As Trump supporters continue to plan rallies in Washington, DC, before and during Joe Biden’s inauguration, GoFundMe, the largest fundraising platform in the world, has banned their ability to raise money for travel expenses.
GoFundMe, used by 96 million people, announced the decision to ban those fundraisers on Monday. Like other tech giants, the crowdfunding company, which has processed more than 120 million donations since it launched in 2010, has been scrambling to find, monitor, and remove incendiary pro-Trump content.
“Due to the violence, GoFundMe has removed numerous fundraisers intended to raise money for travel expenses,” a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “GoFundMe will remove fundraisers for travel expenses to a future political event where there’s risk of violence by the attendees.”
GoFundMe campaigns have helped to raise money for and spread the world about pro-Trump events. BuzzFeed News previously identified more than a dozen campaigns, which the site has since removed, that raised money for people to travel to DC for the rally on Jan. 6 that morphed into a violent, deadly attempted coup. In November, the site also took down a fundraising page for spreading election misinformation.
Since November, GoFundMe told BuzzFeed News, it has found and deleted about 1,400 election-related fundraising campaigns that violated their terms of service. Many of these campaigns were related to “Stop the Steal” rallies, spreading conspiracy theories about election fraud, promoting violence, or trying to raise money for legal fees for people who stormed the Capitol.
As a result of its new policy, the platform has removed 40 campaigns that were created solely to help fund people’s travel to DC for upcoming rallies.
Trump supporters, from couples in Arizona to popular right-wing personalities like Candace Owens, had been using GoFundMe to ratchet up financial support for years. The site suspended the commentator in June for her repeated “pattern of inflammatory statements that spread hate, discrimination, intolerance and falsehoods.”
Before the violence in DC last week, millions of people could create fundraising campaigns to help them travel to political events.
In one campaign, titled #PatriotPilgrimageDC, 285 donors raised $21,548 “to financially support Patriots on their voyage to the capital on 1/6/21 for the DC Protest!”
This content was originally published here.
