Anyone online has seen over the past years how the frequency of Palestinian accounts on Bluesky and other platforms has increased, two- and four-fold, folks asking for help and linking to GoFundMes. They share their stories and plea for help, to flee Gaza, to buy price-gouged food for their children, to afford healthcare. I have made the choice to move from my values, namely that no one asks for help that doesn’t need it: I make an effort to give aid to everyone who asks me to. But what if it’s a mistake to do so?
I’ve noticed a strange contrary attitude or a strange silence from my peers in response to these requests for aid. There’s a reflex to keep staring straight ahead, or there’s a great, perfect-posture, chin-up reflex to Verify™. Because it’s easy to sock-puppet on the web these days, and at the end of the day, anonymity is baked into the fiber of the Internet, and you can’t possibly know if you’re donating to a real person or some deft scammer.
You can’t possibly know
The folks who genuinely need help are likely indistinguishable from the malicious actors. With the advent of LLM tools, it’s probably more easy than it has ever been to create increasingly sophisticated bots that could collect donations. While there are some folks doing all the footwork to personally verify the personhood of different accounts asking for help, not every account of the hundreds, thousands, might be verified. All that labor to research signals of legitimacy and interview people — it’s certainly not negligible.
As Johnny Hill points out, there are a lot of prominent folks, like Molly Shah, like Alex Winter, like the fairshare bot doing this labor, meeting these people already. As he further points out, if it’s really so important to you, you can trust people already in community with Gazans, instead of withholding in favor of some different version of your life where you’re the world’s greatest online detective.
Besides, we donate to legacy aid institutions
I’ve written about this before, and donating to aid groups like Doctors Without Borders, UNRWA, the World Food Program, etc, is an honorable and necessary act. But in the case of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, that critical aid is arriving in a disturbingly diminished capacity, and often not arriving at all. That’s not to say that these institutions aren’t critical, that they don’t make a difference. But if your $50 donation is spread among the now millions of Gazans that need aid to get by, and arrives months from now if ever, it starts to impel questions of whether or not there are more effective ways to make a difference.
So what if I’m wrong?
What if my GoFundMe donation actually ends up in the hands of a malicious actor? What if I can’t afford the time and energy to vet the legitimacy of everyone who asks for help? Won’t I be embarassed? Won’t I be a fool, won’t I have wasted money on something so foolish as hope, as prayer?
Yes.
But what if I’m right?
Direct aid and grassroots networks move at a rate institutional aid groups functionally cannot. Quite obviously, getting immediate help in the hands of individual people helps those people immediately. Donating directly to these families eliminates the bottleneck of waiting in lines to receive slim humanitarian aid when those lines are even available in an environment of constant human rights violations. Moreover, providing help beyond their immediate needs enables them to distribute that aid to their community, existing person-to-person networks spread aid among families and neighbors and god-willing eventually whole communities.
And consider your own mental health for a moment — we look daily into the torment nexus to watch children blown apart and families starved and hospitals collapsed and journalists targeted and bastard IOF soldiers laughing at the results of their remote-controlled slaughter. It’s not right for it to happen and it’s not right for us to watch and do nothing. Forgive me the appeal to spirituality, but it’s not right for your soul to sit and view and do nothing. We can riot in the streets, and we should riot, with hope and anger and persistence, but in the mean time, this is something we can do that materially changes the daily life of Palestinians.
And for a minute, put all of this aside — fuck, man. Isn’t it worth the risk? If I donate $25, if I donate $100, if I donate my entire net worth, and 90% of it goes to scammers — but some portion of it is responsible for keeping a single Palestinian alive for one more day, isn’t that worth it? Why is this a calculus any of us are running — your pride, your resistance to being scammed by imagined masterminds is not worth anyone’s life.
Please, please let yourself off the hook. The next time someone asks you for help, it will heal some part of you to help them; without vetting and qualifying the act of helping. You can make a difference to someone right now.