A senior researcher recently brought on board by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — a group responsible for spending nearly half a billion dollars during the 2020 cycle to pave the way for a Joe Biden win — previously served on the steering committee of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Since May, Megahn Urisko has worked at the philanthropic group created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Her LinkedIn profile boasts of her membership with the communist-aligned DSA. Although it is not clear whether Urisko still holds a leadership role within the organization, it appears she is still an active member, even while working as a Senior User Experience Researcher for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
According to Urisko’s own tweets from September 3, she identified herself as a “”dues paying member” of the Los Angeles and national chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America while criticizing the group for its failure to honor a vote.
One of the top recipients of grant money from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which used those funds to overrule local election officials and maximize voter turnout in blue districts throughout the country.
The Amistad Project wrote that CTCL “used the money to illegally inflate turnout in key Democratic swing states as part of this effort.”
Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta and was at the heart of the accusations of fraud in the 2020 election, was one locality whose board of commissioners voted to accept a $6.3 million grant as part of CTCL’s “Safe Elections” project. The commission did not ask any questions about the name of the group providing the funding, the money’s origin, or the details of what the funding would be used for.
Additional dark-money organizations involved in the effort to “privatize elections” were The Democracy Fund, New Venture Fund, Skoll Foundation, and The Knight Foundation. CTCL — along with the Center for Electronic Innovation Research, the Center for Civic Design, the National Vote at Home Institute, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and Rock the Vote — played a crucial role in the distributing these funds.
Tiana Epps-Johnson, CTCL’s founder, is a former fellow at the Chinese state-funded Ash Center, which has advised officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who have been sanctioned for human-rights abuses by the U.S. government.
The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, housed within the Harvard Kennedy School, is funded by several Chinese Communist Party-backed entities. One donor to the Ash Center is China Southern Power Grid Corp, which has a management board directly appointed by China’s central government.
Another source of funding for the Ash Center is New World China Enterprises Project, a Chinese firm with a board made up almost entirely of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members. In fact, the company’s chairman and executive director, Cheng Kar-Shun, served as a standing committee member of China’s Political Consultative Conference, an arm of the regime that conducts Chinese influence operations.
Moreover, The Ash Center has regularly published studies amplified by Chinese state-run media outlets and government officials.
Facebook has a long record of not only silencing right-of-center points of view on its platform, but of also hiring individuals whose track records indicate a left-wing bias.
Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who currently serves on Pfizer Inc.’s board of directors, was previously the Lead Independent Director at Facebook, which has frequently censored user content related to the coronavirus outbreak and vaccines. She was also CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014-2020.
As The New American reported, Martin Sanchez, a software engineer at Facebook who develops algorithms for the social media service, spent seven years as a government official in Venezuela and even created a website to promote the ideals of former socialist dictator Hugo Chávez.
Then there’s Lead Stories, a platform that partners with Facebook to “fact-check” content. While Lead Stories describes itself as “a web-based fact-checking platform that identifies false or misleading stories, rumors, and conspiracies,” many of its leadership team and staff are Democrat Party donors and former CNN employees.
A recent poll by Axios and the Illinois Institute of Technology.found that 75 percent of Americans think the major tech companies are “too big” and 71 percent said “there should be public oversight in use of algorithms.”
