GoFundMe and the Canadian Convoy
Parallel Societies are a must
Double standards are par for the course in politics since the average voter has the memory of a goldfish (because they are largely apathetic); However, in business, the customer’s memory is closer to an elephant’s (because they are parting with their money to patronize a business) especially with social media amplifying messages which embeds small mistakes deep into the public conscience.
GoFundMe collects a 2.9% payment processing fee along with $0.30 per transaction just as many credit cards do. As do credit card users, GoFundMe customers believe as long as the cause is not illegal, their money will get to the intended recipient. This was true until 2015 when the legal defense fundraiser for the infamous refusal to bake a same-sex wedding cake shop was suspended. GoFundMe had banned legal defense funds until 2017 when they re-allowed some legal defense funds that the company supported. I emphasize “that they supported” because, in 2019, GoFundMe terminated a $3 million fundraising for Australian rugby player Israel Folau in which he quoted 1 Corinthians 6:9–10. Just as the cake shop prior, this campaign was taken down because the recipient was deemed homophobic. These were against terms of service though, so there hasn’t been a double standard…yet.
In 2022, one of the largest GoFundMe fundraisers was suspended. The Canadian Freedom Convoy which raised $10 million CAD (~$7 million USD) had its funds frozen for violation of the terms of service section Prohibited Conduct §A. 8.
User Content that reflects or promotes behavior that we deem, in our sole discretion, to be an abuse of power or in support of hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance of any kind relating to race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, serious disabilities or diseases;
GoFundMe had initially pledged to use the money other people had donated to fund its own causes, then backtracked to funding causes the donators supported that were not the Freedom Convoy and finally (fearing the lawsuits) decided to give back the money.
GoFundMe claimed the trucker convoy is almost an occupation of the city. They sang a different tune during the fiery but mostly peaceful summer of love.
There was a fundraiser for the occupied armed militia in CHAZ/CHOP.
Perhaps if the Freedom Convoy took some inspiration from the summer of love they wouldn’t be refunded.
Quickly, donators switched to alternative GiveSendGo which is hosted on AWS. This time last year, Parler was de-platformed from AWS, so that may not be an effective (long-term) strategy. GiveSendGo has (allegedly) been experiencing DDoS attacks which should be incredibly rare for anything hosted on the highly scalable IaaS that is AWS with all its load balancers, CDN integrations, etc. A conspiracy-minded person may believe it is because AWS doesn’t want to offer the support to a group they disagree with, however, I think if there is a DDoS, it could be due to a lack of proper technical staff at GiveSendGo.
The police and politicians are not only colluding with Big Tech but they are using Canadian tax dollars to prevent Canadians from using their own money to protest government overreach.
This is just a tweet and is a serious allegation if true, but people cheering on the de-platforming of the freedom convoy are probably okay with this too. Society is too polarized. The only good system is one that works well even if your enemies are in control of it.
Though to the opposition, all this action is justified because they deem the protesters to be terrorists.
Even though these people have committed no crimes, they are treated as criminals. This puts otherwise seemingly benign proposed laws in a new malicious light. Bill S. 1331 proposes a device to monitor if a driver is drunk.
(A)(i) passively monitor the performance of a
driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify
whether that driver may be impaired;
...
...
...
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if a
blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit is
detected.
Barring obvious problems such as identification errors (as AI is prone to do) and hacking vulnerabilities, it is also a kill switch for a car. It’s no secret that technology has government backdoors. What does behavior categorized as impaired mean? Could it mean speeding? Making minor driving errors? Yelling expletives as a drunk would? Doing things only a crazy person or drunk would such as (according to them) having the JRE podcast playing in the background?
Anyway, this strays from the point. Highly political fundraisers should avoid GoFundMe. It is not their first time taking something down and in recent memory, they have accelerated their pace of takedown.
Yet as if afflicted by Stockholm syndrome, people keep returning. Even GiveSendGo could have problems as it is hosted on AWS. The alternative GabPay has its own servers and payment processors so it won’t be taken down unless by the government via raids. I myself am a crypto enthusiast and this is one of the few use cases cryptocurrencies are mature enough to handle. Moreover, it cannot be taken down. However, the barriers to entry make it not accessible and thus infeasible for many to use. The moral of the story is to not rely on the supposed enemy’s infrastructure to protest against them. The silver lining is “Get Woke, Go Broke” GoFundMe will lose a lot of business and such a high-profile case might get public attention and accelerate the creation of parallel societies. We can only hope the parallel society is not plagued with the same problems as the current system.