Laws governing charitable giving are many in the US. This is a blatantly illegal move by Go Fund Me and lawsuits are being filed. Anyone who sent a contribution should immediately demand a refund. There are alternative ways to send funds to the truckers.
Update:
They were deluged with angry requests for refunds:
And yet GoFundMe allow this:
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10478329/amp/Western-Australia-mum-charged-attempted-murder-daughter-set-GoFundMe-help-girl.html
I wonder if Trudeau has ever heard of Jimmy Hoffa?
If the law weren’t an ass, federal prosecutors an extension of the Democratic Party, and federal judges accomplices with prosecutors, this would lead to:
Civil judgments with punitive damages, for which both the corporations and the officers who attempted this held liable.
Criminal charges for fraud and or embezzlement for the corporation and the officers responsible.
Criminal charges for public officials implicated (see ‘Official Misconduct’ in New York law), with GoFundMe officials charged as accessories.
A suit by attorneys-general to have GoFundMe dissolved as a corporation, as they’re clearly a mess of racketeers.
Of course, nothing will happen to them but five minutes of bad publicity.
Given how GFM gets money from the donations, they probably wanted to do a special-case “shifting”– and I notice that with each update, how much choice the truckers would have went up– so they could keep that part.
That went…poorly.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/desantis-announces-florida-will-investigate-gofundme-after-company-shut-down-freedom-convoy
Trudeau’s genotype, while debated, is Unproven. He is however, rapidly living up to his phenotype.
From a purely practical point of view it is unwise at the moment for conservatives to engage in large, high profile funding campaigns. It is better to have a lot of smaller, less noticeable ones.
GoFundMe’s shenanigans here might be the most blatant, but KickStarter and IndieGoGo have also deplatformed undesirable campaigns (usually by allowing the campaign to be successful and then refunding all contributions at the last moment before they would be sent to the campaign organizers.)
There are alternatives, but they struggle to get to rise to the level of true competitors because whenever a large enough campaign gets going the left starts attacking their payment processors, hosting, DDOS protection, etc. It’s going to be a while before enough infrastructure has been built that it won’t be possible to disrupt the campaign at any point, so in the short term it is smarter to have a lot of smaller campaigns than a few big ones.
But when stuff like this does happen it of course should be followed by litigation. There have been victories in that regard because most web companies are really, really sloppy in how they handle things legally so that even if they get a sympathetic judge they aren’t guaranteed a victory.
GoFundMe has said that they will automatically refund people at this point. Their defenders are saying this proves that they never had any ill intent. Of course what it really proves is that they always had the ability to refund everyone, and as such their earlier defense of using the money for unrelated charities (theoretically “only” being the money that “couldn’t” be refunded) was a brazen lie.
At best they are the moral equivalent of someone who was about to take a purse from a car, but then decided not to after realizing that the car was directly below a security camera.
That’s assuming that they actually do automatically refund everyone, of course. And that’s not getting into the fact that (if this is anything like previous examples of fundraising sites pulling similar stunts) just the act of cancelling might violate their terms of service, even if they do refund.
This is damage control. Literally. It is about limiting the damages that can be claimed if they are sued.
that’s assuming that they actually do automatically refund everyone,
They will.