120+ former staff accuse Change.org of “siphoning” funds from George Floyd petition with “chip in” tool used to promote petitions; tool now temporarily disabled
The site's ‘chip in’ feature looks like a donation, but it's used to promote the petition Tweets: @stephen_douglas and @thedealwithalex Tweets: Stephen Douglas / @stephen_douglas : It's not ExactChange dot org for a reason. https://twitter.com/... Bleach DuBois / @thedealwithalex : The almost entirely white leadership of @Change dot org is not yet saying how much money they took from folks thinking they were giving to George Floyd. Former Change employees like me demand they donate the money to #BlackLivesMatter organizations // https://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The accusation lands on a recurring weak point in online activism: informal fundraising channels that blur where the money goes. Two years earlier, CNNMoney reported that the owner of Facebook's biggest Black Lives Matter page appeared to have kept some of roughly $100K in donations, and this same week supporters turned to YouTube AdSense revenue as a donation workaround precisely because they distrusted conventional channels.
For Change.org specifically, the 'chip in' charge compounds an identity problem already under examination: a for-profit platform whose promotion revenue sits awkwardly beside its image as a tool for social change, a tension OneZero explores in depth in its look at the company's dual nature. With 90M users and backing from Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, its monetization choices carry outsized weight.
First-order effects
- Donors who used 'chip in' believing they were giving to George Floyd causes were instead funding petition promotion, and Change.org has temporarily disabled the feature while more than 120 former staff publicly demand the money be redirected to Black Lives Matter organizations.
- Former employees like Stephen Douglas are forcing the company to disclose how much was collected — an accounting question leadership had not yet answered.
Second-order effects
- The episode pressures Change.org's core business: if users treat petition-promotion charges as deceptive donations, the company faces a choice between clearer labeling of its paid promotion product and losing the trust its 90M-user reach depends on.
- Other platforms hosting activist fundraising now inherit the skepticism — donors burned by ambiguous flows have already shown they will improvise alternatives, from AdSense videos to direct giving.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across these episodes, informal digital fundraising around protest movements gets pushed toward named, accountable organizations — a shift consistent with Color of Change's growth from 1.7M to 8M members as institutional civil rights groups absorb both members and scrutiny-driven dollars.
- Platform-mediated activism increasingly splits into two tiers: transparent intermediaries whose fee structures survive public audit, and ad-hoc viral channels that repeatedly generate deception scandals.
The trend: Activist fundraising is migrating from ambiguous platform monetization tools toward accountable organizations, as repeated donation-deception scandals force disclosure of where movement money actually goes.