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記事

2024年2月29日

著者:
Mia Sato, The Verge

Palestine: Organizers, nonprofits criticize GoFundMe's handling of urgent, life-saving Gaza donations

"As Gaza is bombarded, GoFundMe donations are stuck in limbo"

...But what fundraiser organizers see as heavy-handed moderation has slowed down aid efforts, and inconsistent policies have left organizers and donors confused. Multiple organizers for fundraisers related to Palestine have received the same form email from GoFundMe referring to “the crisis unfolding in the Middle East,” requiring them to provide additional information and documentation. These additional hurdles are baffling to the organizers, many of whom have run GoFundMe campaigns for other causes and have never encountered this extra red tape. 

Even after A. sent additional information about the original beneficiary, the fundraiser didn’t meet GoFundMe’s requirements. Securing a new beneficiary would lead to even more time under review and a delay in aid. Finally, after weeks of corresponding with GoFundMe to try to find a solution, A. and their fundraising team ultimately decided to refund all donors: instead, they walked donors through how to purchase eSIMs themselves to be donated to people in Gaza.

The issues with A.’s fundraiser underscore the tension between the resources that Gaza urgently needs and the legal bureaucracy platforms work within. 

While A.’s fundraiser was under review by GoFundMe, the campaign was visible and open to donations — another point that has caused confusion and unease. Typically, GoFundMe hides campaigns that are being reviewed and turns off the ability for the public to donate. But in Gaza-related campaigns, the fundraisers appeared to be up and running as usual. GoFundMe didn’t answer The Verge’s questions about this discrepancy...

But even with a plan in place to get money safely to beneficiaries, fundraisers for Gaza have been under intense scrutiny. A. was asked to provide personal information for people involved in eSIM donations as well as a list of individuals who would receive an eSIM — a potentially impossible request to fulfill given the grassroots nature of the effort and the emergency state on the ground. 

“Thank you for your efforts to help those affected by the crisis unfolding in the Middle East. Due to recent developments within the region, we’re carefully reviewing fundraisers related to this crisis,” the form email received by multiple organizers reads. “This is an important step to help ensure fundraisers are in compliance with all applicable laws and strictly enforced policies from our payment partners and our Terms of Service.” 

Like all US companies, GoFundMe must comply with recent government sanctions against Hamas officials and other “facilitators” in the wake of the October 7th attacks. In requiring extensive information about who and what money is going to, GoFundMe is likely running names against lists of sanctioned individuals and groups, says Aaron Martin, assistant professor at the University of Virginia with expertise in humanitarian organizations and tech policy. There are government-run lists as well as private services used by banks for things like anti-money laundering or terrorist financing screenings, Martin says, but these are often incomplete or inaccurate, and false positives can occur in regions where people have similar names.

“For [GoFundMe’s] own internal due diligence and risk management processes, they need to be able to say at least we checked, and we either cleared the names or we’re still investigating because these are common names, and we simply don’t know.”...

“This kind of compliance is really just an ass-covering exercise, because you don’t want to be in a position where money went to a quote, unquote bad guy,” Martin says...

GoFundMe spokesperson Jalen Drummond didn’t respond to specific questions about how the company flags and reviews campaigns or what tools it uses to review beneficiaries.

“Our top priority is protecting the generosity of our donors. Just as we have done with past crises, we have a team of experts reviewing and vetting fundraisers through our standard verification process to ensure they are verified, and compliant with relevant international laws, global regulations, and the requirements dictated by our payment processors,” Drummond said in a statement. “Any suggestion of discrimination is wholly without merit, baseless, and contrary to the values that guide our platform.”

Even campaigns benefitting US-based organizations working on Palestinian causes have been placed under review without explanation. Slow Factory, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, launched a program to buy billboards in an effort to, in the words of co-founder Colin Vernon, “bring visibility to the ongoing injustices and genocide being committed against Gaza.” Actor and activist Poppy Liu, who is not affiliated with the organization but had admired its work, set up a GoFundMe campaign in support of the project. Liu’s campaign reached its goal within a day — and just as quickly, was placed under review.

“[I felt] incredibly mad, because it feels incredibly apparent that this is part of a national trend of censoring anything that talks about Palestine,” Liu told The Verge. “It feels explicitly racist. It feels anti-Arab.” Liu says they complied with GoFundMe’s requests for additional information — including specifying multiple times that Slow Factory was a US-based nonprofit — and waited days until the review was finally lifted.

“I’ve never had an issue before and I’ve fundraised for things that were not even registered 501(c)s,” Liu says. 

Vernon, co-founder of Slow Factory, hasn’t experienced this type of review before, either.

“This was positioned as ‘routine’ verification but haven’t heard of any such validation in the past, so we were of course suspicious that it is because of the content of the campaign,” Vernon told The Verge in an email. “We have seen so many instances where ‘routine’ bureaucracy is only deployed in specific cases, which points to a political motivation.”...

The roadblocks — both literal and digital — that prohibit Palestinians from receiving aid reveal what otherwise might go unnoticed: there’s a complex web of red tape and corporate interests that undergird the supposedly seamless digital transfers that happen online every day. PayPal, for example, has refused to allow Palestinians to use its service for years, even as Israelis in illegal West Bank settlements are able to. In 2021, when violence broke out between Israel and Hamas, Venmo (which is owned by PayPal) was found to be delaying payments that included terms like “Palestinian emergency relief fund” and “emergency Palestinian relief fund.”...