WASHINGTON —Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Ranking Member Steve Scalise (R-La.) and House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) today launched a probe into GoFundMe’s selective discrimination to cancel the Canadian truckers’ campaign and called on Select Subcommittee Chairman James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) to hold a hearing on the platform’s efforts to silence certain viewpoints.
“We write to conduct oversight over GoFundMe’s recent decision to remove one particular campaign—the Canadian truckers’ campaign—from its website and get a detailed accounting of how the company is dealing with undistributed donations collected on its platform totaling millions of dollars,” wrote Ranking Members Scalise and Comer to GoFundMe CEO Timothy Cadogan. “Understandably, citizens across the globe are speaking out against many of the limitations on individual freedom being imposed under the guise of COVID restrictions, which many of these same elected leaders mandate on others yet don’t even follow themselves. And even in the United States—the freest country in the world—the Biden Administration continues to harm countless Americans by perpetuating unscientific COVID-19 policies and fears. We are concerned that GoFundMe is censoring individuals who are peacefully challenging the science and merits of some of these COVID mandates, while also signaling to any others who dare speak out that their voices will be silenced.”
In recent weeks, a protest movement led by Canadian truckers formed in Canada with the goal of protesting restrictive COVID-19 mandates, including the fact that both the United States and Canada now require truckers crossing their borders to be vaccinated against COVID-19. A GoFundMe page, titled “Freedom Convoy 2022,” supporting the truckers was established and quickly raised millions of dollars. On February 4, 2022, GoFundMe abruptly shut down the page, attempted to defraud donors, and stated it would force organizers to send all remaining funds to charities approved by GoFundMe. GoFundMe has not taken similar action against other pages in support of left-leaning protest movements, including those with connections to violence such as bail funds for rioters and Antifa.
“Committee Republicans are concerned that GoFundMe’s policies are not being executed in a just manner. As we have seen, for some in the Big Tech industry, far-left violence is merely speech, while conservative speech is treated as violence. Big Tech is increasingly refusing to permit a level playing field in the marketplace of ideas, actively censoring conservative viewpoints while promoting far-left causes. And we are particularly interested in this case where millions of dollars in crowdsourced funds would have potentially been misappropriated absent a public outcry,” continued Scalise and Comer.
The Republican lawmakers call on GoFundMe to provide all documents and communications related to the decision to remove the Freedom Convoy 2022 page, as well as the evolution of the platform’s policies on diverting donated funds to other causes deemed by the company as credible. They also call on Chairs Clyburn and Maloney to immediately convene a hearing to examine this latest example of Big Tech silencing certain viewpoints.
The letter to GoFundMe can be found here.