In recent years, far-right and other extremist causes have typically found it difficult to fundraise through online donations. This is largely due to deplatforming efforts, particularly after the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, during which a white supremacist killed a young woman. In response, digital platforms and infrastructure companies made concerted efforts to deny extremists access to fundraising tools. Several retaliatory but short‐lived crowdfunding sites were created, such as the antisemitic GoyFundMe and Hatreon (pronounced hate¬reon). These intentionally antagonistic platforms soon became defunct, usually after payment processors and hosting providers refused services. But what about fundraising campaigns where underlying extremist motives are more difficult to discern? Or where a crowdfunding platform stakes its reputation not on careful stewardship of content to avoid complicity in extremist harms but rather on their refusal to make such determinations, instead privileging ‘free speech’ above all other concerns? These dilemmas arose during the 2022 Freedom Convoy, a month-long occupation of downtown Ottawa where hundreds of truck drivers and other participants created blockades that brought the city to a standstill. Though ostensibly assembled to protest vaccine mandates for truckers crossing the Canada‐US border, the protests rapidly evolved into a broader movement against all COVID‐19 mandates. Concerns were heightened by the organizers’ close association with far‐right interests. As the occupiers swelled into the thousands, fears grew that violence could erupt in ways comparable with the January 6 US Capitol insurrection. The Freedom Convoy was supported via crowdfunding, with campaigns on GoFundMe and GiveSendGo raising enormous sums and attracting donors worldwide. Amid criticisms of their complicity in aiding extremism, GoFundMe and GiveSendGo adopted radically different stances, reflecting a growing and concerning divide between ‘Big Tech’ and ‘Alt Tech’ platforms. In our study, ‘Crowdfunding platforms as conduits for ‘ideological struggle and extremism’, we addressed the following questions: How do crowdfunding sites maintain their legitimacy as ‘open’ platforms while avoiding complicity with divisive, injurious, or even outright violent…