[deepsun]

I wonder if bad publicity is still publicity here. The hardest step here is to make people know about the "club". Then a charismatic salesman can persuade whatever. I've seen people being persuaded milk is black, bombs are food etc.

[dmix]

This is probably similar the debate around giving SBF a 'platform', which ultimately did almost nothing to help him, quite the opposite.

In this particular case I doubt it provided much negative press for the scheme (AFAIK, it remained very niche) and the runners probably tried to memoryhole it as soon as possible. The only real gain was probably the run-up to the event where Snowden's name could be attached to it.