Free Beacon: The Campaign to Pressure Corporations to Boycott Twitter Is Being Funded by, Get This, Leftwing Billionaire and Patron of NeverTrump Pierre Omidyar

Of course.

And once again he's spending money to limit your right to speak -- and read -- freely.

Omidyar, the eBay founder and financial backer of the Intercept and ProPublica, donated $509,500 to Accountable Tech in 2021 and 2022, according to a recently updated list of grants disclosed by Omidyar's foundation. Omidyar also gave $2 million to at least six other organizations that targeted Musk, criticizing him in letters and op-eds as "uniquely ill-suited for the job of running a social media platform" and warning that he would turn Twitter into a "free-for-all of hate and harassment."

The news reveals one of the primary forces behind the anti-Musk campaign. Accountable Tech has been dodging questions about its donors for months. Over the past year, Accountable Tech and other groups bankrolled by Omidyar organized campaigns to pressure corporations to boycott Twitter and issued statements and op-eds denouncing Musk and calling for government investigations into the billionaire. "I wonder who funds them," wrote Musk in May, in response to a Washington Free Beacon report about the organization's secretiveness.

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The Free Beacon reported last year that Accountable Tech--which calls itself a "small nonprofit taking on Big Tech companies"--has no physical footprint and is a registered trade name of the North Fund, a $66 million nonprofit group that uses aliases to push an array of left-wing causes from a shell office in Washington, D.C.

Accountable Tech did not respond to a request for comment.

The North Fund is one of Arabella's many, many dark money front-groups. It's funding "misinformation" research, yet another attempt to squelch any but pro-communist speech.

Arabella Advisors, a consultant firm with ties to the Democratic Party, manages funds that are supporting academic and independent research into online "misinformation," predominantly targeting conservatives' online presence.

Researchers funded by the Arabella network recommended strategies such as censorship as ways to mitigate the spread of "misinformation" and "disinformation."

"Groups like the Arabella network weaponize charitable laws and tax exemption to aid Democratic electoral victories, bypassing the IRS prohibition on electioneering," Hayden Ludwig, senior investigative researcher at Capital Research Center (CRC), a conservative watchdog group researching liberal financial influence, told the DCNF.

Several funds managed by Arabella Advisors, a Democrat-linked consultant firm, are quietly bankrolling research by universities and non-profits into how online "misinformation" and "disinformation" spreads, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of the networks' grants.

Arabella Advisors, run by former Bill Clinton official Eric Kessler, manages certain administrative, legal and philanthropic functions of several non-profits including the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, North Fund and New Venture Fund, which donate to a variety of left-leaning groups, causes and Democratic candidates, according to tax filings and statements on the funds' and Arabella's websites. Several funds within the network are also sponsoring research into the effects of, and how best to mitigate, misinformation and disinformation, according to a DCNF review of public grants.

Many of the Arabella-funded research projects cite conservatives predominantly as purveyors of misinformation, with several projects recommending solutions to mitigate the spread of misinformation, including censorship.

The New Venture Fund sponsored a project in March called "The True Costs of Misinformation" at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, led by the center's research director Joan Donovan, that sought to study the impacts of online misinformation, particularly on "vulnerable communities," according to the project's description. The project included a workshop featuring several panels on different topics related to the alleged impacts of misinformation.

A presentation titled "What Is Driving Conservativism's Post-Democratic Turn in America?" by Steven Feldstein at the Carnegie Council ostensibly examined the impact of misinformation on the perceived "anti-democratic" attitudes espoused by conservatives in the U.S., according to the workshop agenda.

"How did American conservatives reach a point where their main political messages are either blatantly anti-democratic or outright falsehoods?" the presentation's description read, alleging that "political partisanship" in the U.S. was "largely stoked by conservative propaganda and disinformation."

One panel entirely focused on strategies for "misinformation mitigation," with presentations from researchers at the University of Washington and Google, among other places, according to the workshop agenda. The strategies included legislative action to alter election laws to curb election misinformation, and "psychological inoculation" against dis- and misinformation.

Another presentation sought to figure out ways to demonetize sites promoting "divisive disinformation on COVID" at "the industry or policy level," according to the workshop agenda.

The Shorenstein Center did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment.

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The North Fund, another Arabella affiliate, is behind a group called Accountable Tech that, among pro-antitrust activism and support for privacy regulations for tech companies, researches and advocates against online misinformation; Accountable Tech is a registered trade name of the North Fund, according to the North Fund's business filings. The group organized a pressure campaign targeting advertisers to boycott Twitter amid Elon Musk's takeover of the platform, citing the threat of misinformation, among other concerns. The North Fund declined to comment to The Washington Free Beacon, who also reported on this link, but said that it "follows all disclosure requirements related to the disclosure of individual donors and grantees."

Does it? Because it's only now forced to admit it's being funded by Omidyar. (This article is from 2022.)

I digested this very good Tablet Mag article about Arabella and its fake "grassroots" front-groups, the locus of all leftwing dark money evil.

Back to the Free Beacon's scoop: Omidyar doesn't just want Musk made so poor he's forced to sell off Twitter -- he wants him legally harassed and prosecuted.

The Open Markets Institute, a group that raked in $900,000 from Omidyar, sent a letter in November asking the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to investigate Musk's purchase of Twitter.

In April, Data for Progress--a group that took $365,000 from Omidyar--called out Musk on Twitter for allegedly paying "$0 in federal income taxes in 2018." That grant was also removed from the Omidyar Network following Free Beacon inquiries.

That lie sounds familiar.

And in November, the director of Fight for the Future, which received $95,000 from Omidyar, published a column in Time magazine calling on activists to stop using Twitter and switch to competing platforms.

Earlier this month, Omidyar was also listed as a sponsor of the Digital Content Next Summit. The trade association, which represents mainstream media outlets, is run by Jason Kint, one of Musk's most vocal critics.

In December, Kint warned that he would have Musk "hauled in front of Congress" if the Twitter owner didn't restore the accounts of several journalists who had been suspended for posting public information about the billionaire's jet. The Omidyar Network told the Free Beacon that it paid $35,000 to sponsor the summit.

Meanwhile, the other Satanic Socialist Mega-Donor George Soros suffered from a super-Biden, near-Fetterman cognitive fault while reading a speech.

No wonder he's such a big supporter of Joe Biden.

Unfortunately his passing will not greatly diminish his capacity for evil -- his son is the deputy manager of the Open Society fund, and has the same evil agenda as Soros.

posted by Ace at 03:11 PM

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