Slashdot Mirror
No Cash For Hate, Say Mainstream Crowdfunding Firms (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Online fund-raising sites are turning their backs on activists looking to offer financial support for James Fields, the man accused of driving his car into counter-protesters at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday. GoFundMe, Kickstarter and other mainstream crowdfunding firms have policies that prohibit hate speech or abuse, the latest example of technology firms making it harder for far-right groups to organize online. Fields is accused of killing one woman and injuring 19 others on Saturday after the rally in Charlottesville turned violent. Supporters of Fields, who was denied bail at a court hearing in Virginia on Monday, have turned to the internet to raise money for his legal defense. GoFundMe, one of the two leading crowdfunding firms, said on Monday it has removed multiple fundraising campaigns for Fields, because the company prohibits the promotion of hate speech and violence.
It's an easy call to make for a corporation:
On the one hand, you get free publicity, and most people give you credit for being moral.
On the other hand, you might alienate the few remaining Americans who support racist violence.
In terms of raw numbers, the choice is easy. On the other hand, you'd like these funding things to be apolitical, not appointing themselves judges. It would be kind of interesting to see how many people actually would be willing to donate to his defense fund. Does that fool actually have any chance at all in court?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The ACLU defended the Unite the Right group in Charlottesville when the city revoked their permit to demonstrate. So is the ACLU a supporter of hate speech and thus needs to be purged?
That line about the US having the best justice system money can buy is meant to be sarcasm. Isn't "putting their finger on the scales of justice" what you do when you introduce money to this situation, not when you remove it?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The question here is how much leeway businesses have in refusing service. The left has already established that they believe a business may not discriminate at all, and must treat everyone equally in terms of business transactions. That's why they believe a Christian owner of a cake shop must produce a cake for a gay wedding even if it personally offends the owner to produce decorations for a gay wedding.
Well, now we have a case which flips the left/right spectrum. If you are running a business offering a service to the public, can you deny that service to white supremacist customers because you personally disagree with white supremacy?
Now, I personally believe the cake shop owner has the right to refuse to make a cake decorated for a gay wedding (but not to refuse to sell a generic cake which the buyer may decorate as they wish). So I have no problem with GoFundMe, Godaddy, etc. denying these Nazis services since it requires "their" equipment to propagate white supremacist materials. But I'm curious though how those on the left justify denying business owners the right to refuse a customer in one case, but having no problem with it in this one.
You're right, it's not a case of "the cops hate minorities"; it's a case of the cops viewing themselves as soldiers and the rest of us -- white, black, or whatever -- as the enemy. There's a very real problem with hyper-aggressive, militarized police in this country, but BLM obscures it behind a cloud of identity politics.