Social Media Case 5 - PayPal

I have never had a PayPal account, but I have donated money to charities through different means, some of which have been online. If I found out that the means which I donated through were keeping part of my donation for themselves, and were not allowing the money to be used for the cause I donated to, I would be extremely upset. I think it is understandable why people were furious and took to the comments section to voice their anger.

It seems like PayPal had fallen into an expert blind spot, they saw they had received recognition and wanted to share how well their company was doing. They did not seem to think that their actions with Regretsy would be associated with their mention in Forbes. It seems foolish to me that they thought they could delete away the negative comments and that would make everything okay. That is like putting a sticker over you check engine light and saying that your car is fine. What is worse is that when they realized they had messed up to the point where deleting could not fix things, it seems that their apology was not completely truthful. They claimed to be working with the owner of Regretsy and giving a donation as well. I am not sure if they ever were true to their word, but after posting the apology the owner posted about how she had yet to be contacted, which you can read about here.

I think there are definitely times when the comments section becomes abused and we fall into the ‘Natalie Portman’ effect where the point of the post is completely misdirected by off topic comments. These angry comments were not about PayPal being highlighted by Forbes, but reprimands for what they had done with Regretsy. While the comments were not about what the post intended them to be, I think this is an instance where having a ‘Natalie Portman’ effect is okay. A company that is ‘fishing for compliments’ in a way by showing they had been highlighted in Forbes, but is also doing harsh and unfair business with other groups should own up to all of their actions. They should not try to delete their problems away.

It seems like it is another moment where a company is forced to apologize not because they realized they made a mistake and are truly sorry, they are sorry because they got caught. This article  from Today news showed that PayPal seemed to not really care, and were not truly invested in fixing the problem until they saw how much backlash they were receiving.