Following the shutdown of the “Freedom Convoy 2022” GoFundMe campaign, that raised in excess of $10.1 million in donations in support of Canada’s Freedom Convoy, organisers with the Freedom Convoy were quick to open another fundraising campaign on GoFundMe’s rival platform GiveSendGo.
In a press release, published on Feb. 7, GiveSendGo coFounder, Heather Wilson, said, “In light of allowing this campaign we have seen an overwhelming outpouring of support from across the globe.”
As of 12:30 p.m. EST on Feb. 8 the campaign reached US$6,352,342 and is showing no signs of slowing down.
Immediately following the launch of the campaign GiveSendGo’s platform was inundated by both people wanting to donate to the cause as well as thousands of bots that were part of a coordinated DDOS attack resulting in the platform being inaccessible most of the time.
A DDOS attack, or denial-of-service attack, is a cyber attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a website unavailable to users by temporarily disrupting services by flooding the targeted site with superfluous user requests in an attempt to overload the site with traffic preventing legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
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On Feb. 5 GiveSendGo tweeted, “We have been under heavy DDOS and bot attacks. In spite of all of this we still have managed to raise funds 5X faster than the gfm did. GFM raised 10mil in 3 weeks. GSG campaign has already raised over 1.1mil in just over 12 hours!”
On Feb. 7 GiveSendGo cofounder, Jacob Wells, said in a press release, “We’ve seen nearly 10 million bots trying to overwhelm our servers in just the past two hours. Though this has caused issues for the platform, we will not let it stand in the way of providing a safe and effective means of fundraising for our campaign owner across the globe.”
As of Feb. 8 the platform appears to be operating smoothly as it continues to raise thousands of dollars an hour for the Freedom Convoy. The campaign is GiveSendGo’s most successful campaign since it launched in 2014..
Wells has since come out and blasted GoFundMe and Big Tech for their “authoritarian style of social platforms” which he says promote bias as fact and cause further division, Fox News reported.
“Big Tech really has taken it upon themselves to be the arbiters of truth. And it’s a place that they were never intended to be, and it’s caused more damage than good. We are now stepping into that place because there is a natural pushback from many people because America was founded on these ideas of freedom,” Wells told Fox News Digital in a phone interview on Monday.
“This is like the tip of the spear and what is coming in a tsunami of technology that is pushing back against this authoritarian style of social platforms where it’s like these people just think that they get to control the narrative,” he told Fox News adding that, “It’s mind-blowing to me that they actually think that is the way that it ought to be, because in my perspective, it only breeds more distrust and more vitriol, more divide.”
A second campaign on the GiveSendGo crowdfunding platform, launched to support the Freedom Convoy titled, “Adopt a Trucker” has so far raised over CND$500,000 (US$393,400.00).
