> several friends have been outraged

I don't know if you can even call it cynicism anymore. You just understand the news media business model. Outrageous headline -> more clicks -> more ad revenue. There would simply be less revenue if your friends only had to read one article to get the full picture.

But how will venmo know what is commercial vs. paying rent? If you can mark it as rent and they won’t report, then merchants will just mark everything in such ways. In practice Venmo will just report everything for safety.

It's up to you to the both parties to ensure that the payment is marked correctly. And services like Paypal already have a reason to kick people off who aren't choosing the right transaction type. Paypal doesn't take a fee from friends & family and other gift payments, so it's already in their best interest to find who's abusing it. Also I can't imagine the platform would be liable if they are not the direct cause of misreported transactions.

It's not up to Venmo to report. They are just providing extra information to the IRS to cross check.

Even if you mark it as such in-app; as a business you still have a legal duty to correctly report the income your business made.

Not doing so is already illegal. This just helps the IRS catch this type of fruad easier.

There's no extra taxes or anything - the $600 or more is taxed when reported correctly (as it was before this change, and how amounts under $600 are taxed as well - business income).

Venmo is already trying to solve this by incentivizing users to flag payments themselves.

When you go to pay someone, there's a pretty big box on the screen that says "Are you paying for goods or services? Protect your purchase here" with a little toggle button, and an explanation that the seller will pay a fee in return for you being able to get a refund.

Part of the problem is bad headlines. A larger part of the problem is the fact that when people get their news from social media, they read only the headlines and don't bother with the story.

Somehow people have become convinced that reading a stream of half-sentence headlines is the same thing as being informed about current events.