Extremists raised more than $6M online
Crowdfunding websites called ‘financial lifeline’
Extremists raised more than $6.2 million on crowdfunding websites from 2016 to 2022, according to an Anti-Defamation League study provided exclusively to USA TODAY. The bonanza shows that America is in the “heyday of extremist fundraising,” an ADL expert said.
Researchers tracked fundraising campaigns on 10 crowdfunding sites. Most were housed on GiveSendGo, which calls itself a “Christian crowdfunding” website founded in 2014. GiveSendGo campaigns accounted for $5.4 million of the total fundraising tallied by the group.
As USA TODAY reported in 2021, participants in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, have used GiveSendGo and other crowdfunding sites to raise money for legal bills and other expenses.
The ADL report concluded that $4.75 million has been raised in the past four years for Jan. 6-connected campaigns on these sites.
The ADL also found what it described as “several small, short-lived sites that were dedicated to extremist and hateful causes.” They included sites with names like “GoyFundMe” and “Hatreon.”
Many of the campaigns tracked by the ADL are small, raising amounts in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars. But some have raised tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Shortly after the Capitol riot, GoFundMe banned fundraising for travel to political events that have a “risk for violence.” But other sites, particularly GiveSendGo, have become the go-to for extremists and their allies.
Mark Dwyer, an investigator for the ADL’s Center on Extremism, monitors funding sources such as cryptocurrency and online donations. Dwyer and his team decided to focus on crowdfunding after seeing a sizable increase in online fundraising since the Jan. 6 riot, he said.
“I would consider this to be the hey
day of extremist funding,” Dwyer said.
Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL Center on Extremism, called on crowdfunding sites – particularly GiveSendGo – to limit fundraising by extremist and hate groups.
“Crowdfunding is a financial lifeline for various extremists,” Segal said. “Major servicers like GoFundMe and GiveSendGo have a responsibility to enforce their terms of service and stop the exploitation of their platforms by people and groups that traffic in bigotry and violence.”
GiveSendGo did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It describes itself as a conservative alternative that does not censor crowdfunding campaigns as mainstream platforms do.
Its policies prohibit campaigns that promote hate, violence and racial intolerance. But co-founder Jacob Wells said in testimony before the Canadian Parliament in March that GiveSendGo would host campaigns for the Proud
Boys if the group planned to spend the money on legal expenses.
“We believe deeply, to the core of our being, that the suppression of speech is much more dangerous than speech itself,” Wells said.
The largest crowdfunding platform, GoFundMe, says it also prohibits campaigns that spread hate and violence.
“We will continue to vigorously enforce our zero tolerance policy against hate, violence, harassment, discrimination or intolerance of any kind,” GoFundMe spokesman Jalen Drummond told USA TODAY.
According to the ADL, campaigns have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for antisemitic documentaries and propaganda networks and represent 94% of the extremist or hateful campaigns the ADL identified.
After declining to comment about that question in response to USA TODAY’s questions, GoFundMe later said it had banned a prolific Black Hebrew Israelite from fundraising on the platform.
“We do not tolerate antisemitism. Period,” Drummond said, adding that the ADL has commended GoFundMe for quickly enforcing its policies.