Elon Musk shared a Federalist article on Twitter this week that detailed how “Zuckbucks” were used to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, and leftists are livid.
On Tuesday, the Twitter CEO linked to an October 2021 article, written by Federalist contributor William Doyle, that examines how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave hundreds of millions of dollars to nonprofits such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) leading up to the 2020 presidential contest. CTCL and CEIR then poured these “Zuckbucks” into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsupervised election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes.
Notably, Doyle’s article examines how these grants were heavily skewed toward Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive, privately funded Democrat get-out-the-vote operation. Organizations such as the Capital Research Center have also released detailedanalyses on the partisan distribution of these funds.
While Musk simply referred to the article as “interesting,” that was apparently too much for Washington Post columnist Philip Bump to handle. In response, Bump penned an article titled, “Musk shares baseless election claim with millions of Twitter users,” in which he attempted to smear the Twitter CEO and discredit The Federalist’s article.
“This is a common way in which Musk elevates right-wing rhetoric. He’ll often engage with fringe voices by declaring their commentary to be “concerning” — suggesting it’s just something worth mulling over,” complained Bump in melodramatic fashion.
But then Bump openly admits the purpose of “Zuckbucks” wasn’t to help election offices “promote safe and reliable voting” during the Covid outbreak, as CTCL and CEIR originally claimed, but to increase voter turnout in Democrat-majority areas.
Much of the analysis in the Federalist article centers on the idea that these investments were larger in more-Democratic counties, using that as a peg for the argument that the investments were partisan and critical to Biden’s success.
But that argument is easily countered. CTCL’s investments were often in heavily Democratic areas — because those areas often have lower turnout rates. If you want to increase turnout, the smartest place to try to do so is places where turnout is lowest. In the United States, that’s often lower-income communities and communities that have high populations of Black and Hispanic residents, two groups that often vote heavily Democratic.
In trying to explain away the disparities in “Zuckbucks” distribution, Bump instead admits a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort is exactly what happened. While Zuckerberg’s donations to CTCL and CEIR were marketed as just a good-faith initiative to ensure Covid didn’t disrupt local election administration, House Republicans later discovered that less than 1 percent of CTCL’s 2020 funds were spent on personal protective equipment.
“The argument has gone from: Private funding from CTCL for election administration offices was only meant to help the elections run smoothly,” to “CTCL poured money into Democratic strongholds to boost turnout and that’s a good thing,”tweeted Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
Whether they realize it or not, Bump and the Post are admitting the main purpose of “Zuckbucks” was to boost turnout among voters in Democrat strongholds. It’s a remarkable fact that, for once, the Post got right.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President.
The sudden rise of well-funded election activist nonprofits represents a paradigm shift away from persuading and motivating voters, and toward manipulating the election process to benefit Democrats.
Over the last several months, a growing number of Republicans, including Donald Trump himself, seem to be having a change of heart about universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.
While few Republicans are ready to completely abandon policies that support election integrity and transparency, more and more seem willing to follow the old adage “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” and suggest that Republicans become significantly more reliant on universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting to win elections. There is no worse idea in politics today.
Conservatives do not have the institutional or financial support to match Democrats in election activism and ballot harvesting, nor are they likely to be able to any time in the near future. The advantages Democrats have accrued over the last 20 years in election manipulation and “lawfare” are nearly insurmountable.
But this is not necessarily a portent of gloom and doom. The growing number of ultra-left Democratic candidates are deeply unpopular and would be unelectable outside deep-blue areas under the election norms that prevailed prior to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the 2020 presidential election.
Democrats’ performance in 2020 and 2022 would almost certainly have been far worse under conditions that involved persuading voters to go to the polls on Election Day, rather than relying on a complex web of wealthy nonprofits and armies of election activists to churn out mountains of mail-in ballots, submitted by indifferent voters, during greatly extended early voting periods.
Raw Institutional Power
Republicans need to better understand the vast institutional power that is arrayed against them on the left in the form of lavishly funded 501(c)(3) nonprofits and charitable foundations, along with legions of election lawyers, data analysts, and election activists.
Consider the shadowy Arabella Advisors, a nonprofit consulting company that guides the strategy, advocacy, impact investing, and management for high-dollar, left-leaning nonprofits and individuals. Arabella provides these clients a number of services that enable them to enact policies focused on left-of-center issues such as election administration and “voting rights.”
Arabella Advisors also manages five nonprofits that serve as incubators and accelerators for a range of other left-of-center nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Windward Fund, and the North Fund. The New Venture Fund was the second-largest contributor, behind Mark Zuckerberg, to the Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020. The Sixteen Thirty Fund spent $410 million during the 2020 election cycle, which was more than the Democratic National Committee spent.
These nonprofits have collectively supported hundreds of left-wing policy and advocacy organizations since the network’s creation. In 2020, Arabella’s nonprofit network boasted total revenues exceeding $1.67 billion and total expenditures of $1.26 billion and paid out $896 million in grants largely to other left-leaning and politically active nonprofits.
There is no comparable organization with anything close to this level of financial clout in the Republican world.
Beneath philanthropic foundations and holding companies such as Arabella, there is a world of left-of-center 501(c)(3) nonprofits focused on elections. The Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute has identified at least ten 501(c)(3) nonprofits that we believe played key roles in the 2020 election on behalf of the Democrat Party.
These groups were already in place and ready to implement strategies calculated to give Democrats an electoral advantage long before state-by-state legal barnstorming transformed the norms of American voting systems in the name of Covid-19.
Some of these groups are mainly policy-oriented, focused on increasing Democrat votes by promoting vote-by-mail, ballot drop box initiatives, extended early voting periods, and the relaxation of voting standards such as voter ID. These organizations ranged from local efforts such as the New Georgia Project to national projects like Democracy Works, The Voter Project, and the National Vote at Home Institute.
Another group of nonprofits sprang into action in 2020 to finance the implementation of the Democrats’ election agenda, including hiring new personnel, voter canvassing, ballot harvesting, new election infrastructure such as ballot drop boxes, targeted public relations campaigns, and expensive ballot “curing” efforts.
These organizations, which ended up spending well more than $400 million in 2020, include the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the Center for Secure and Modern Elections (CSME), and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), among others. Once again, there is no similar complex of election-oriented institutions in the Republican world.
Democrats’ ‘Election-Industrial Complex’
These organizations are not arms of political campaigns nor “dark money” partisan advocacy groups, both of which are normal parts of the traditional electoral process. They have nothing to do with persuading voters or “getting out the vote” in the traditional sense, but are instead devoted to gaining an advantage for Democrat candidates by changing election laws, manipulating the election process, and promoting new voting technologies.
This complex web of lavishly funded nonprofits and foundations is not just large and extremely powerful: It is without comparison on the right.
The institutions that support the left’s election activism are so large and so powerful, one might refer to them as an “election-industrial complex.” Election activism is a multi-billion-dollar per year business in the world of Democratic Party politics.
“ELECTION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX“
The Democrats’ election-industrial complex burst into full view in 2020 with CTCL’s $332 million Covid-19 Response Grant Project, funded almost entirely by Facebook founder Zuckerberg, which was aimed at gaining control of election offices in areas that were critical to Democrat campaigns in 2020 through large, “strings attached” grants.
The bulk of that money was spent in a sophisticated effort to increase turnout among a specific profile of voter in order to benefit Democrat candidates. All large CTCL grant recipients were required to “encourage and increase absentee voting” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes, and to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
It has yet to sink in among many Republicans that the CTCL, and the myriad other election activist nonprofits they partnered with in 2020 to carry out their plans, represent a substantively different challenge than Democrats outspending Republicans in conventional election spending.
The sudden rise to prominence of these institutions represents a paradigm shift in the way elections are organized, away from persuading and motivating voters, and toward manipulating the election process, introducing new voting rules, and supporting voting technologies that benefit Democrats and handicap Republicans.
This is the paradigm that many Republicans now propose to embrace, with virtually no institutional or financial support.
Conservatives Must Rebuild Classic Electoral Norms
Conservatives are supposed to be involved in conserving things, and there are few things more worth conserving than the U.S. election system as it has existed throughout most of American history. U.S. elections used to be the envy of the world even 10 years ago, but since then have deteriorated to the point where a large and growing proportion of the population views election results with deep skepticism.
Viewing the grotesque Covid-19 era distortions in the present electoral landscape as an unalterable fait accompli means abandoning our election system to a vast institutional complex that seeks to make the voting booth a relic and Election Day an anachronism.
Even worse, the left’s election-industrial complex seeks to reshape voting into a private activity, to be undertaken at home at the initiative of community organizers and activists, as opposed to a public activity that takes place in a neutral public square, and which relies on the initiative of the voters. In the liberal election utopia, the sanctity of the voting booth and the secret ballot must give way to the collective intimacy of the kitchen table and the oversight of neighborhood political bosses.
For Republican activists to commit to a long-term strategy of universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting would not only be a losing proposition from a practical standpoint, it would also contribute even further toward the transformation of our political system away from the control of civically engaged voters, and toward the consolidation of control in the hands of a small cadre of partisan activists and community organizers, as well as their numerous partners in the nonprofit world and administrative state.
There is a larger argument to be made, that universal absentee ballots and ballot harvesting must be opposed, not just from a practical standpoint, but also from a moral and philosophical point of view. We will have much more to say in the future about how universal mail-in ballots represent an objectively disordered way of deciding elections, which must therefore be unconditionally opposed.
Joseph Arlinghaus is the president and founder of Valor America, a conservative federal election SuperPAC founded in 2016 to use the latest social science research and randomized controlled election experiments that revolutionized the Democratic election world after 2005. He serves on the advisory board to the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute. William Doyle, Ph.D., is research director at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections.
The Gateway Pundit reported on Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that large-scale layoffs at Facebook (META) were planned.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg shared his letter to the 11,000 he fired as the Holidays approach.
Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.
I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.
How did we get here?
At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.
How will this work?
There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to get all the relevant information to you as quickly as possible and then do whatever we can to support you through this.
Everyone will get an email soon letting you know what this layoff means for you. After that, every affected employee will have the opportunity to speak with someone to get their questions answered and join information sessions.
Some of the details in the US include:
Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.
PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time.
RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November 15, 2022 vesting.
Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for people and their families for six months.
Career services. We’ll provide three months of career support with an external vendor, including early access to unpublished job leads.
Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before termination and some visa grace periods, which means everyone will have time to make plans and work through their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration specialists to help guide you based on what you and your family need.
Outside the US, support will be similar, and we’ll follow up soon with separate processes that take into account local employment laws.
We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.
While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others. Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially. This is not a reflection of the great work these groups have done, but what we need going forward. The leaders of each group will schedule time to discuss what this means for your team over the next couple of days.
The teammates who will be leaving us are talented and passionate, and have made an important impact on our company and community. Each of you have helped make Meta a success, and I’m grateful for it. I’m sure you’ll go on to do great work at other places.
What other changes are we making?
I view layoffs as a last resort, so we decided to rein in other sources of cost before letting teammates go. Overall, this will add up to a meaningful cultural shift in how we operate. For example, as we shrink our real estate footprint, we’re transitioning to desk sharing for people who already spend most of their time outside the office. We’ll roll out more cost-cutting changes like this in the coming months.
We’re also extending our hiring freeze through Q1 with a small number of exceptions. I’m going to watch our business performance, operational efficiency, and other macroeconomic factors to determine whether and how much we should resume hiring at that point. This will give us the ability to control our cost structure in the event of a continued economic downturn. It will also put us on a path to achieve a more efficient cost structure than we outlined to investors recently.
I’m currently in the middle of a thorough review of our infrastructure spending. As we build our AI infrastructure, we’re focused on becoming even more efficient with our capacity. Our infrastructure will continue to be an important advantage for Meta, and I believe we can achieve this while spending less.
Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs.
How do we move forward?
This is a sad moment, and there’s no way around that. To those who are leaving, I want to thank you again for everything you’ve put into this place. We would not be where we are today without your hard work, and I’m grateful for your contributions.
To those who are staying, I know this is a difficult time for you too. Not only are we saying goodbye to people we’ve worked closely with, but many of you also feel uncertainty about the future. I want you to know that we’re making these decisions to make sure our future is strong.
I believe we are deeply underestimated as a company today. Billions of people use our services to connect, and our communities keep growing.Our core business is among the most profitable ever built with huge potential ahead. And we’re leading in developing the technology to define the future of social connection and the next computing platform. We do historically important work. I’m confident that if we work efficiently, we’ll come out of this downturn stronger and more resilient than ever.
We’ll share more on how we’ll operate as a streamlined organization to achieve our priorities in the weeks ahead. For now, I’ll say one more time how thankful I am to those of you who are leaving for everything you’ve done to advance our mission.
Mark
Facebook has huge faced losses in the last year. Last summer Facebook’s market capital was nearly $1 trillion dollars and now it is closer to $245 billion.
Facebook (META) stock is down more than 73% over the year and has lost $800 billion of its market cap, CNBC reported.
This evidence should be enough for the Pennsylvania legislature to recognize there is a real problem when private money and private actors collaborate with election officials.
The Democrat governor’s office in Pennsylvania colluded with left-wing activists to secure millions of dollars in private money to run get-out-the-vote efforts in blue counties in the swing state in 2020, new, explosive testimony revealed. The Pennsylvania legislature heard this testimony, backed up by email evidence, on Tuesday during the first public hearing on two new bills seeking to block private grants.
Tuesday’s public hearing began with statements by the respective primary sponsors of the bills that seek to ban dark money from elections, with Sen. Lisa Baker speaking in support of Senate Bill 982 and Rep. Eric Nelson encouraging passage of House Bill 2044. Pennsylvania investigative journalist Todd Shepherd then testified at length on the results of his extensive probe into the insertion of private funds into the 2020 election.
With a series of PowerPoint slides, Shepherd revealed to lawmakers that beginning in July 2020, consultants working for leftist organizations coordinated with local election officials and Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s office to lobby five blue counties to apply for these private grants. While the grants originated with the nominally non-partisan Center for Tech and Civic Life—an organization that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s private foundation later infused with some $350 million in cash—emails reveal that a main consultant involved in targeting select counties, Marc Solomon, worked for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, or the CSME.
“What’s important to know about CSME is that it is not a 501(c)3, but rather it is a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund,” Shepherd told the Pennsylvania lawmakers. In turn, “the New Venture Fund is managed by Arabella Advisors,” Shepherd continued, noting that “the ‘parent’ group of Arabella, New Venture Fund — they are part of what the Atlantic Magazine identified as ‘The Massive Progressive Dark-Money Group You’ve Never Heard Of.’” In fact, in January, The New York Times called out the New Venture Fund in its article headlined, “Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then they Won with it in 2020,” Shepherd added.
The CSME was not the only left-wing organization involved in lobbying blue counties to obtain grants. The emails also indicate that The Voter Project played a prominent role in this targeted cash giveaway: Following the 2020 election, the lead strategist in Pennsylvania for The Voter Project would brag that The Voter Project “was instrumental in signing up over 3.2 million people to vote by mail and leading the soft-side effort to win the swing state in 2020.”
How the Left Opened This Battlefront
A July 2020 email exposes the beginning of these efforts, with The Voter Project’s Gwen Camp introducing Delaware County’s Christine Reuther to CSME’s Solomon, saying they had “both been hearing about the other’s operations” and “want[ed] to get everyone together to talk about the potential for an official partnership.” According to the testimony, Camp copied Jessica Walls-Lavelle, a special advisor to the chief of staff on election reform in Wolf’s office, on that email, along with The Voters Project lead Pennsylvania strategist Kevin Mack.
In August, other emails show the governor’s staffer, Walls-Lavelle, reaching out to additional blue counties. Solomon passed the good news to his Delaware County contact, Reuther, telling her, “We’ve invited Chester, Montco, and Bucks to apply! They’re on it!”
Another email from August shows Camp, a consultant for The Voters Project, contacting a representative in Lackawanna County, telling the recipient that Camp is working with Jessica Walls-Lavelle, who is “with the Governor’s Office.”
Activists Push for Ballot Trafficking Dropboxes
All five counties lobbied by the left-wing activists, with an assist from Wolf’s office, ended up breaking heavily for Joe Biden, which likely explains why, when Solomon saw in August 2020 that Montgomery County had applied for a $1.2 million grant, he exclaimed, “the third largest county in the state, Philly suburbs!” Solomon then asked his colleagues whether they should turn this “into more of a plan.”
In an email response, Solomon’s cohort noted that the application “raised polling place consolidation as a possibility.” “We should ask what resources they need to make that not happen,” the email continued, suggesting: “Could we push them to use more than 5 drop boxes with more money? Maybe pointing out that Delaware County is using 10 times as many?”
While the right-to-know requests revealed the targeted lobbying of blue counties, there were no emails showing any outreach to core Republican counties until after September 1, 2020. That proves significant, according to Shepherd’s testimony, because when the summer-time targeting of Democratic strongholds took place, the Zuckbucks cash infusion to the CTCL had not yet been announced. Without that cash, there may never have been a chance for the red counties to obtain any funds. (Shepherd also questioned where the earlier CTCL funding came from—something apparently still unknown.)
But even after the new funds came in, the Democrat counties still received a substantially higher cut of the $22.5 million in grants spread across 23 counties, as Shepherd illustrated with powerful graphics, testifying, “Philadelphia had $8.83 cents that could be spent on each ‘Joe Citizen’ registered to vote there, while in Luzerne or Erie County, those counties had about 75 cents to spend on ‘Joe Citizen’ registered voter in those counties.”
Equal Protection Problems
Far from being an outlier, Pennsylvania’s experience matches the growing evidence seen in other states that the Zuckbucks and other leftist money funded state-run get-out-the-vote efforts for Biden. What makes Pennsylvania different, however, is that the emails connect the grant process to government actors and show the state’s collaboration with left-wing political activists to lobby Democrat-only counties. This evidence raises constitutional concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The Supreme Court made clear in Bush v. Gore that “the right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise.” The Equal Protection clause requires both that the right to vote be granted on equal terms, but also that the state “not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of any.” The emails highlighted in Tuesday’s hearing suggest that such “arbitrary and disparate treatment” occurred in 2020, with the governor’s office and select counties as willful participants.
Individuals representing the secretary of state’s office and Philadelphia County also testified at Tuesday’s hearing and attempted to downplay the disparity by stressing that large counties had different needs. Delaware County spent some $600,000 on “Bluecrest mail sorting equipment” one witness stressed, while an election official from Philadelphia county noted it expended huge sums of grant money to purchase modern machines to “open, sort, and tabulate” votes in that county.
But rather than support their “nothing to see here” response, Delaware and Philadelphia County’s purchase of the high-tech Bluecrest mail-sorting equipment highlights a second Equal Protection problem seen in the 2020 election.
As I reported shortly after the election, evidence shows that Philadelphia and other Democrat strongholds illegally engaged in pre-canvasing activities by inspecting mail-in ballots before election day. They did this by weighing the ballots on the Bluecrest sorting equipment to determine if the voter had enclosed the ballot in a “sleeve” as required by state law. Election workers in Philadelphia and other select counties then provided campaign workers the list of allegedly defective ballots—ones without a sleeve—allowing activists to contact the voters, telling them to cast a new vote.
While the Bluecrest sorting equipment used in Philadelphia and Delaware County can detect which ballots are defective based on their thickness or weight, smaller counties without that sophisticated equipment could not conduct such pre-canvas inspections, which in any event violate the state’s election code.
Other Evidence of Vote Mismanagement
Referencing Delaware County’s expenditures proves ironic for a second reason: Whistleblower videos have exposed extensive evidence of systemic problems with the 2020 election in the large Pennsylvania county, including violations of election law and potentially corruption and fraud. Of course, mail-in voting itself is ripe for election fraud, and as the emails show Delaware County had 10 times the number of drop boxes planned over the even larger Montgomery County.
The whistleblower videos in Delaware County also captured election workers discussing the fact that some of the voting machines were missing V-drives, or the removable memory drive that records the vote tallies, and conversing on how to recreate the missing data, which a later video confirmed the county did. Yet, even with this video evidence, Delaware County council member Christine Reuther declared at a recent public meeting, “There were no missing drives. It’s been debunked. It’s been before the board of elections. It’s been addressed in court. There’s been testimony about it. There were no missing drives.”
Reuther is the same council member involved in the early lobbying for Delaware County to apply for private grants.
This evidence should be enough for the Pennsylvania legislature to recognize there is a real problem when private money and private actors collaborate with election officials, especially when they target select counties. But Tuesday’s hearing suggests Democrats don’t care, with one witness opposing the new legislation by framing the bills as part of “the big lie” that Trump won the election.
Without Democrats on board, the bill will be doomed even if it passes the legislature, as last year Wolf vetoed a similar ban on outside money. And we may now know why.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Signs outside every physical polling place forbid electioneering. Each state has some form of restriction on political activities near polling locations when voting is taking place. These restrictions are usually on the display of signs, handing out campaign literature, attempting to influence voters, or soliciting votes within a predetermined distance (typically 50 to 200 feet) of a polling place. A list of the specific electioneering prohibitions adopted by each state can be found here.
Opposition to electioneering is the main reason election integrity advocates oppose allowing political activists to provide food and water to voters waiting in line at polling places. What has been portrayed as a measure to starve and dehydrate suffering voters is really a commonsense prohibition against electioneering. Allowing such practices would allow anybody with a few water bottles or a bag of sandwiches an opportunity to harangue, harass, or otherwise intimidate voters who are waiting in line to cast their ballots.
But nobody has yet come to terms with a new type of electioneering that goes hand in hand with universal absentee voting. We call it “remote electioneering” and define it as an attempt to influence or solicit votes among absentee voters between the time they receive their absentee ballot and the time they submit it to their election office. Obviously, the opportunities for what in normal circumstances would qualify as illegal electioneering multiply considerably with absentee voting, since there is no way of knowing the extent to which partisan activists attempt to influence the behavior of absentee voters.
CTCL’s Goal Was to Influence Absentee Voters
But we have a glimpse of the attitudes of Democrat election activists toward electioneering with absentee ballots through Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) documents, which outline the actions that the major recipients of their Covid-19 Response Grant Program would have to fulfill as conditions of keeping their grant money. By the admission of the activist election officials in Wisconsin who were funded by CTCL in 2020, absentee ballot electioneering was one of their major goals. Grant recipients were required to “Encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in their completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes. They were also to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents” in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which in 2020 were flooded with no-excuse absentee ballots for the first time ever.
We know that absentee ballot electioneering occurred in areas in these states where CTCL had a substantial presence because it was part and parcel of CTCL’s requirement that absentee voting be promoted, assisted, and increased. Ongoing contact between activist election officials and millions of new absentee voters was not only encouraged in areas that received big CTCL money, it was required.
Wisconsin Illustrates Extravagant Plans
The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, which served as the basic template for CTCL’s nationwide efforts during the 2020 election, provides documentation of their extravagant plans to use key election offices to electioneer the absentee vote that they were so intent on promoting.
Election officials in Wisconsin who were “on the street” had enough contact with voters to bemoan the fact that “countless [individuals]” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID reportedly “took considerable staff time and resources.”
If election officials had such knowledge, they must have had extensive contact with such low-information absentee voters while they were in the process of completing and submitting their ballots. If this were at the polling booth, it would qualify as illegal electioneering because election officials had “extensive contact” with in-person voters who were completing and submitting their ballots.
A great deal of concern was expressed about “Voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.” Figuratively “holding someone’s hand” as they cast a vote — whether absentee or in person — seems to be the very definition of electioneering.
The city of Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “voter navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures. But it would be illegal for poll workers to help voters complete their ballots when voting in person. Why should it not be illegal for partisan activists to help people complete their absentee ballots?
The city of Racine wished to create a corps of “vote ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would recruit, train, and employ such paid ambassadors to set up at the city’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests. But how do we know that the diplomatic efforts of such “ambassadors” would not be exercised exclusively on behalf of their own partisan interests when “assisting” in the completion of absentee ballots?
Violating Voting Booth’s Sanctity
The sanctity of the voting booth used to be considered one of the sacred traditions of American democracy, as it protects the right of individuals to determine who will represent them in government. But the kind of Democracy™ that involves the indiscriminate mass mailing of no-excuse absentee ballots is a top-down endeavor, where most of the power, initiative, and agency is on the side of Democrat politicians and leftist election activists rather than voters.
Their plan is to influence, cajole, and incentivize the least civically engaged, least informed, most apathetic individuals within their jurisdictions to fill out absentee ballots in a way that validates the consolidation of Democratic Party power. Absentee ballot electioneering is the key to a more modern way of “stuffing the ballot box” in an era where activists have convinced a significant number of people that their voting rights have been fatally compromised if they are not permitted to cast a ballot in whatever way is most effortless for them.
The fact that opportunities for electioneering are so few at the polling place, and so plentiful during the time that elapses between the receipt of absentee ballots and their submission, suggests another reason those who wish to find new ways to interfere in legitimate elections are the most strident advocates of universal mail-in voting. It also provides yet another reason why people who believe in free and fair elections should spare no effort to resolutely oppose no-excuse absentee voting in 2022.
William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Dallas. He can be contacted at doyle@rodneyinstitute.org.
A left-leaning nonprofit instructed public officials how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election. The National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI) guided officials to sway public opinion in favor of mail-in voting with their “2020 Election Official Communications Toolkit.” The group shared this document with public officials in Wisconsin while working with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to influence the 2020 election.
CTCL used nearly half a billion dollars from Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg to fund private action within government election offices. They spent most of the money in Democrat-saturated districts, which boosted Joe Biden’s narrow presidential win in 2020. As a partner for the “Zuckbucks” recipient, NVAHI gave public officials advice on how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots.
“Do not repeat myths as a way to refute them,” the document says. “Instead, control the narrative by presenting information that affirms the safety, security, and reliability of mail balloting.”
Mail-in voting is not only proven to be more susceptible to voter fraud and errors than in-person voting, it is well known to favor Democrats over Republicans. It essentially functions as a get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of Democrats, whose voters are less motivated to show up at the polls on election day. Republican voters far prefer to vote in person, accurately believing it is more secure.
The group also told election officials to push mail-in voting by placing articles in media outlets: “Reporters will likely already be writing up voter information guides as well as shaping their articles around how well or poorly the election is running. A proactive op-ed strategy is helpful here,” the document says.
NVAHI explained that officials should target free, popular local news publications: “For all these types of outlets, approach them about whether they would run an article on your behalf about the upcoming election,” the document says.
The organization recommended officials use public information strategies such as “playing up the security” of mail-in voting. NVAHI told election officials to dissuade concerns about mail-in ballots by claiming that they contain “over a dozen security features.”
“Voters may be reluctant to fill out a mail ballot because of concerns they’ve heard about stolen or lost ballots. Assuage those concerns without leaning into them,” the document says.
The guide also tells public officials to “instill a sense of urgency” about mail-in voting, recommending an appeal to popularity: “Voters may be unsure whether voting by mail is right for them. Social proof (showing how many people are taking up a behavior) is a powerful way of making mail-in ballots a compelling option.”
The document also recommended that government election offices use particular slogans for public information campaigns, such as “Voting by mail is easy and secure,” and “Let’s all vote safely. Choose to vote by mail.”
NVAHI partnered with the organization Ideas42 to create this toolkit. According to its website, the group is “a non-profit that uses insights from behavioral science to improve lives, build better systems and policies, and drive social change.” Ideas42 works with CTCL partner Center for Civic Design, along with several offices of government secretaries of state.
After CTCL gave a grant of $1.6 million to the Wisconsin city of Green Bay in 2020, NVAHI gained access to absentee ballots and influence over election preparations in the area. NVAHI Wisconsin State Lead Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed the elections guide to former Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske in August 2020.
When reaching out to Teske, Spitzer-Rubenstein described the toolkit as “a groundbreaking resource that uses behavioral science insights from our partners at Ideas42 to help you connect with communities and get voters the information they need.”
Spitzer-Rubenstein, who worked for Democrat political campaigns in the past, emailed Teske to ask if his group could “cure” absentee ballots. This means altering absentee ballots after they are filed to allegedly fix errors, rather than counting improperly marked ballots as invalid. When Teske turned down the offer, Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed former Green Bay Mayor’s Office Chief of Staff Celestine Jeffreys, who ordered Teske to open the city elections’ ballot-curing process to NVAHI, a private special interest group.
A 2021 audit of Wisconsin elections found the state had counted enough illegal ballots in 2020 to potentially switch its Electoral College votes from Biden to Donald Trump. Vote curing in the election could have contributed to the state counting illegal votes, the audit found.
Also in 2021, a judge ruled that the state’s 2020 use of ballot drop boxes and ballot harvesting, both of which are only possible with mail-in ballots, was illegal. The majority of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin were votes for Biden, who won the state by a margin of 0.63 percent, or approximately 20,600 votes.
Before election day, Green Bay elections officials gave Spitzer-Rubenstein four out of five keys to the room in which the absentee ballots were stored, former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno told Wisconsin Spotlight.
After the election, Juno expressed concerns that the Central Count location was “tainted by the influence of a person working for an outside organization influencing the election,” according to Wisconsin Spotlight. Teske said she felt that third-party groups such as CTCL and NVAHI excluded the clerk’s office from the election process.
“As you know, I am very frustrated, along with the Clerk’s Office. I don’t know what to do anymore,” she emailed a colleague. “I don’t understand how people who don’t have knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election.”
Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He is a correspondent for Campus Reform and an outreach assistant for the Freedom Foundation.
Virginia’s hotly contested gubernatorial race is just days away, and with Republican Glenn Youngkin and former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe tied in the polls, the professional left isn’t leaving anything to chance. A McAuliffe defeat is largely considered a bellwether for congressional Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
So how do Democrats plan to ensure a McAuliffe win and a subsequent retention of power in the state and U.S. Senate? By using the same tactic they used in the 2020 national contest: profligate mail-in voting and fake grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts funding by philanthropies and wealthy leftists, a strategy revealed through Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s gift to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL).
And it’s a smart strategy. Joe Biden voters were twice as likely as Donald Trump voters to vote by mail in 2020, for example; and we know the effect of Zuckerberg’s millions on the 2020 election. The Capital Research Center specializes in exposing the activists behind these efforts. Here’s what we’ve discovered about the funding and activists behind them.
Getting Out the Vote for Democrats
Vote Forward is one of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) groups swamping Virginians with a letter practically begging them to vote early. Here’s my copy:
Vote Forward is ostensibly nonpartisan—until you look at its original website from 2018, which reads “Flip the House Blue: Send letters to unlikely voters.” Elsewhere, the group admits it was founded to send “get-out-the-vote” mailers to “traditionally underrepresented communities,” code for Democrat-leaning constituencies.
The New York Times praised Vote Forward’s goal of boosting Democrat turnout just one week before the 2020 election. An old FAQ states that many of its campaigns “typically target low-propensity voters who we believe are likely to vote for Democrats when they do cast a ballot.”
In 2020, that target was 10 million voters. To make that happen, Vote Forward sued the U.S. Postal Service, accusing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Trump nominee—of “undermin[ing] USPS’s ability to ensure the on-time delivery of mail ballots” in the 2020 election. The details of their settlement remain unclear, but USPS agreed to deliver mail-in ballots in time for Georgia’s January special election, the result of which ultimately handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate.
Like many organizations that present themselves as more interested in voting than election outcomes, Vote Forward is part of the Left’s Voting Machine: A massive web of interconnected GOTV nonprofits commanding tens of millions of dollars, mostly gifted by ultra-wealthy institutions like the Ford, Gates, and Rockefeller Foundations.
We’ve traced more than $600,000 flowing to Vote Forward from the Hopewell Fund, part of a $731 million “dark money” network run by the consultancy Arabella Advisors in Washington, DC. After studying this network for years, it’s become clear to us that wherever Arabella is involved, one is sure to find the left’s top operatives as well.
For example, Vote Forward’s board includes Ezra Reese, a partner at Perkins Coie and its Marc Elias-led spin-off (the Elias Law Group) “focused on electing Democrats, supporting voting rights, and helping progressives make change”—a fact you won’t find advertised on the “nonpartisan” group’s website. Perkins Coie is the left’s law firm of choice. Elias was general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a partisan operative whose past dealings include George Soros-funded efforts to abolish voter ID laws.
The center explicitly targeted the “New American Majority,” another code for likely Democratic voters that they define as “young people, people of color and unmarried women.”That bloc contains 73 percent of all unregistered voters nationwide, which is why the left-wing strategists at the Democracy Alliance consider their turnout “central to progressive long-term success.”
The IRS requires all nonprofits be officially nonpartisan in order to be tax exempt. In the center’s case, nonpartisanship comes in the shape of a fig leaf—as liberal journalist Sasha Issenberg explains in his 2012 book, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns: “Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats” (emphasis added).
We were among the first to report in-depth on how billionaire Zuckerberg and the little-known Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) spent $350 million to effectively privatize the 2020 election in battleground states, helping turnout for Biden in the name of COVID-19 “relief.”
Overnight, this little nonprofit’s revenues grew by more than 12,000 percent from $2.8 million thanks to Zuckerberg’s cash injection—fueling its “nonpartisan,” “charitable” façade to elections officials and helping Democrat turnout in precisely the spots Biden needed to win the presidency.
Across nine states, our data shows that CTCL’s grants consistently ignored Trump counties in favor of big, Democratic-leaning spots like Philadelphia, Maricopa County, and Houston—all essential to Biden’s victory. In Georgia, for instance, Biden counties were two-and-a-half times more likely to receive CTCL funding than Trump counties.
Virginia received close to $4 million in Zuck Bucks, more than one-third of which went to populous Fairfax County to “support in-person early voting” and “vote by mail.” Fairfax County was Biden’s biggest vote-haul in the state and is the linchpin to McAuliffe’s strategy.
Nearly $970,000 paid for “temporary staffing support” to bolster Fairfax County’s elections agency. That may sound innocuous, but as CTCL expert William Doyle recently wrote at this site, that funding “supported the infiltration of election offices by paid Democratic Party activists.”
[CTCL] funded self-described ‘vote navigators’ in Wisconsin to ‘assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing … and witness absentee ballot signatures,’ and a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called ‘Happy Faces’ counting the votes amidst the election night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia.
Fairfax County applied for an extension to its CTCL grant in January, but ultimately returned its remaining $187,709 in April, spokesman Brian Worthy told me. To his knowledge, the county has not applied for another grant for the 2021 election. That’s a good start, but to save the integrity of our elections, Zuck Bucks need to be banned. No exceptions.
There’s no faster way to destroy what remaining trust Americans have in their elections than by giving them to the highest bidder. Private funding of elections would take us back to the worst of the 19th century robber barons, when rich political machines won elections by buying public officials and intimidating voters. It also presents opportunities for foreign interests to manipulate our politics and undermine American sovereignty.
It’s unknown how much CTCL money remains in Virginia or if the group has continued to make grants here. Neighboring Fairfax City reports $14,175 in CTCL funds leftover for the 2021 election.
CTCL has been surprisingly mum about the ongoing election considering how loudly it advertised open-ended grants to Georgia counties in January. It’s possible that the dozens of exposés, hundreds of critical news articles, flurry of state Zuck Buck bans, and an inquiry from furious congressional Republicans silenced the leftists running CTCL.
Or maybe not. A recent CTCL statement calls lawsuits against its grants program “frivolous” and its funding “equitable,” particularly in small counties with small elections budgets.
Today’s left has cynically embraced Zuck Bucks out of short-term thinking, believing like NPR that “private money from Facebook’s CEO saved the 2020 election.” That’s a losing hand. Americans can see that the same leftists who’ve now embraced plutocracy were just yesterday crying “eat the rich” and “abolish billionaires.” Close to a dozen states have already banned Zuck Bucks and grassroots groups are leading a national movement to audit the 2020 election and save the country.
Leftists believed the country would overlook their desperate indiscretions, claiming—as CTCL does—that Zuckerberg’s unprecedented spending spree somehow made 2020 “the most secure election in U.S. history.” We’ll know even more in December, when CTCL releases its IRS Form 990 filing to the public. If coming revelations are anything like observers expect, that claim will age about as well as milk.
Hayden Ludwig is an investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center in Washington, DC.
In all the back and forth of Tuesday’s Big Tech hearing, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons’ exchange with Twitter’s Jack Dorsey stood out most starkly, offering a window into the next step of the left’s long-championed Big Tech censorship of scientific dissent from liberal orthodoxy.
“You do, Mr. Dorsey, have policies against deep fakes or manipulated media, against Covid-19 misinformation, against things that violate civic integrity,” the Delaware senator began, “but you don’t have a standalone climate change misinformation policy. Why not?”
“Our policies are living documents,”Dorsey replied. “They will evolve, we will add to them, but we thought it important we focus our energies and prioritize the work as much as we could.” And then:
Well, Mr. Dorsey… I cannot think of a greater harm than climate change, which is transforming literally our planet and causing harm to our entire world. I think we’re experiencing significant harm as we speak. I recognize the pandemic and misinformation about Covid-19 manipulated media also cause harm but I’d urge you to reconsider that because helping to disseminate climate denialism in my view further facilitates and accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world.
This has been ongoing for years in corporate media. In 2019, Chuck Todd pompously announced his show would no longer “give time to climate deniers.” Two years before that, when The New York Times’ Bret Stephens used his debut column to call out “The Climate of Complete Certainty” that seeks to shut down completely reasonable dissent, the paper faced vicious backlash labeling Stephens a “climate denier.” For more than a decade before this, more of the same — often trickling up, from activists to the reporters who sympathize to the powers that can truly silence voices.
Four years ago, reporters demanded then-President Barack censor fake news, pushing Press Secretary Josh Earnest into the awkward position of having to remind apparent journalists of the First Amendment four times. The targets that day were the Bat Boy-like farces they blamed for Her 2016 loss, but it was already obvious the definition of “fake news” would rapidly expand. Once President Donald Trump assumed office, corporate media and allied politicians bypassed the White House and turned to Silicon Valley, which fell in line quickly enough.
COVID-19 provided the first preview of the new alliance, where even doctors and scientists were censored for carefully — we once said “scientifically” — questioning the alarmists’ narrative of the day. At the same time, Democrats, corporate media, and even corrupt, foreign bodies like the World Health Organization have been permitted to push whatever information supports that day’s goal post.
Completely rational appeals are met with absurdities like “the science is decided,” as if constantly evolving experimentation in search of knowledge can be bottled into some oracle-like decree to support the mob’s latest demand. Rather than decided science, these decrees are mere hypotheses susceptible to support and opposition, but through the alliance of Democrats, corporate media, and Silicon Valley, they become unquestionable edicts ranging from No Business to Eternal Mask-Wearing to No Family For Thanksgiving.
Coons’s comments are a good reminder that what is COVID today is climate tomorrow. Indeed, COVID policy has offered Americans a perfect preview of what will happen if climate alarmists get their way: Science not as method, but as god. And not the strong and mysterious God of the Jewish and Christian faiths, but a shifting one, whose every dictum and desire is whispered to the kings and enforced at their whims.
Do you have a problem with that? You can take it up with The Science. And The Science is decided.
Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, the vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald. Follow him on Twitter.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, centre, talks with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, right, as Lu Wei, left, China’s Internet czar, looks on at Microsoft’s main campus in 2015 / TED S. WARREN/AFP
A recent report from the New York Post claims that Facebook has hired Chinese nationals who are “working on censorship,” at the company. China famously employs the “Great Chinese Firewall” to block many websites within the communist country, including Facebook.
The New York Postreports that a Facebook Insider told the publication that at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” are employed at Facebook. The insider told the Post: “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”
The insider provided the Post with an internal directory of the team that does much of the censorship work at Facebook. According to the Post, the job is referred to as “Hate-Speech Engineering” and most of its members are based out of Facebook’s Seattle offices. Many of those working there have Ph.D.s, and their work involves machine learning and AI.
At Facebook, this mainly pertains to teaching the Facebook algorithm to manage what content shows up in users’ newsfeeds. The Facebook insider states that this means making sure certain content “shows up dead-last.” The insider used New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari as an example of an average Facebook user, stating: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”
Facebook engineers reportedly test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to determine an optimal outcome and remove what top executives refer to as “borderline content.” The insider stated: “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag. Content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”
The Post notes that the employees on Facebook’s Hate-Speech Engineering teamearned their degrees from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Jilin University in northeast China, and Nanjing University in eastern China. Another engineer reportedly worked for Huawei, a company that has been labeled a security threat by the U.S. and Sweden.
The idea of one of America’s most powerful companies using Chinese censorship experts is troubling for reasons beyond the obvious. The Chinese nationals could be in a position to spy on both the company and its users. The National Security blog Lawfare notes that Chinese intelligence law allows the country to deputized any of its citizens into doing intelligence work such as acquiring data. Lawfare writes:
Article Seven stipulates that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law.” Article 14, in turn, grants intelligence agencies authority to insist on this support: “state intelligence work organs, when legally carrying forth intelligence work, may demand that concerned organs, organizations, or citizens provide needed support, assistance, and cooperation.” Organizations and citizens must also protect the secrecy of “any state intelligence work secrets of which they are aware.” These clauses appear to limit the obligations on individuals to Chinese citizens, but they do not stipulate that only Chinese “organizations” are subject to these requirements.
A Facebook spokesperson denied that these employees influence the site’s broad policies, stating: “We are a stronger company because our employees come from all over the world. Our standards and policies are public, including about our third-party fact-checking program, and designed to apply equally to content across the political spectrum. With over 35,000 people working on safety and security issues at Facebook, the insinuation that these employees have an outsized influence on our broader policies or technology is absurd.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Facebook has removed a video posted by Breitbart News earlier today, which was the top-performing Facebook post in the world Monday afternoon, of a press conference in D.C. held by the group America’s Frontline Doctors and organized and sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots. The press conference featured Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) and frontline doctors sharing their views and opinions on coronavirus and the medical response to the pandemic. YouTube (which is owned by Google) and Twitter subsequently removed footage of the press conference as well.
video source: Matt PerdieThe video accumulated over 17 million views during the eight hours it was hosted on Facebook, with over 185,000 concurrent viewers.
The livestream had accumulated over 17 million views by the time of its censorship by Facebook.
In terms of viral velocity, the post was beating content from many other prominent accounts on Facebook today, including Hillary Clinton, Rev. Franklin Graham, and Kim Kardashian.
Over 185,000 viewers were concurrently watching the stream when it aired live Monday afternoon.
The event, hosted by the organization America’s Frontline Doctors, a group founded by Dr. Simone Gold, a board-certified physician and attorney, and made up of medical doctors, came together to address what the group calls a “massive disinformation campaign” about the coronavirus. Norman also spoke at the event.
“If Americans continue to let so-called experts and media personalities make their decisions, the great American experiment of a Constitutional Republic with Representative Democracy, will cease,” reads the event’s information page.
The event was organized and sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots.
“We’ve removed this video for sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” a Facebook company spokesman, Andy Stone, told Breitbart News. The company did not specify what portion of the video it ruled to be “false information,”who it consulted to make that ruling, and on what basis it was made.
Stone replied to New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose on Twitter regarding the video:
Stone then added that the platform would direct users who had interacted with the post to information on “myths debunked by the WHO.”
Facebook’s decision to censor the livestream was quickly followed by YouTube, the Google-owned video-sharing platform. The video had over 80,000 views on YouTube prior to its removal.
Following Facebook and YouTube’s removal of the video, Twitter followed suit, removing Breitbart News’s Periscope livestream of the press conference. Jack Dorsey’s platform also then limited the Breitbart News official account, indicating that tweets containing links to multiple stories about the press conference violate the platform’s COVID-19 policies.
Twitter limits Breitbart News account
Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday over the social media giant’s alleged bias against conservatives. Zuckerberg appeared before Congress for the second consecutive day to answer questions related to Facebook’s data privacy practices.
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When it was time for Scalise to speak, he asked the Facebook CEO whether or not the platform is biased against conservative news publishers, referencing a study from The Western Journal that looked into the matter. The Western Journal’s analysis found that Facebook’s much-publicized demotion of publishers’ content in users’ news feeds has negatively impacted conservative-leaning publishers significantly more than liberal-leaning outlets.
“I do want to ask you about a study that was done dealing with the algorithm that Facebook uses to describe what is fed to people through the newsfeed, and what they found was after this new algorithm was implemented was that there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content and a favorable bias towards liberal content,” the Louisiana Republican said.
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Noting that there was a “16-point disparity,”which he called “concerning,” Scalise — a former computer programmer himself — asked Zuckerberg who writes Facebook’s algorithm.
Rep. Scalise: “Having a point of view” is “something Facebook has never done before,” once again pointing to the removal of Diamond and Silk from the site. Displays this chart and asks, “Who determines the algorithm?” pic.twitter.com/bkh0BObOog
“Was there a directive to put this bias in?” he said, before asking if Zuckerberg was aware of such a bias.
In his response, Zuckerberg claimed there is “absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do. To the contrary, our goal is to be a platform for all ideas.”
Despite Zuckerberg’s claims, The Western Journal’s analysis indicated that Facebook’s algorithm change, intentional or not, has in effect censored conservative viewpoints on the largest social media platform in the world. This change has ramifications that, in the short-term, are causing conservative publishers to downsize or fold completely, and in the long-term could swing elections in the United States and around the world toward liberal politicians and policies.
Scalise was not the first GOP lawmaker to ask Zuckerberg about Facebook’s alleged bias against conservatives.
As The Western Journal reported, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz asked the Facebook CEO pointed questions Tuesday about Facebook’s political standpoint and the possible censorship of conservative views on the platform.
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“Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?” Cruz asked. “Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak?”
Zuckerberg responded saying that there is certain content that is not allowed — hate speech, terrorist content, nudity — and that they refer to themselves as “a platform for all ideas.”
The senator pressed again, saying that it is a “simple question”whether or not Facebook is “engaged in political speech which is (their) right under the First Amendment.”
The Facebook CEO said that though the company’s “goal is certainly not to engage in political speech,” he was “just trying to lay out how broadly I think about this.”
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Cruz then told Zuckerberg that there are many Americans who are concerned about Facebook’s political bias in what they show on their platform.
“There have been numerous instances with Facebook in May of 2016 as Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposefully and routinely suppressed conservative stories from conservative news,” the senator pointed out. These stories include ones about CPAC, Mitt Romney and Rand Paul.
As Cruz pointed out, Facebook also had blocked a post from a Fox News reporter and “over two dozen”Catholic pages.
“This is actually a concern that I have, and that I try to root out at the company — is making sure that we don’t have any bias in the work that we do,” Zuckerberg responded. “I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about.”
According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “love” will defeat ISIS, the militant Islamic group that has taken large areas of Iraq and Syria, brutally murdering anyone who holds a view different from theirs, Breitbart.com reported Tuesday, citing a post the tech mogul made on his own website.
“Each of these attacks were carried out with a goal to spread fear and distrust, and turn members of a community against each other,”he said, addressing recent attacks in Belgium, Turkey and Pakistan.
The “only sustainable way to fight back” against these militants is to “create a world” where everyone “feels cared for and loved,”he added.
On Easter Sunday, at least 70 people were murdered and 300 more were injured when a Taliban faction that supports ISIS detonated a bomb in a park filled with children. The group said it had specifically targeted Christians in that attack.
As our own T.K. Whiteman reported, ISIS militants are plotting to murder Jewish children in Turkey. Zuckerberg, by the way, is Jewish.
According to the Religion of Peace blog, there have been 24 attacks in the week of March 19 – 25, resulting in 200 deaths and 395 more wounded.
Militant Islamic terrorism is nothing new, and Facebook’s response in recent years has primarily been to target those who report on it or those who oppose the idea of militant jihad. This, by the way, is the subject of a book that Adina Kutnicki, an investigative journalist based in Israel, and I are currently working on. That book is tentatively set to be published sometime this fall.
Zuckerberg is clearly living in a dream world if he thinks he can stop global militant jihad with a Coke and a stirring chorus of “Kumbaya.”
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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: ‘Love’ will defeat ISIS
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