Gov. DeSantis and Texas Pressure Forces GoFundMe to Release Freedom Convoy Cash Daniel Greenfield
The two positive outcomes of this episode are that…
1. Every conservative now knows not to use GoFundMe. The tech platform has a long history of banning and discriminating against conservatives. This time its overreach went into the millions.
2. Florida and Texas flexed their newfound legal muscle at a tech company and it backed off. GoFundMe is much smaller in scale than the real monsters like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and lacks their layers of lobbyists and paid politicians. But it’s mid-size enough to make for a good field test.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he would “investigate” the company, accusing them of fraud.
“It is a fraud for @gofundme to commandeer $9M in donations sent to support truckers and give it to causes of their own choosing. I will work with @AGAshleyMoody to investigate these deceptive practices — these donors should be given a refund.”
GoFundMe also drew the ire of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who stated on social media that he would be launching a fraud investigation.
“Patriotic Texans donated to Canadian truckers’ worthy cause using GoFundMe. This BLM-backing company went woke, froze the funds, & failed to deliver Texans’ money,” Paxton said. “Today I assembled a team to investigate their potential fraud & deception. Texas donors will get Justice!”
GoFundMe had clearly been scrambling for excuses.
Plan A was freezing the convoy money and complaining that there wasn’t a good enough plan for distributing the money.
Mind you, GoFundMe is widely used by individuals and causes that are not non-profits and have no experience with the paperwork and legal requirements. The whole premise of crowdfunding is that you don’t need to have that kind of background or organization.
Then the organizers provided the information and had the money frozen anyway with GFM announcing that it would redistribute the money to some charity with the consent of the organizers. That’s not what people were donating the money for.
GoFundMe claimed that the authorities had told the company that the protest was lawless. A point that never seemed to have troubled the company when it literally promoted a CHOP fundraiser and endless BLM protests.
“Organizers provided a clear distribution plan for the initial $1M that was released earlier this week and confirmed funds would be used only for participants who traveled to Ottawa to participate in a peaceful protest. Given how this situation has evolved, no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organizers — we will work with organizers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers and verified by GoFundMe,” GFM’s statement claimed.
So much for the Mostly Peaceful Protest clause used by BLM.
Now GFM is doing immediate refunds, between the chargebacks and legal threats, it seems to have had enough. Nevertheless a lot of time and probably some money was wasted.
Still hopefully conservatives will no longer use GFM and Florida and Texas have tested their new legal ‘terror’ weapon.
Comments are closed.
