Indiegogo may sound like the name of a 1970s funk band, but it’s actually one of the fastest growing crowd-funding sites on the Internet. Founded in 2002 by a former Wall Street analyst, the funding platform allows inspired individuals to grow projects or personal campaigns by pooling money from donors. If you desire, you can drop a few bucks to help a startup bakery. You could also help finance new stables at a therapeutic horse ranch or sponsor an orphanage in Haiti.
Everything is fair game, as long as you play by the rules. And the rules are clear: User terms stipulate that you can’t promote hate.
Strange, then, that among those partaking in Indiegogo’s services is the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an organization classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. They are using the platform to raise money — and lots of it — to put out another batch of their now-infamous anti-Muslim metro and bus ads.