A look at how hate groups have built their own financing platforms, after being largely pushed off mainstream crowdfunding sites
Erin Carson / CNET : See also Mediagazer , Thanks: @rogerwcheng
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece is an early snapshot of a financing cat-and-mouse game the related coverage tracks for years afterward. When mainstream platforms cut off far-right networks — Google's removal of Gab's app coincided with Gab claiming $1M+ raised via crowdfunding — the money didn't disappear; it moved to channels built or tolerated outside mainstream moderation.
First-order effects
- Deplatformed groups lose access to established payment rails and must either build their own fundraising infrastructure or route through sympathetic alternatives like the Christian-oriented GiveSendGo.
- Equity crowdfunding under the Jobs Act of 2012 emerges as a workaround: Gab's two StartEngine-brokered rounds raised $2M, keeping it financially viable despite app-store and processor bans.
Second-order effects
- Enforcement lags policy — three years after this article, research found US-based hate groups still raising funds on Stripe, PayPal, Facebook, and Amazon despite those platforms' stated rules against them.
- Hosting-layer scrutiny follows the money: an investigation found 151 tech firms including GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Google, and Amazon providing DNS, CDN, or hosting to hate-spreading sites, pushing the moderation question upstream of crowdfunding entirely.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content-moderation pressure migrates from consumer apps to the financial and infrastructure layers — payment processors, registrars, brokers like StartEngine — where a handful of companies hold chokepoint power over which movements can raise money at all.
- Demonetized movements of any ideology learn the same playbook: vaccine skeptics later repeated it on GiveSendGo and GoFundMe after YouTube demonetization, normalizing a parallel fundraising economy that sits beyond mainstream platform policy.
The trend: Platform deplatforming is shifting extremist and fringe financing from mainstream rails toward self-built and ideologically aligned funding channels, making payments and infrastructure providers the next enforcement battleground.