This is, indeed, the correct solution. My favorite example of this comes from the outstanding NearlyFreeSpeech.NET:
What is the “MFFAM” policy?
Because we believe in free speech, we host a small amount of offensive content. Some days, that’s really hard to do. There are views expressed using our service that we find personally repugnant. (Although we don’t host as much of that type of content as one might expect, given our extremely broad Terms & Conditions of Service. The simple fact is that our service is for smart people, which disproportionately excludes people who hold those types of views.)
Nonetheless, our content policy does occasionally put us in a position of accepting money to host sites we find abhorrent. But we have no interest in profiting from sites like that. For that reason, since our founding in 2002, we have what we have more recently started calling the MFFAM policy: Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons.
When we find a repugnant site on our service, we mark the account. We receive reports about all payments to such accounts, and we take a portion of that money larger than the amount of estimated profit and we donate it to the best organization we can find. The best organization in any given case meets two criteria:
The recipient organization does share our values.
The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.
Examples of organizations that have received funding over the years include the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, local chapters of the NAACP, the National Bail Fund Network, the American Immigration Council, the Trevor Project, and others.
This policy isn’t perfect by any means, but neither is the world we live in. MFFAM does let us help the organizations that we hope will eventually get us closer to that perfect world. It helps the people who operate repugnant sites understand that they are here because we tolerate them… barely… not because we endorse them or their views. It also does a pretty decent job of further thinning out the number of such sites, as a fair number of people who run them only believe in free speech when they’re the ones talking.
This is great, but I wonder whether a charity would be allowed to do it. (I took the Good Causes Zvi was talking about to be typically charities.) I gather they’re more constrained than for-profit businesses in how they spend their money, and I don’t know much more than that.
This is, indeed, the correct solution. My favorite example of this comes from the outstanding NearlyFreeSpeech.NET:
This is great, but I wonder whether a charity would be allowed to do it. (I took the Good Causes Zvi was talking about to be typically charities.) I gather they’re more constrained than for-profit businesses in how they spend their money, and I don’t know much more than that.
This is a brilliant policy, thank you for making us aware of it.