AmazonSmile’s Demise Exposed the Risk of SPLC Gatekeeping

The Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center should force a broader reckoning over how much power corporations gave one activist group to police the nonprofit world. The charges are allegations, and SPLC is entitled to defend itself in court. But the indictment raises a basic question that conservatives have been asking for years: why was SPLC treated as a trusted gatekeeper for charities, platforms, and public debate in the first place?

DOJ Alleges SPLC Misused Donor Funds

According to the Justice Department, a federal grand jury charged SPLC with wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. DOJ alleges that between 2014 and 2023, SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, National Alliance, National Socialist Movement, American Front, and others.

The Justice Department says the alleged scheme involved donated money that supporters believed would be used to fight violent extremism. Instead, DOJ alleges SPLC used covert accounts and fictitious entities to disguise payments to individuals tied to the very groups SPLC publicly denounced.

Those are serious allegations. They do not establish guilt. But they do make it impossible to ignore the larger problem: SPLC spent years shaping reputations, influencing platforms, and helping decide which nonprofits were treated as legitimate.

Amazon Gave SPLC Gatekeeping Power

The AmazonSmile program showed how far that influence reached. AmazonSmile allowed customers to direct a share of eligible purchases to charities of their choice. But as Fox Business reported, Amazon relied in part on SPLC to determine which organizations were excluded under rules barring groups that promoted terrorism, violence, or hatred.

Conservatives warned at the time that this gave SPLC too much power over charitable giving. A shareholder proposal asked Amazon to examine whether its use of SPLC as a gatekeeper led to viewpoint discrimination against right-leaning organizations. Amazon shareholders rejected the proposal, and the company declined to revisit the relationship in any meaningful way.

That was the wrong call then, and it looks even worse now.

Conservative Nonprofits Were Treated as Suspect

Amazon was only one example of a much larger problem: SPLC’s labels carried real consequences for lawful nonprofits that depended on access to donors, platforms, and basic institutional trust. When corporations, payment processors, platforms, or charitable programs outsource judgment to SPLC, they do not merely adopt a neutral screening tool. They hand reputational power to an ideological organization with a long record of targeting mainstream conservative groups.

Innocent conservative 501(c)(3) organizations should never have been forced to clear an activist group’s political filter to participate in charitable programs. Donors should have been free to support lawful nonprofits without SPLC standing between them and their chosen causes.

Corporate America Should Stop Outsourcing Judgment

Companies should make their own judgments instead of handing nonprofit eligibility, speech rules, or reputational decisions to activist organizations with political incentives. If a charity is lawful, tax-exempt, and in good standing, corporations should not quietly exclude it because a controversial outside group placed it on a blacklist.

The Justice Department’s indictment does not settle every question about SPLC, and a court will decide the criminal case. It does, however, show why corporations were wrong to treat SPLC as an unquestioned authority.

CFE Takeaway

AmazonSmile is gone, but the broader issue remains. Corporate America should not use activist groups to decide which lawful charities are acceptable. Donors should choose the nonprofits they support, and companies should stop giving ideological gatekeepers power over charitable giving.