If leftists are so confident they can easily win the political debate in the realm of ideas, why do they work so hard to silence opposing opinions?
A major network of pro-Democratic news websites launched a petition aimed at taking Donald Trump off of Twitter and Facebook, even as the latter platform only recently announced that it would soon be reinstating the 45th president.
Courier Newsroom sent out a link to the petition Thursday to recipients of its email list.
“After years of using social media platforms to spread disinformation, incite violence, and ultimately, ignite a deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021 — Former President Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter,” the petition reads. “We cannot allow him to rejoin these platforms and spread more hateful, inaccurate information. Sign the petition now to keep Trump off of Facebook and Twitter.”
Both platforms banned Trump in January of 2021. Twitter, under the new leadership of Elon Musk, reinstated Trump back in November, although the Republican presidential candidate has not yet posted on the platform, preferring to use his own social media site, Truth Social.
Facebook, meanwhile, just announced the reversal of the ban on Thursday, stating Trump would be allowed back “in the coming weeks.”
The petition sent out to Courier Newsroom subscribers was circulated by Blue Amp Action, a Democratic consulting firm with a record of working on several campaigns, including performing $230,000 worth of media-productive services for Joe Biden in 2020.
Clearly, keeping Trump off two of the largest social media platforms would be a boost to whoever ends up being the Democratic presidential candidate. And this is exactly what the powers behind Courier Newsroom want. The network may put on the facade of news, but in reality it is a propaganda front for the Democratic Party.
One of the top financial backers behind Courier Newsroom is Laurene Powell Jobs (the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs), who has become a major Democratic donor in recent years and has poured money into Courier Newsroom through Acronym, the leftist dark money group that funded the news network. Acronym ultimately divested its stake in the company in 2021.
As the Washington Free Beacon reports:
In October 2021, the progressive billionaire George Soros and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman formed an organization called Good Information, Inc. The group acquired Courier Newsroom, which operates websites designed to look like legitimate local news publications. Soros, the Democratic [P]arty’s biggest donor, gave $1.2 million to Courier Newsroom through his Open Society Foundations in 2021 to support the group’s “non-partisan journalism.”
While Courier Newsroom aims to root out political disinformation online, Hoffman has funded multiple projects that used disinformation to help elect Democrats. In 2017, he funded a project in which tech firms created fake social media personas in order to suppress Republican voter turnout in Alabama’s 2017 special Senate election.
Notably, Courier Newsroom isn’t the only Soros-funded group to press Facebook to keep its ban on Trump.
There’s also Media Matters for America, which together with Accountable Tech has created a campaign known as “Keep Trump Off Facebook.” Soros gave Media Matters for America $500,000 in 2021.
Then there’s the left-wing activist site MoveOn.org, which received $450,000 from Soros in 2021. MoveOn.org has gone so far as to purchase ads on Facebook to spread its petition to prevent Trump from getting back on the platform.
According to MoveOn.org’s petition, Trump “propagated lies about the election results, sought to overturn the outcome and seize power, and stirred up the violent attack on the Capitol.… In the intervening years, Trump has continued to lie about the election results, share propaganda from white supremacists, and pedal [sic] QAnon conspiracy theories. And as the January 6 committee has made clear, his actions were part of an intentional, willful effort to hold power and overturn the rightful election of President Biden.”
Courier Newsroom is known for being a purveyor of pink slime journalism — a practice in which an organization publishes low-quality local news stories as a cover for mixing in ideological, party propaganda. Publishers of pink slime journalism do this to take advantage of readers’ trust in local news as being more reliable than national outlets.
Courier Newsroom was founded by Tara McGowan, who formerly worked for the Obama campaign and for the left-wing SuperPAC Priorities USA. It is a well-oiled machine; as of 2020, the network had a staff of 60 reporters and 12 editors, with approximately 300 videos and articles being published per week.
The organization raised $15 million in just the first half of 2022 — from donors including Soros and Hoffman. Thanks to this cash flow, they were able to spend $5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads to boost the campaigns of Democrats.
In fact, the tactics of Courier Newsroom prompted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to institute a new policy limiting the reach of partisan sites and reducing — though not eliminating — their ad buying.
Biden is doing his part to try to keep right-of-center speech off of social media. As The New American has reported, the White House under Biden is awarding over $550,000 in public grant money to create an AI model that would be used in rapidly detecting “microaggressions” across social media.
The grant was made through Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and gives researchers at the University of Washington the funds to develop a technology capable of reading through social media content to identify “implicit bias” and microaggressions, the latter being defined, per the standards of a former University of Washington research project, as language that might offend members of “marginalized” (read: “non-Christian, non-white”) groups.
Clearly, the Left knows they cannot win fairly in the intellectual public square. It’s all the more reason for proponents of Americanism to continue spreading constitutionalist principles on every medium available.
