Still a site bug not user fault.

Given that its tastes are the aggregate average of our Internet population, the LLMs are probably dead on for casual gift giving.

That is just Slashdot bug. It cannot handle even common Unicode characters. Posts from phones frequently get those character substitutions.

I wonder if it is the synchronization problem? Sheets seems to do a better job with live edits, and if they prioritize that over a more delayed batch update, I can see Sheets struggling with cell count especially if those cells have interlocked computations. Purely guessing, though.

Sure, they tried, but nowadays they are much more empowered to actually do it.

Not defending WaPo generally, but the protest did get them to reverse course on the AI comment controls and filtering. The comment system still sucks but all the AI stuff has been backed out.

Yes, providing the info to bypass the portal and go directly to the entity is part of doing that ethically. And it is not something GoFundMe was doing. But it is not legally required. GFM was unethical but not illegal.
If anyone thinks this *should be* illegal, that's a whole different discussion. In my opinion, it is something worth writing to state and national legislators about changing.

US law (nor any state law I know of) would not recognize that as an assignment of claims. That's a trademark of an entity. It does not make any representation or claim about the activity of GoFundMe.

I'm a manager for a meta-charity org. We raise money all the time for charities without telling the charity in advance, particularly during disasters when time is critical to get the word out about the need. Right now, tonight, there are people and corporations across the USA raising funds for the various food banks. I doubt many of them have explicit arrangements with the food banks.

Done ethically, this sort of thing aids the main charity immensely. GoFundMe crossed all sorts of lines.

Every single piece of this is legal to raise money for someone else. To keep a portion of the money raised for yourself as long as you disclose to donors that you are doing that. As long as GoFundMe actually did send the remaining money along, it's all legal. Ethical? No. Legal? Yes. They never claimed to be the orgs themselves. In fact, they explicitly said they weren't the orgs. As long as you disclose to donors your process, it is legal. As far as I can tell, the law in USA (varies some by states) expects that donors will do due diligence before giving. The unethical part to me is the search-engine optimization: that misleads donors into thinking GoFundMe is the only or the official portal. But that's just unethical not illegal because GFM never claimed to be the only portal... that's legally on the search engines for presenting them that way.

You do not need permission to raise money on someone else's behalf. That happens all the time with both individuals and corporations raising money for causes they care about. It is perfectly legal. It is the methods that were shady, but GoFundMe (probably quite carefully) avoided illegality.

The three you cite were not among the 1.4 million autocreated pages. Plenty of non-profits are on GoFundMe. These three pages use personal pronouns and speak on behalf of the org. Using that phrasing would indeed be illegal for GoFundMe. The autocreated ones avoided that language.

Multiple websites claim that all of the autocreated pages have now been removed from GoFundMe, so you won't find examples tonight.
https://www.philanthropy.com/n...

It's legal to fundraise on someone's behalf -- people and corporations do it all the time, and they don't need the other entity's permission to do it. The place where GoFundMe crossed ethical bounds was on the scalper-level tipping and on the search-engine optimization, both of which actively interfered in funds reaching the donor intention.

It is legal. People fundraise for causes all the time on behalf of orgs and donate the funds raised. The problem is a) when your fundraising interferes with direct giving and b) when your take of the donations is greater than your costs such that you are scalping the donations.

They are not impersonating the charities. They are unethical in doing this, but the pages are quite clear that they are raising money on their own to benefit the charities. It is the search-engine optimization that makes this bad.

As far as I can tell, this is legal: the GoFundMe pages are explicitly not representing the orgs⦠they are GFM acting on its own to raise money for these other orgs, but in a fairly problematic way.