Poynter’s head of the censorial International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and former PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Angie Drobnic Holan has just been elected to the leadership cabal of a globalist media behemoth financed by leftist billionaire George Soros.
Poynter proudly announced July 24 that IFCN director Holan was “elected to the Steering Committee of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), the largest global community of journalism support and media development organization.”
Holan is apparently one of 17 newly elected members to the Committee who will begin their four-year term in November. The Committee serves as the "leadership body for the network, setting its strategic direction and representing its diverse membership."
The GFMD, which is on record supporting the United Nation’s dystopian push for “global digital governance,” lists Soros’s Open Society Foundations as one of its two “core funders” for 2024 along with the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which became particularly notorious for giving tax dollars to the censorship-obsessed Global Disinformation Index (GDI).
Soros gave at least $869,900 to GFMD between 2016 and 2023 alone. Holan seems to have a knack for taking leadership roles at Soros-backed enterprises. The IFCN — which was heavily invested in helping Big Tech platforms like Facebook widely censor conservative opinions on the COVID-19 virus, amongst other topics, like elections and abortion — is also funded by Soros. It looks like she’s dedicated to keeping that tradition of staying within the Soros media network. The leftist PolitiFact, which she used to run, is Poynter’s in-house fact-checker historically employed by Big Tech platforms to censor content, most notably as Facebook’s former fact-checking partner.
GFMD in particular has a troublesome history of pushing leftist extremism.
In November 2024, GFMD held a policy meeting to debrief on the U.N.’s so-called “Summit of the Future” and the infamous Global Digital Compact, which Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Justin Haskins referred to as “creating a fact-checking apparatus at the United Nations.” The meeting supposedly “provided GFMD members and partners with insights to advance advocacy for media freedom, public interest journalism, and digital governance while fostering collaboration to shape media and digital policies effectively.”
At that meeting, the GFMD gave a platform to Taysir Mathlouthi, the EU Advocacy Officer for the radical group 7amleh, also known as the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, who attacked Israel and complained about Big Tech’s history of supposedly “silencing” pro-Palestinian voices. But as NGO Monitor pointed out in 2023, 7amleh’s idea of “silencing” includes removal of explicitly pro-terrorism content, including those celebrating the carnage Hamas unleashed on Israeli citizens October 7, 2023.
NGO Monitor noted that one of 7amleh’s missions is “to pressure Meta into abandoning its content moderation criteria for posts promoting terrorism.” 7amleh even decried the removal of the pro-violence hashtag #AlAqsa_Flood (#االقصــى_طوفان), the name of Hamas’s terrorist operation which was being used to label videos of the slaughter of Jews during the first day of escalation while the attacks were underway, according to Jewish Insider in May 2024.
The Jewish Insider also reported that 7amleh is a “founding member of The Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition, which includes Al-Haq, Addameer, Al Mezan and UAWC, organizations proscribed by Israel in 2021 as fronts for the U.S.-designated terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”
This is apparently the kind of extremism that GFMD supports, which is not surprising given that the Soros empire has funded 7amleh itself, in addition to funding groups that explicitly supported Hamas’s October 7 genocide on Israel:
Taysir also stressed the importance of using 7amleh’s data in advocacy, citing its inclusion in U.N. Special Rapporteur Irene Khan’s report ‘Global Threats to Freedom of Expression arising from the Conflict in Gaza.”
Uh, mazel tov on the election, Holan?
