A massive effort spearheaded by a censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is looking to incorporate global pressure to push Big Tech platforms to juice their censorship operations before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Free Press, a Soros-funded media group that claimed responsibility for helping get former President Donald Trump banned from Twitter, is at the helm of a new push to restrict free speech online. “More Than 200 Groups Urge Leading Tech Platforms to Implement Election-Integrity Policies to Protect Democracy Worldwide,” Free Press blared in its Apr. 9 press release on a new co-signed letter by groups around the world.
In the letter, the anti-free speech groups raged at social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X) and YouTube for reducing “interventions necessary to keep online platforms” allegedly “safe and healthy” and demanded “swift action” to protect so-called democracy. MRC research unveiled that at least 45 of the signatories have had their coffers packed with Soros cash to the tune of a whopping $80,757,329 between 2016 and 2022 alone.
The letter was distributed to top executives at Big Tech platforms at Discord, Google, Instagram, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Rumble, Snap, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter).
The document attempted to justify that it was written with reducing “real-world harms” and “the rise of extremism and violent attempts to overthrow democratic governments” in mind. However, it appears that its true design is to pressure Big Tech companies to silence disagreeable speech the left despises as 60 countries across the globe gear up for their elections in 2024. But even more disturbing was the letter’s implication that its primary target is interfering in the 2024 U.S. election. This development is directly in line with Soros’ brand, who has dedicated millions of his ungodly fortune to groups looking to interfere in elections by stifling online speech.
The first of six so-called “interventions” called for by the coalition involve investment “in greater platform integrity by reinstating election-integrity policies, inclusive of moderating content around the Big Lie,” which the Soros-funded co-signatory William J. Brennan Center for Justice defined as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The letter also condescended how in “2020, Black people and other people of color, women, and non-English speakers were — and continue to be — disproportionately targeted with online election lies.” The statement linked out to an Associated Press article pertaining specifically to so-called 2020 election “disinformation” in the U.S. election and how 2024 will be allegedly “worse.”
Nora Benavidez, the senior counsel and director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press, railed in a statement, “‘The tech industry’s refusal to safeguard their platforms is already having a dangerous impact on democracies around the world.’” Her disingenuous pontificating ended in hyperbole: “‘Today, hundreds of civil-society groups are putting these companies on notice: Failure to uphold and enforce sound election-integrity policies and expand non-English staffing to monitor disinformation, political deepfakes and other harmful content will be catastrophic to free and fair elections worldwide.’”
The explicit push for speech controls is especially disturbing in light of the stated vision of one of Free Press’s founders.
Leftist Free Press co-founder Robert W. McChesney once made a Marxist call to action in 2000 to “overhaul” the American press: “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.” He published his comments in the Monthly Review, a self-described “independent socialist magazine.” It appears Free Press is living up to its founder’s principles.
The signatory that received the most Soros funding in MRC’s tally was none other than the climate change-obsessed Global Witness, which is already on record pressuring Facebook and TikTok to increase censorship operations before the 2022 midterm elections. The Soros empire funded the group with a massive $20,338,270 between 2016 and 2022. The group’s “digital threats” campaign, for example, is specifically focused on pressuring governments to regulate speech on social media. “The Big Tech companies are not too big to be made to change, and change does not rely on significant numbers of us having to stop using the digital products these companies provide,” Global Witness claimed.
Another one of the more dangerous groups listed in the letter is the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which received $3,149,863 from Soros between 2017 and 2022. The leftist group was recently exposed in a House Judiciary Committee investigation for co-authoring a “hate groups” blacklist with the Soros-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI) targeting “conservative” and faith-based organizations. This list was later disseminated by law enforcement to several financial institutions. The discovery was part of a broader congressional investigation that uncovered federal law enforcement circulating documents to private financial institutions to jawbone them into giving up sensitive customer data. The customers caught up in the federal dragnet didn’t even necessarily have to be suspected of committing any crimes. ISD disturbingly lists the U.S. Department of State and Department of Homeland Security as funders.
The fact that Free Press is at the tip of this Soros-tied spear should concern every American. Free Press’s obsession with censorship and gaining control of the Internet cannot be overstated. This is the same group that boasted how it was “involved in direct talks that pressured Google and Amazon to boot the dangerous” pro-free speech platform Parler from their platforms because of so-called “election lies.”
Free Press’s 2015 annual report celebrated how it was also responsible for influencing the Obama-era FCC into adopting draconian “Net Neutrality” rules that arbitrarily sanctioned massive government regulation of the Internet. Free Press praised how the FCC reportedly cited the Soros-funded organization “close to 70 times” in its final order on the matter. The adopted FCC rules empowered government officials to review, approve or reject Internet service provider rates. What they actually did, according to the Cato Institute, was guarantee “ISPs government enforced market protection and profitability, in exchange for regulators ensuring that ISPs won’t be too profitable.” In other words, the FCC rules proposed by former President Barack Obama and Free Press in 2015 sought to regulate the Internet as a public utility. Then-FCC commissioner Ajit Pai stated that the move gave the agency “broad and unprecedented discretion to micromanage the Internet,” in a 2015 press release on the proposed rules.
Americans beware. The Soros network is coming after your free speech just in time for the U.S. elections — again.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
