Kiandria Demone, an entrepreneur and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia, with a growing online platform, has become known to, in her own words, “bully racists” off the internet or to stop doing whatever it is they’ve done.
So when followers across her platform began to share the story of Shiloh Hendrix—a white woman from Rochester, Minnesota, who has gone viral for launching a GiveSendGo campaign after footage of her targeting a young Black child with racial slurs on the playground surfaced—Demone looked into the matter. As she scrolled late into the wee hours, instead of seeing another potential opportunity to call someone out, she saw something much more sinister: a company profiting from hate speech.
“I was initially looking for things that were red flags as far as their compliance as a company,” she told theGrio during a recent phone interview. “I started thinking like, this isn’t going to be enough, because they’re just going to fix it and they’re going to keep operating.”
That’s when she remembered the fact that, “there’s a bank somewhere.”
“That’s who has some accountability,” she continued. “The bank can’t just do whatever they want to do. A payment processor they cannot just do whatever they want to do. They have a policy and they have regulations, there are laws, there are people who monitor that, there are people that the payment processor has to answer to.”
The 33-year-old social media disrupter has launched an effort to prevent Hendrix from receiving any money from her campaign on GiveSendGo, which has netted over $600,000. (The ask has since been increased to $1 million.) By directing her nearly 50k followers and all who want to help to put pressure on the fundraising platform and payment processor by making complaints, she hopes to hold them accountable for profiting off of hate.
To determine who the payment processor was, Demone used her tech savvy to break down…
Read the full article here
