The whole-of-government approach to limit the spread of purported misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation,” from the White House to federal agencies and their private partners in Big Tech, think tanks and speech-policing organizations, is turning inside out.
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Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon, congratulated President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday for an “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” after he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris.
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The Center for Tech and Civic Life—which four years ago doled out controversial election grants that became known as “Zuckerbucks”—recently notified White Pine County, Nevada, of a $20,000 grant.
The county, in a major battleground state going into the Nov. 5 presidential election, has a population of about 9,000 and is part of what the Left-aligned center calls its Rural and Nonmetro Election Infrastructure Grant Program.
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The recent arrest of Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, has been in the news. Anti-Russian westerners cheered these events on, even though Durov had fled Russia years ago in order to pursue his techno-libertarian dreams in peace. Adding to the intrigue, the arrest may have included an element of treachery, as some reports say he was invited to visit France by French President Emmanuel Macron, only to be arrested on the tarmac. Mon Dieu!
The ostensible basis for Durov’s arrest is criminal responsibility for various unsavory things that have happened on his Telegram platform. This kind of vicarious liability for hosting websites, particularly those involving user communications and forums, is not entirely new, but it is controversial and always applied very selectively.
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As the 2024 election fast approaches, a former State Department official turned free speech advocate told Just the News that the entrenched censorship regime created to police disinformation and misinformation along ideological lines will take considerable work to reverse.
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Meta Platforms CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Monday that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” his team for months in 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, including content from ordinary Americans.
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A left-leaning organization backed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is promoting a $6 million election grant program to “support local election officials” from an influential left-wing nonprofit, The Federalist reported Friday.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) allegedly told election officials to participate in the “A More Responsive Government 2024 Grant Program” associated with the Institute for Responsive Government (IRG), according to emails obtained by The Federalist. The CTCL funneled $350 million to states across the nation in 2020, with Zuckerberg donating $328 million to the organization, according to Influence Watch.
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Money always finds a way. In the years following the 2020 election, dozens of states managed to ban private funding of elections. But even though Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly promised not to pour more of his money into your local election office, this year, the “Zuckbucks” team is recommitted to spreading cash wherever they legally can.
Recall that in late 2020, Zuckerberg directed his charitable arm to pass $350 million through an obscure nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to fund large and small election offices around the nation. Some politically important counties received millions of dollars while others did not. As of today, 28 states have since banned the practice. Despite the bans, the CTCL’s work continues. In fact, the bans guide cash along new paths of least resistance.
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It is less than 90 days to Election Day, and right on queue the group behind the “Zuck Bucks” campaign of 2020 is back with a new scheme. This time, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) is doling out millions in grant dollars to rural election administrators in 19 states.
Election officers beware. The group is trying to turn the government offices that run elections into bastions of partisan progressive activism. Election officials striving for nonpartisanship should steer clear.
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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday accepted Venezuelan authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro’s challenge to fight.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had high praise for former President Trump on Thursday, calling his reaction to getting “shot in the face” one of “the most badass things” he’s ever seen.
Trump’s reaction, getting back to his feet, clenching his fist and yelling “fight, fight, fight” as blood dripped off his face, has become a much heralded and iconic moment not only in the United States, but throughout the world.
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Tech giant Meta announced Friday it will be lifting former President Donald Trump’s “heightened suspension penalties” on Facebook and Instagram as the 2024 elections grow closer.
President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, released an updated statement on the company’s site, announcing the change to the protocols from January 2023, specifically for Trump’s restrictions, in order for users to “hear from political candidates.” The company stated the previous restrictions on Trump had been placed in “response to extreme and extraordinary circumstances” following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, alleging the social media platform censored an election video on May 3.
The Kennedy-supporting super PAC, American Values 2024, posted a 30-minute video titled, “Who Is Bobby Kennedy?,” which the independent charges Instagram and Facebook users were restricted from sharing. Kennedy and American Values 2024 filed a First Amendment lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, Zuckerberg and other entities seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an injunction barring the platform from continued alleged censorship.
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The Federal Communications Commission has revived regulations for “net neutrality.” According to FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, “the action we take here is good for consumers, public safety, national security and network investment.” The people have room for doubt and the “neutrality” concept requires some explanation.
The internet developed in fine style long before any such regulation appeared, but in 2015, the FCC reclassified Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from “information services,” to “common carrier services.” The government treated an innovative new technology like a public utility monopoly, in effect turning back the clock to the Communications Act of 1934.
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Facebook has interfered with U.S. elections almost 40 times since 2008, according to a study conducted by the Media Research Center.
Among the group’s findings are Facebook censuring 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2022 Senate and House candidates on their platform. For example, the company removed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s account. The company also “shuttered political advertising one week before the election” in 2020, according to the MRC’s analysis.
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Wisconsin’s most-recent former governor says elections in the state must be fair and free from outside money posing as election aid.
Former Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday said voters need to approve a constitutional amendment banning so-called “Zuckerbucks” in order to keep politicians from sapping faith from voters.
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A U.S. Senator from Tennessee took to Fox News to slam Big Tech companies over the dangers their platforms pose to America’s youth.
“You know, I wish that each one of those [tech executives] would have taken their turn at apologizing to those parents,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Harris Faulkner on “The Faulkner Focus.” “You look at the amount of pornographic material on X, you look at what Snap has done, connecting kids to pedophiles and drug dealers, TikTok, with the kids that have done these TikTok challenges and lost their lives, Discord which is used for chats and gaming, and kids are meeting really bad actors. Every one of them owed those parents that were in that room an apology and those kids – friends of kids – who had lost their lives that showed up wearing those t-shirts. Some were worth more than $230 which is what [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg said a teen was worth to them on social media.”
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As the 2024 election cycle begins, the Honest Elections Project releases its report on 14 election reforms that states should make to protect the integrity of elections.
With the 2024 presidential primary elections underway, a bipartisan election integrity watchdog has released its updated report on election reforms that they say will help secure their elections. Some of these reforms have been considered or implemented in various states since the 2020 presidential election, during which there were numerous irregularities and inequities.
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn addressed the CEOs of five social media companies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” on Wednesday.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress on Wednesday said the tech firm has “no plans” to make a kids version of its Instagram platform.
He acknowledge “discussions internally” on the idea but also said Meta has not “actually moved forward with that, and we currently have no plans to do so.”
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Anyone who’s followed the Mark Zuckerberg “Zuck bucks” story since 2020 has witnessed some spectacular acrobatics from the left.
First, it was denial that a partisan billionaire was trying to privatize the election in swing states. Then, when Democrats unseated President Trump, NPR and others praised Zuck bucks for “saving” the election. When the 2022 midterms came, the cry was for more private funding to “rehabilitate” democracy. Now the media’s latest stop: gaslighting the public into believing any criticism of leftist “dark money” is just conservative propaganda, rather than one of the worst election innovations of our time.
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Two North Carolina counties left a Zuckerbucks nonprofit — where private money is injected into public election administration — as the 2024 election cycle began, citing time commitment as the reason for leaving.
Brunswick and Forsyth counties in North Carolina have left the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), after joining it last year.
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Even as Democrats such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse warn of “right-wing dark-money network seeking to undermine the future of democratic elections in the United States,” progressives have far-outstripped Republicans in harnessing the power of putatively non-partisan, nonprofit organizations that push the boundaries to win elections.
More than 150 progressive nonprofits spent $1.35 billion on political activities in 2021 and 2022, according to data compiled by Restoration of America, a conservative political action committee. Although there are no readily available estimates of comparable conservative efforts, observers say they are overmatched.
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New Mexico is suing Facebook and Instagram for creating “prime locations” for sexual predators to share child sexual abuse, solicitation, and trafficking content.
NM Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a civil suit filed against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, alleging that “certain child exploitative content” is ten times “more prevalent” on Facebook and Instagram than on pornography site PornHub and the adult content platform OnlyFans.
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The American Legislative Exchange Council held their national annual conference in Scottsdale last week, which included a pre-session for legislators with the Honest Elections Project (HEP). HEP is focusing on three issues relating to elections currently, and is proposing draft model legislation that legislators can introduce on a few issues. One is Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), which is gearing up to be a huge fight on the 2024 ballot in Arizona.
Three progressive groups are pushing RCV in Arizona. However, the Arizona Legislature has also referred a proposition to the ballot in 2024 that would stop RCV. HEP has extensively looked into how RCV works, and determined that it ends up putting far left Democrats into office, not moderates as some would expect. HEP’s fact sheet went over several races where it was used and showed how it facilitates this, undermining the Constitution’s principle of one person, one vote.
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Money doesn’t guarantee victory in political campaigns. For proof, look no further than Meg Whitman, the California billionaire who in 2010 squandered $179 million in her futile campaign to beat Jerry Brown and become that state’s next governor.
When money is married to institutional power, however, it makes all the difference. This is why, 10 years after the Whitman debacle, Mark Zuckerberg was able to purchase the presidential election outcome in 2020 for $419 million. Whitman’s money paid consultants and bought ads on television. Zuckerberg’s money went to supplement the activities of election offices in swing states – election offices that employed workers represented by unions that overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans.
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The true danger to American democracy comes from the radical left. Just don’t expect to hear it from the mainstream media.
On Nov. 9, Americans learned that law enforcement intercepted a handful of fentanyl-laced letters intended for election offices across at least five states, including Georgia’s Fulton County. While alarming, fentanyl isn’t like anthrax – briefly touching it isn’t deadly. But ingesting it is – just ask the families of the 74,000 Americans who died from fentanyl in 2022 alone, much of it produced in China and smuggled in through President Biden’s wide-open southern border.
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Wisconsin voters may be able to ban “Zuckerbucks” — the injection of private money into public election administration — from their elections next year, before the 2024 general election.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) poured nearly $350 million into local elections offices managing the 2020 election, with most of the funds donated to the nonprofit by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The nonprofit has claimed its 2020 election grants — colloquially known as “Zuckerbucks” — were allocated without partisan preference to make voting safer amid the pandemic.
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Meagan Wolfe’s days as administrator of the troubled Wisconsin Elections Commission may be numbered.
The Senate Committee on Shared Revenue, Elections and Consumer Protection voted 3-1 on Monday to reject the appointment of Wolfe, the controversial election regulator protected by the left and lambasted by conservatives.
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A nonpartisan organization that trains election workers from across the country is now being run by two liberal voting activists—one who previously worked for the nonprofit that distributed hundreds of millions of dollars of Mark Zuckerberg’s election grants during the 2020 elections. The grants were supposedly to “help” local governments run elections, but most of the money went to election offices in Democrat-run localities.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan’s philanthropic arm laid off dozens of employees Wednesday in an ostensible restructuring.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which was founded and is led by the couple, laid off 48 employees, a spokesperson told Business Insider. CZI sent hundreds of millions of dollars, dubbed “Zuckbucks,” to an organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which used the funds to help administer elections in 2020 in largely Democratic districts in multiple states, which critics argued was an attempt to boost turnout.
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The Democratic Party machine has crushed Republicans in the contest to harvest early votes in battleground Wisconsin — inside and outside the law.
The GOP is looking to turn the tables with a new national initiative launching in the Badger State.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival Threads has plummeted in popularity for a second consecutive week, according to market intelligence company Sensor Tower, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The so-called “Twitter Killer” has experienced a substantial fall in engagement, down to 13 million daily active users, which is a 70% drop from July 7, according to Sensor Tower estimates, the WSJ reported. Meanwhile, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter steadily maintains around 200 million active daily users, who spend an average of 30 minutes on the platform.
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Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody on Monday called on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking to account for how Meta is being used to facilitate human trafficking and sex exploitation.
Moody did so while announcing what she described as the “stunning” and “disturbing” findings of a statewide investigation that found that Meta platforms are being used more than any other social media platforms by human traffickers to commit crimes.
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State Representative Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) is urging the Wisconsin Elections Commission to fire Meagan Wolfe, WEC’s controversial administrator.
The commission meets at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday to take up Wolfe’s re-appointment to a four-year term. Her current term ends Friday.
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Meagan Wolfe, the controversial administrator of the controversial Wisconsin Elections Commission, sent out a defiant letter on Wednesday to local elections officials as she looks to save her job.
Wolfe’s current term is set to expire in a couple of weeks, and, as she notes, her future is uncertain.
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In what has become commonplace for the American far-left, one of its top lawyers hosted a “Democracy Summit” wherein speakers and panelists insisted that Republicans are “fascists” and that anything the political right says is “misinformation.”
David Becker, founder of the lobbying group Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) which is funded by Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, organized the conference.
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Chairwoman of the nonprofit group Greater Georgia and former Georgia U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler recently joined Governor Brian Kemp as he signed Senate Bill 222, also known as the “Zuckerbucks” ban, into law.
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Eight House Republicans have introduced a bill to block the use of private money to operate elections and curb the controversial process called ballot harvesting.
If enacted, the Protect American Election Administration Act would block what the bill’s sponsors call a “private takeover of government election administration.”
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Pennsylvania’s top election officials this week informed lawmakers that the process of replacing the state’s voter-records system is “behind schedule” but assured them his agency is prioritizing its completion.
Responding to questions from members of the state House Appropriations Committee in preparation for drafting the Fiscal Year 2023-24 budget, Pennsylvania Acting Secretary of State Al Schmidt said 23 counties are testing the initial version of the new SUREVote system.
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Iowa and Ohio are the latest states looking to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the controversial interstate voting data partnership.
Already seen as suspect by conservatives questioning ERIC’s left-leaning ties, the organization has been inflexible to changes called for by Ohio and other Republican-led states.
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The Georgia Senate has passed a bill to prohibit local election offices from using private funding to conduct elections, after election officials reportedly used a loophole to accept the money.
The bill stipulates “costs and expenses related to conducting primaries, elections, runoffs, or other undertakings authorized or required by [state law] shall be paid from lawfully appropriated public funds.”
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) slammed DeKalb County for accepting $2 million in private money for election administration — or “Zuckerbucks” — in “violation” of state law while suggesting a legislative remedy to prevent counties from directly receiving such funds.
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The injection of private money into public election administration — or “Zuckerbucks” — is continuing in a new form, as left-leaning candidates are being recruited to run for local elections offices by an organization that receives funds from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
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The city of Green Bay is doubling down on its legally dubious policy on bugging City Hall, and it appears a lawsuit is in the offing.
In response to a warning letter from the Wisconsin State Senate, Green Bay’s Chief of Operations Joseph Faulds has issued a statement asserting the city will continue its audio surveillance, but it will provide notice about the recording devices.
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Former Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske watched as her election office was effectively taken over by liberal voting activists.
Emails show the clerk growing ever more concerned as the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) and its network of liberal groups insinuated themselves into Green Bay’s election administration in the days leading up to the hotly contested 2020 presidential election.
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The group that distributed most of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial election grants in 2020 has designated at least two Utah counties as part of a new effort, despite a state ban on private money funding election operations.
The two local juridictions are Cache County, with a population of 137,00, and Weber County, population 267,000.
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Although about half the states ban private dollars from funding local governing of elections as a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial grants in 2020, a tech-aligned group will dole out individual $500,000 grants to jurisdictions for future elections.
The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, established in April, will award individual grants of $500,000 to at least two local jurisdictions out of 10 that the organization accepted into the program.
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The liberal voting activist group that dumped $350 million of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money on local election offices during the 2020 presidential election is back again with another $80 million to give over the next five years.
And Wisconsin once again will be front and center in the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s “generosity.”
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The liberal voting activist group that dumped $350 million of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money on local election offices during the 2020 presidential election is back again with another $80 million to give over the next five years.
And Wisconsin once again will be front and center in the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s “generosity.”
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