A George Soros-funded fact-checking organization heads up a coalition arguing that fact-checks are … free speech. Huh?
The director of the Soros-funded International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the leftist Poynter Institute announced a statement gaslighting on behalf of 130 organizations at a global fact-checking summit.
“World’s fact-checkers issue ‘Sarajevo statement’ supporting fact-checking as free speech, not censorship,” IFCN director Angie Drobnic Holan proudly announced. However, this is false, as multiple social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have actively partnered with IFCN affiliates to deboost any content that has been fact-checked. Poynter is also notorious for trying to blacklist right-leaning media.
Holan, in effect, is attempting to twist around the meaning of what censorship really is, even though it received grants from one of the most prolific funders of censorship in America today.
Morever, fact-checking often operates as a harsh form of censorship online. For instance, fact-check interstitials on Facebook stop users from clicking through to view the content 95 percent of the time, according to the tech company. Facebook’s parent company Meta partners with Poynter.
Soros gave $492,000 to Poynter for IFCN between 2016 and 2019 alone. In light of Soros’s $80 million investment in groups pushing Big Tech to censor speech ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, it is particularly concerning that the so-called “Sarajevo statement” highlighted election interference as supposedly important to “give the public accurate information.”
Holan was spinning herself silly trying to paint censorship zealots as victims of smear campaigns. “In the United States, political and legal attacks on the misinformation research community have pressured academic researchers to curtail work that aids the fact-checking community and widespread efforts to improve election voting processes,” she railed.
She mourned the unpopularity of the infamous and faltering federal government censorship proxy Stanford Internet Observatory, which was part of a government-tech-researcher cabal targeting online speech in 2020 and 2022.
Holan was adamant about deluding readers into thinking that its leftist variant of a Ministry of Truth behemoth was in fact the hero of the free speech story in America.
Holan claimed, “it is time to restate our longstanding commitment to access to information and freedom of expression, for all people and across borders.”
MRC Free Speech America Assistant Editor Luis Cornelio contributed to this report.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
