RED ALERT: Vicious Media Harass Freedom Convoy Donors

(Rallying Patriots) – A new report from WND has revealed that many media outlets are still sending out messages to small-dollar donors to the Freedom Convoy who had their identities leaked after crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked.

“The personal information of roughly 90,000 donors to the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers and hackers protesting Canada’s vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions, was leaked after hackers breached GiveSendGo late Sunday. The leaked data included names, email handles, IP addresses and zip codes, and was provided to ‘journalists and researchers’ by Distributed Denial of Secrets, an activist group hosting the information,” the report stated.

Several big publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, ran stories last week that were all based on leaked information that analyzed the origins of the funding the Freedom Convoy has been receiving. Both of these outlets ended up publishing the names of Freedom Convoy donors and then reported that they contacted the small-dollar donors as part of their investigation into their contributions to the protest effort.

The Daily Caller attempted to reach out to the NY Times, but received no answer. The Post, however, defended its report.

“We were reporting on a matter of public interest and reached out to people listed in the data in order to confirm its authenticity,” Shani George, the Post’s vice president of Communications, went on to say to the DCNF in a statement.

“The Intercept published two stories Thursday based on the data, the first examining a $100 donation reportedly made by former Canadian politician Richard Ciano. The Intercept alleged Ciano, who denied donating to the Freedom Convoy, may have in fact made a small contribution, citing the hacked data,” WND reported.

“The Intercept did not contact individual donors because we did not identify them, except where that information was newsworthy, such as in the case of Silicon Valley billionaire Thomas Siebel or prominent political operative Richard Ciano, who apparently wasn’t telling the truth when he told the media that he did not donate,” a spokesperson for The Intercept went on to tell the DCNF in a statement released Friday.

Local newspapers have also started to do their own digging into this data and message donors too, publishing individual names that were included on the list. Delaware Online recently published a story that named a high-level officer of the Delaware Transit Corporation after the person’s name appeared in the data leak. This publication also did not respond to requests for a comment from the Daily Caller.

“Salt Lake Tribune political correspondent Bryan Schott, who wrote an article analyzing the leaked data to identify Utah donors by zip code, tweeted he had ‘reaching out to people from Utah who appeared on the leaked Canadian trucker donation data,’ characterizing the responses he received as ‘aggressive.’ He deleted the tweet after receiving harsh criticism on social media,” the WND report said.

Schott then declined to provide further comment after being reached by the DCNF, but did offer an apology in a tweet thread last Thursday, stating it was “not my intention” to “cause any grief or upset.”

“Several Canadian outlets such as the Toronto Star and Global News have also published stories in which they contacted small-dollar donors and published contributors’ names, the DCNF previously reported,” WND stated.

Many prominent figures in both the media and political spheres have slammed the publication and messaging of small-dollar donors, including controversial Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who tore into a journalist for reporting on the harassment of an Ottawa business owner.

“I fail to see why any journalist felt the need to report on a shop owner making such a insignificant donation rather than to get them harassed,” Omar said in a tweet. “It’s unconscionable and journalists need to do better.”

“Several individuals whose names appeared in the donor lists have reported experiencing harassment and negative consequences; Tammy Giuliani, who donated $250 to the Freedom Convoy fundraiser, was forced to close her gelato store after receiving threats of violence over her donation. Marion Isabeau-Ringuette, communications director for the Ontario Solicitor General, is no longer employed in the state government after her donation to the Freedom Convoy was revealed, according to Toronto CityNews,” the report concluded.

Copyright 2022. RallyingPatriots.com

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