Texas billionaire John Arnold joined the board of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Arnold has donated millions of dollars to organizations dedicated to censoring “disinformation,” which usually takes the form of stifling the free speech rights of Americans.
Meta announced in mid-February that Arnold has joined the company’s board of directors. Arnold founded and co-chairs Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing criminal justice and others issues. The move is concerning because of Arnold’s apparent dedication to censorship of what he believes is “misinformation” as America approaches a presidential election.
Mark Zuckerberg is already making changes to the Facebook algorithm that diminish news in favor of lighter content, and adding a censorship zealot to the board may forecast his strategy to impact the 2024 election in favor of the Democrats.
Texas Billionaire John Arnold and his wife Laura (Arnold Ventures)
As the Washington Examiner detailed, Arnold Ventures has given $13.7 million to five groups dedicated to combat alleged disinformation, which often up targeting free speech as part of larger censorship machine.
As former Breitbart News report Allum Bokhari explained:
Enormous in scope, the censorship machine that has made a mockery of the First Amendment was driven by powerful forces that went far beyond the Silicon Valley tech companies themselves — though they are major culprits.
Corporate media companies, billionaire philanthropists and foundations, academics, associations, and the deep state all joined forces to create a vast, international web of organizations that conspired to suppress Americans’ free speech rights, and the free speech of people around the globe in the form of so-called “disinformation” experts.
Arnold Ventures has granted the American Journalism Project (AJP) $9.7 million; the AJP invests in local news and nonprofit groups. “In the absence of trusted news sources, we see targeted disinformation campaigns, including efforts to spread misinformation through social networks and websites masquerading as news brands,” AJP stated on its website.
The group has partnered with the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, which has donated millions of dollars to leftist news outlets.
Arnold Ventures also donated over $13.5 million the New Venture Fund. The New Venture Fund created the Media Democracy Fund, which was reportedly “instrumental” in the leftist push to enact net neutrality regulations during the Obama administration.
Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), a conservative investigative think tank, said of Arnold Ventures: “It’s especially sad to see them backing the left-wing scam of cancel culture camouflaged under the label of fighting misinformation and disinformation.”
Arnold Ventures donated $1.5 million to the Social Science Research Council, a nonprofit group that does social science research. The grants to the council’s Social Media and Democracy Initiative.
The Examiner explained:
The Social Science Research Council operates a project called Mediawell that “curates research and news on digital disinformation and misinformation,” according to its website. Mediawell, for instance, promotes an article on its website that is titled “Fighting an indestructible monster: Journalism’s legitimacy narratives during the Trump Era.”
Mediawell also promotes an Axios article on its website that is titled “Racist ‘white replacement theory’ goes mainstream with Republicans” and a New Yorker piece titled “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory” about right-wing education activist Christopher Rufo.
The council operates the Mercury Project, a $25 million project hand out grants to groups studying alleged misinformation and disinformation related to vaccines and public health.
Arnold’s philanthropic group granted over $1.1 million MapLight, a leftist nonprofit group tracking money and politics in elections. MapLight has released articles on how to tackle “electoral misinformation” and how to “fight disinformation and safeguard elections.”
However, the the president of Maplight has since told the Examiner that the group no longer focuses on disinformation.
Arnold Ventures has donated $500,000 to the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which funds media operations. The group then funded two leftist news outlets, Spotlight PA and Capital B News. Spotlight PA has regularly published articles on misinformation and disinformation.
Arnold Ventures also donated half of a million dollars to Global Witness, a nonprofit which published a study on “election disinformation” in the U.S. The group also called on TikTok, Meta, and YouTube increasingly censor ahead of the midterm elections. Another article criticized Meta for not censoring “far-right hate speech” in Norway, as the country was allegedly seeing a rise in “far-right parties.”
These are just a few of the leftist-funded organizations that seek to stifle free speech in the name of combatting alleged disinformation and misinformation.
Organizations that Arnold doesn’t have ties to yet act as fellow travelers in the censorship machine include The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a United Kingdom-based think tank, maintains a “Dynamic Exclusion List” used to blacklist conservative media websites.
Dr. Daniel Rogers, a cofounder and executive director of GDI, wrote an op-ed for Time magazine calling for sweeping tech regulations to block Donald Trump or “someone like him” from getting elected.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
