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 created the Knight Research Network, which became a major bankroller of the censorship industry.
- The Knight Research Network poured more than $100 million into a variety of organizations known for their deep roles in online censorship, including the Global Disinformation Index, Meedan, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
- Knight also targeted swing states in 2024 to “fortify the election.”
- Its recommendations include deeper government oversight of the tech sector, “nonpartisan expert” advice to lawmakers on tech matters, and nationwide “digital and media literacy” lessons in schools.
For over seven decades, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was regarded as one of America’s nonpartisan philanthropic giants — a champion of journalism, civic life, and the arts. But in the last decade, the foundation that once funded local newsrooms and journalism schools has transformed into one of the most powerful underwriters of the censorship industry, funding a sprawling network of researchers, activists, and institutions that work to police speech under the banner of “disinformation.”
Founded in 1950 by newspaper magnates John S. and James L. Knight, the foundation began as a traditional journalism philanthropy, endowing university fellowships at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and MIT. By 2023, it managed $2.6 billion in assets, with offices in 26 U.S. cities where the Knight brothers once published papers.
The USAID Partnership
In 2010, the Knight Foundation took a step beyond America’s borders — hand in hand with USAID, the now-shuttered arm of the U.S. influence around the world, and one of the federal government’s foremost suppliers of “counter-disinformation” dollars.
That was the year Knight joined a public-private partnership with USAID called the MATADOR (Media Assistance Utilizing Technological Advancements and Direct Online Response) program, training NGOs across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa in media, get-out-the-vote, and anti-corruption campaigns.
The program was launched months before the outbreak of the Arab Spring, when US overseas influence operations were at an all time high.
According to US State Department archives, the MATADOR program focused on “election monitoring, distribution of unbiased election news and information, encouraging youth participation in politics, getting out the vote, and engaging the public in monitoring corruption.”
This, especially the language on influencing the flow of news and information and get-out-the-vote campaigns, echoes the language used by Western-backed influence operations aimed at influencing political outcomes overseas.
Following the 2016 election, that same model of information control and influence turned inwards against the American citizenry — and the Knight Foundation was at the heart of it.
The Knight Research Network: $107 Million for “Disinformation Studies”
By 2019, the overwhelming priority of the Knight Foundation was fighting domestic disinformation. The new Knight Research Network distributed $107 million in grants across more than 60 academic and civil-society groups, including many of the most controversial players in what has come to be known as the “censorship-industrial complex”
Recipients included:
Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, whose early research on “Russia linked bots” helped fuel the Russiagate narrative.
University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, a founding member of the DHS-created Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) that coordinated censorship of 2020 election content.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which pressured advertisers to boycott conservative media.
Meedan, a U.S.-government-backed nonprofit that built surveillance and censorship technology for use on private messaging platforms like WhatsApp, and worked directly with government censors in Brazil.
The German Marshall Fund, creators of the “Hamilton 69” dashboard that branded American citizens as Russian propagandists.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, home to the Influence Operations Researchers Guild, whose members advocate global restrictions on online speech.
- In 2024, Knight specifically targeted media investment at swing states – to “fortify the election.”
Trump’s Election Could Cause “American Democracy to Come to an End”
A snapshot of Knight’s attitudes towards domestic speech can be found in the recent public statements of its network of “experts,” like Knight First Amendment Institute contributor Richard Hasen, whose 2022 book Cheap Speech called for greater tech censorship against Donald Trump and similar figures.
In 2021, Hasen can even be found arguing for government laws in the U.S. to prohibit contested elections:
And one of the most difficult questions concerns Trump’s post-election conduct: Is falsely claiming an election was stolen or rigged something that the government may prohibit? The question is a close one, and it is one with which I continue to wrestle. If such a law is permissible, it must be because such a law is necessary to protect the integrity of future elections and democracy more generally.
In an online panel, moderated by Knight First Amendment Institute litigation director Alex Abdo, Hasen is quoted as claiming “we face a serious risk that American democracy, as we know it, will come to an end in 2024.”
Elsewhere in the appearance, Hasen expresses concern that the Supreme Court (and, by extension, the First Amendment) could get in the way of regulating speech on tech platforms.
“I worry that the Supreme court is going to be an impediment to effectively countering disinformation should Congress get its act together and actually try to pass some laws to do that.”
In another comment underscoring the partisan nature of the discussion, Hasen notes “you can’t separate out this issue from the current political moment and how trumpism depends in particular on spreading misinformation.”
The Knight First Amendment Institute: Controlling Online Speech in the Name of Freedom
Knight’s most audacious creation came in 2016: the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Ostensibly devoted to defending free speech, the Institute has become a hub for scholars and former officials arguing for government-managed information environments.
Its fellows and affiliates — including Yoel Roth (former Twitter Trust & Safety chief), Richard Hasen (UCLA law professor and author of Cheap Speech), and Dean Jackson (January 6 Committee investigator) — have repeatedly argued that restricting so-called online misinformation, particularly from the populist right, is necessary to safeguard democracy.
In congressional testimony, the Institute’s litigation director Alex Abdo stated that while the First Amendment forbids coercion, it “does not preclude the government from trying to persuade private actors to embrace its views.” In effect, this is a legal defense of the very “jawboning” practices — informal government pressure on platforms.
The “First Amendment” institute also slammed Mark Zuckerberg for ending Meta’s fact-checking programming, bemoaning that tech billionaires were not more “accountable”:
“Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement today is a stark reminder that many of the biggest platforms we use to communicate about issues of public importance are owned by billionaires who are not accountable to us. Apart from the obvious effort to signal political allegiance, the impact of the announced changes will not be clear for some time. But if we have any hope of measuring or understanding what is happening on these platforms, we need strong protections for the independent researchers and journalists who study them, and better mechanisms for ensuring they can access platform data.”
The Knight Commission: Censorship Rebranded as “Trust”
In 2017, the Knight Foundation joined the Aspen Institute to launch the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy. Its 2019 report, Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America, called for a national “digital literacy” program to re-educate Americans about misinformation, expanded “platform accountability,” and “AI-powered fact-checking systems.”
The report made no secret of its antipathy to the first Trump Administration, stating:
“The Commission is particularly concerned that the current presidential administration [Trump] has repeatedly attacked the integrity of much of the press, independent of issues with particular articles or reporters.”
and:
“Before presenting our recommendations to increase trust in the news media, this Commission would be remiss to ignore the explicit antipathy the President of the United States has expressed towards much of the press.”
The nationwide push for “digital and media literacy” would later gain the backing of the federal government under the Biden Administration
From the Department of Homeland Security’s 2021 guide on Media Literacy & Critical Thinking Online
In 2019, the federal support was not yet there –and the Knight Foundation’s report urged for this to change. Among its more ambitious goals was a “moonshot” plan: ensuring all children under 13 were trained in digital literacy before joining social media — effectively a pre-indoctrination curriculum against dissenting narratives.
The Knight report also recommended consensus-building for policymakers, including the revival of a centralized congressional office to provide expert tech advice to lawmakers of both parties — a vehicle for shaping the entire US Congress’ views on tech matters.
The Commission also recommended closer partnerships between Big Tech and news organizations to identify and suppress “divisive content,” as well as new systems to let advertisers block “noxious content” — and the report pointed to NewsGuard as an example of this approach.
Finally, the report called for the active involvement of the government in dictating best practices for social media companies, “consistent with the First Amendment,” including discussions around the critical liability protection offered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1990s law that allows platforms to host third-party content without being legally liable for it.
The report calls for “representatives of all sectors” to work together on best practices for tech platforms — a precursor to what would become known as the “whole-of-society” approach to combating disinformation: the combination of tech, media, academia, nonprofits, and government agencies working in unison to censor political speech.
