It’s marketing and a show of strength.

that isn’t activism. I’m sorry.

how does this impact the system for change? it doesn’t. This is more performative BS. I’d like to think people on a lemmy server would have better ideas to engage in real, collective activism. This requires real work, not just buying a flag and driving your car on the freeway.

This seems ethically gray. essentially you pay a premium fee to be on the website. The fact that it’s a donation seems even more problematic because it does seem like it could be a legal issue for the defense fund. I hope these people contacted his lawyers about it. Additionally, people on r/brianthompsonmurder pointed out the fact that people with little to no money won’t have as much of a chance of being included (because they are picking and choosing who gets to say happy birthday??). “While donations increase the likelihood of your message being included, our goal is to feature as many messages as possible.” So people who can’t pay that much… what? This feels weird and immoral to me. Perhaps the donation should be suggested in lieu of the card, but not a premium tier??

And the fact that they are not being transparent with how they are getting site to luigi is really weird. Will he even ever see it? A guy who wants things to be transparent and is against classism, is anti-capitalist. It’s really off and doesn’t feel right.

This is something that seems to be happening with a lot of social media in america. they are really doubling down on censorship on the platforms (reddit, facebook, tiktok). I personally believe some kind of internal memo was sent by the trump administration that the public does not know about. It’s too big of a coincidence. This stuff is what is sending me to open source social media, and i believe that it will make much more of the public go that way too, eventually.