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Valerie Plame Wilson Launches GoFundMe to Kick Trump Off Twitter, Garners Few Donations

President Trump
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August 22, 2017

Donations have been slow to roll in for Valeria Plame Wilson's GoFundMe campaign to ban President Donald Trump from Twitter.

Plame Wilson, a former covert CIA operations officer outed in a 2003 leak, created the GoFundMe "Let's #BuyTwitter and #BanTrump" campaign on August 16 with the set goal of $1 billion, the Washington Examiner reported.

Plame Wilson's goal is to garner enough support to buy controlling shares of the social media company and subsequently kick Trump off Twitter.

The vocal Trump critic wants to ban the president from Twitter for what she called his pro-violence rhetoric, but her campaign efforts have been off to a slow start. Wilson has raised a little over $3,000 in five days.

While her ultimate goal is to use the donations to buy a controlling share of Twitter, she would "explore options for buying a significant stake in the company and champion this proposal at the annual shareholder meeting."

Plame Wilson would need to purchase 50 percent, plus one of Twitter's outstanding shares, in order to gain controlling interest of the company. Twitter currently has 731 million outstanding shares with a stock price that has stabilized around 16 cents.

Despite Plame Wilson's $1 billion goal and her statement that "Twitter is a publicly traded company. Shares = power," purchasing controlling interest in Twitter would not be that simple.  A takeout price for Twitter would require some kind of premium to buy out large stakeholders, including Twitter board member Peter Fenton and his VC firm Benchmark, and Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey.

Plame Wilson, however, remains committed.

"Donald Trump has done a lot of horrible things on Twitter," Wilson said on her "Let's #BuyTwitter and #BanTrump" GoFundMe page. "From emboldening white supremacists to promoting violence against journalists, his tweets damage the country and put people in harm's way."

"But threatening actual nuclear war with North Korea takes it to a dangerous new level," Wilson said. "It's time to shut him down."

Should the plan fail, or result in a surplus of funds, Plame Wilson plans to give 100 percent of the campaign proceeds to Global Zero, an anti-nuclear weapons non-profit.