the stock market works, but it’s more than clear that #opPayPal had an impact on this. Wonder what that drop of 3% means in money? – Over 1 billion U.S. dollars!



What can I say, never underestimate the power of people in large groups. I am really curious how this is going to evolve. Such online activism truly amazes me, and it is the one thing we unfortunately did not use as a weapon when the protests against police brutality in Macedonia were taking place.

P.S. Yes, I closed my PayPal account too. I was gonna do it anyway, never really used it.

Posted in: Cyber activism, general