NB Blog Feed

NEED A HANKY? Taylor Lorenz Ugly Cries Over Neutral Meta Policy Because It Affects Lefties Too

The Washington Post’s in-house cry-bully Taylor Lorenz apparently only seems to care about Big Tech when its policies affect leftists’ ability to spread their off-the-rails agitprop all over the social media landscape.  Meta announced Feb. 9 that it would be limiting all political content recommended writ large to its user bases on Instagram and Threads. This apparently struck a nerve with Lorenz, who jumped on the news with a Feb. 10 piece of her own lambasting the move as “angering some news creators” who were “gearing up for a crucial election year.” Talk about projection.  Lorenz is apparently still miffed, as her Apr. 10 piece regurgitated the bellyaching of leftist “content creators” pleading for Meta and its subsidiary Instagram in an open letter to “reverse” course, despite it being a neutral policy that affects everyone, both left and right-leaning content creators. The letter was spearheaded by the radical LGBTQ group GLAAD — a drag-queen-shows-for-kids apologist organization — and the anti-free speech leftist group Accountable Tech, which has deep ties to the Democratic Party, which Lorenz failed to disclose.  In 2023, Accountable Tech was “beefing up its team with former Democratic staffers to combat what they call an undermining of the information ecosystem and democracy ahead of next year's elections,” reported Axios at the time.  Accountable Tech’s co-founder, Jesse Lehrich, was a foreign policy spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign. The group’s current chief of staff, Robbie Dornbush, served on then-candidate Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Accountable Tech’s communications director Bianca Recto previously worked for the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in addition to the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign.  Lorenz didn’t bother letting readers know about any of this, but perhaps that’s because in Lorenz’s world, targeting right-leaning content is OK, but a neutral policy that even remotely affects left-leaning content is a foul ball. Hypocrisy much? Lorenz whined that Meta’s new apolitical policy (no pun intended) “alarmed users who post about social issues, including LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, racial inequality and disability.” According to Lorenz, so-called “Independent” journalists and content creators “say they’ve struggled to reach their audiences in recent weeks since the change was rolled out.” Conveniently, nowhere does Lorenz mention that Meta’s new policy affects all sides of the political spectrum, not just the woke, social justice warriors she’s mourning about.  Is Lorenz going to take issue with Meta in light of MRC Free Speech America’s latest study showing that Facebook interfered in U.S. elections to the overwhelming benefit of leftist candidates at least 39 times since 2008? Doubtful. But Lorenz did manage to complain in her April 10 screed that LGBTQ creators were potentially going to be inhibited from promoting sex changes for children. Yes, she actually wrote that: LGBTQ creators have been particularly concerned by the limitations because they were imposed as some states were placing restrictions on medical treatments for transgender youths. It’s a wonder how many more buckets of lefty crocodile tears Lorenz is going to cry before she starts treading water.  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 at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.    

NB Blog Feed

George Soros Fueled $80M Into Groups Calling for Big Tech Censorship in Lead-Up to 2024 Elections

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 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 Speech, 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.  

NB Blog Feed

WATCH: MRC’s Dan Schneider Takes Blowtorch to Election-Interfering Big Tech Giants

MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider blew the lid off the gargantuan election interference that leftist Big Tech platforms have been engaging in for years. During the May 13 edition of The Unusual Suspects podcast, host Rob Garguilo asked Schneider which Big Tech companies are actively suppressing election-related speech. “Every single one of them,” replied Schneider. He added that the leftists in the C-Suites of these censorship-obsessed tech companies, “have the idea that anytime that we disagree with them, that that is disinformation or misinformation or mal-information and harmful to what they think is democracy so we have to be silenced.” Schneider concluded that the “biggest offender” was Google, which was shown through MRC Free Speech America research to have grossly interfered in US elections since 2008.  Schneider broke down some of the MRC’s past findings illustrating specifically how Google has manipulated the U.S. election process to serve its own left-wing political ends. “For about three months we ran about the same two sets of search queries [Republican presidential campaign websites and Democrat presidential campaign websites], and we ran them before each one of the Republican presidential campaign debates.” The results damningly showed that Google actively suppressed President Joe Biden’s political opponents, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But of course, as Schneider analyzed, this is just one of the many glaring examples of Google’s malfeasance. MRC Free Speech America counted no less than 41 times that Google has worked to ensure that its favored leftist candidates won their respective elections.  Schneider stressed that there are “very practical things” citizens could do to fight against Google’s bias. “If you have to use Google, don’t bother with the first page of search results. Go to the second or third page of search results, if you actually want a balanced view.” Schneider also suggested other search engine platforms like Tusk and DuckDuckGo as viable alternatives to the Google monopoly. Garguilo summarized MRC’s Big Tech research as “terrifying when you hear what’s going on with election interference.” He added that part of the problem is a lack of awareness of the issue. “We’ve traded freedoms for ease of convenience,” Garguilo said. “You know why people don’t use DuckDuckGo? It’s not as easy to use as Google. I never even knew Tusk existed. So I’m walking away knowing that now there is a different search engine.”   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.