“Professional thieves”: Elon Musk criticizes GoFundMe for suspending the campaign to support truckers in Canada. Truckers protest against mandatory vaccination in Ottawa, Canada, on February 3rd, 2022.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, has lashed out at GoFundMe for suspending the fundraising campaign in support of Canadian truckers protesting against mandatory vaccination, and has accused the platform of practicing double standards.
“This is not my money,” the billionaire wrote this past Friday in a tweet accompanied by a meme with two photos. In the first, labeled “amateur thieves”, a train is seen on a railway surrounded by broken packages due to the massive looting reported in mid-January in Los Angeles (California). The second contains the platform’s logo with the phrase “professional thieves”.
In parallel, Musk tweeted a screenshot with a GoFundMe tweet in which he promoted a campaign to support agriculture in the area known as ‘Capitol Hill Organized Protest’ (CHOP, for its acronym in English) in the city of Seattle (Washington), occupied by activists amid the protests against racism and police brutality that shook the US in 2020 following the death of African-American George Floyd at the hands of the Police.
“In a community without police, this farmer feeds people and groups them together,” read a tweet from the organization on July 2nd, 2020. “Double standards?” asked the businessman in an apparent allusion to the decision of GoFundMe to suspend fundraising in support of the Canadian carriers of the so-called ‘freedom convoy’. The interruption came when more than 10 million Canadian dollars (about 7.9 million US dollars) had already been accumulated.
End of the campaign
Meanwhile, the platform announced this Saturday in an update that it will refund donations to contributors, while the remaining money will go “to charities verified and selected by the organizers of the freedom convoy.”
In a ‘post’ on January 4th, the platform explained that said fundraising violated point 8 of its terms of service, which “prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment.” “It seems that the so-called ‘marginal minority’ is the government”: Musk returns to comment on the trucker protests in Canada
“GoFundMe supports peaceful protests and we believe that was the intent of the 2022 ‘Freedom Convoy’ fundraiser when it was first created. We now have evidence from law enforcement that the once peaceful demonstration has become in an occupation, with police reports of violence and other illegal activities,” they emphasized.
For their part, from the Ottawa Police, which became the epicenter of the demonstrations, they endorsed the platform’s decision not to support “illegal demonstrations”, while urging other platforms to follow their example. Meanwhile, Tamara Lich, one of the organizers of the campaign, assured in a video that they plan to attract money by using the GiveSendGo online platform to “get donations to truckers much faster”.
How was the money planned to be spent?
Before permanently suspending the campaign, GoFundMe paused it at least twice. In mid-January, the service froze the funds collected (4.5 million), citing the need to verify how they were going to be distributed. Last Thursday, the first tranche of one million was delivered to the organizers of the initiative after GoFundMe received the plan to distribute the money among the carriers. However, the service suspended the campaign again on February 3rd.
The promoters of the collection indicated that the funds would go to cover the costs of the truckers’ trip to the capital, Ottawa, including food, fuel and lodging. At the same time, they ensured that the remaining funds would be distributed among the members of “a reliable veterans organization that will be chosen by the donors.”
