SUMMARY The Knight Foundation is one of the most well resourced philanthropic organizations in the United States, with $2.6 billion in assets as of 2023. The Foundation is tied to the foreign policy blob — in the 2010s it entered a public-private partnership with USAID to facilitate influence operations abroad. After the 2016 election, it…
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SUMMARY Less than two months before the 2024 presidential election, Georgetown University hosted an online panel titled “Is Democracy a Democratic Form of Government?” Panelists included the vice president of research at Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-funded nonprofit tracking “democratization” and freedom worldwide. Freedom House received approximately $80 million from the U.S. taxpayer in…
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Beneath Wikipedia’s public brand of crowdsourced objectivity lies a troubling reality: a cadre of ideologically driven editors wielding deletion powers to suppress content that challenges dominant narratives. Recent attempts to erase pages on sensitive topics reveal a pattern of bias, one that undermines free speech and distorts historical records. From downplaying violent crimes to silencing…
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SUMMARY Wikipedia has recently been in the spotlight for its political bias, facing interrogation from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), in addition to a spate of news coverage highlighting the online encyclopedia’s political bias. Multiple investigations have confirmed that Wikipedia is run by a tiny clique of mostly-anonymous editors, with 1 percent of users responsible for…
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In the early days of the platform censorship era, the favored approach was relatively blunt: ban big accounts, remove posts, issue takedowns of disfavored narratives, or suspend users whose content crossed certain lines. As this approach has become unpopular, the censorship industry now aims for something more insidious: rather than outright removing speech, the new…
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Set up in 2024, the Knight-Georgetown Institute is a relatively new addition to the global maze of “counter-disinformation” hubs working to influence the design and content moderation practices of social media platforms. As FFO recently exposed, the Institute aims to fight “toxicity” and “disinformation” in part by connecting disinformation researchers to lawmakers — it is…
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SUMMARY The Knight Foundation has a long history of bankrolling online censorship using the pretext of combating “disinformation,” including efforts targeted at swing states in 2024 to “fortify the election.” The Knight-Georgetown Institute has become a hub for big names in the disinformation industry, including James Baker, the FBI’s Russiagate lawyer and formerly chief counsel…
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Emails obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that despite knowing that COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and side-effects were still an open question, CDC officials under the previous administration were still determined to paint concerns about the jab as “misinformation” as late as 2024. In a virtual meeting on January 9, 2024, CDC public…
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Editor’s note – following publication of this report, a representative of the Carnegie Endowment reached out to confirm that their senior fellow, Rachel Kleinfeld, had been falsely quoted by Reuters as attributing the assassin’s motivations to the far-right or groypers. Reuters has now acknowledged the error, removed the false quote, and issued a correction at…
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The European Union is on the verge of enacting one of the most sweeping surveillance regimes in the West, under the benign-sounding pretext of child protection. The legislation—dubbed Chat Control by critics—would force messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram to scan every private message sent on their platforms, destroying the concept of encryption and…
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