Black Lives Matter has officially been kicked off of Amazon’s charity platform, AmazonSmile, after the company claimed that the radical organization failed to meet its standards of a “good standing” charity, following controversy about the organization about its failure to disclose how it spent millions of dollars donated in past years from groups, corporations, and individuals.
Black Lives Matter was first reported as having been removed from AmazonSmile on Wednesday when the retail conglomerate unlisted the organization as an option for their charity donation system.
AmazonSmile is a program that automatically donates 0.5% of eligible purchases made through the site to a charity of the user’s choice. Users simply need to do their shopping using the address “smile.amazon.com” and the donation is made at no extra cost to the customer. There are almost a million public charitable organizations to choose from, but BLM is no longer one of them.
BLM has also fallen out of compliance as a charity in several U.S. states, with the organization voluntarily ending their online fundraising back in early February after Washington and California threatened them with legal action for failing to report their expenses in the latter half of 2020.
BLM is also out of compliance with its legal obligations in Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maine.
Because of its failure to properly behave as a charitable organization, the group is not eligible to receive donations through Amazon’s Smile service.
This isn’t the first time that Amazon banned questionable charities from its site. In 2021, the company banned several groups that were suspected of being responsible for escalating the January 6 Capitol riot.
Amazon said at the time that their Smile program was not open to: “organizations that engage in, support, encourage, or promote intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence, money laundering, or other illegal activities are not eligible.”
BLM collected over $10 billion in donations from across the globe since 2020, but nobody has any idea how most of the money got spent.
Author: James King
