Is this essentially going to be an investigation in which they find that which has made people butthurt is something they signed away in the terms & conditions they never read? Seems like it. Good on GoFundMe.
If you put in big letters "Contribute to <this>" and then, somewhere totally else, in tiny letters amid 15,000 other tiny letters, put "but we may take your money and contribute it to anything we like"... then you are NOT the good guy. You are swindling the user and a lot of people are of the opinion that this is exactly the kind of situation the government should step in on.
Alternatively, make the 15,000 tiny letters illegal, and require products to specify in clear, easily understandable language what the user is agreeing to; with the ability to return whatever it is if they do not agree with it.
Who reads t&c? Gofundme exists because people fund campaigns they want to. They can point to their T&C and say hard luck. But they won't exist for long with that response. Existence of any business is not a law of nature. If they mess with their user base, they will cease to exist.
Terms and conditions aren't bulletproof. Contrary to popular belief (among socialists in particular for some reason), corporations cannot do whatever they want. If something is illegal, no amount of fine print can make it not illegal.
GoFundMe has already backed away from this new policy and will refund directly, so it's honestly probably moot at this point.
But this idea of donating to other charities unless a refund is requested appears to be something novel. As far as I can tell, it's something they came up with, then backed away from, just for this incident specifically.
