Trump used dark patterns to trick supporters into donating millions more than intended

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, he didn’t stop asking his supporters for money. The emails kept coming in. But by the end of his four years in office, according to a new report in The New York Times, they had begun to look an awful lot like a scam.

By June 2020, the Trump campaign had begun using dark patterns, computer interfaces designed to trick users, to automatically sign up campaign contributors to donate far more money than they had intended — recurring monthly donations, recurring weekly donations, even a one-time surprise “money bomb” — by pre-checking the checkboxes for each option, burying the fine print under paragraphs of bold text, and forcing his supporters to wade through it all and opt out if they...

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