A college that has received substantial funds from leftist billionaire George Soros suggested tech companies, particularly artificial intelligence, aren’t censoring enough speech.
Bard College, which has received over a billion dollars in donations and endowment pledge from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), published a Jan. 13 post on combating artificial intelligence (AI)-generated “disinformation,” the favorite leftist catchphrase to justify censorship.
While seeming to approve of some aspects of X’s (formerly Twitter) Community Notes fact-checking program, the college also promoted Financial Times tech correspondent Hannah Murphy’s assertions that Big Tech isn’t doing enough to quash free speech.
“In a long essay on the dangers and challenges of AI generated disinformation, Hannah Murphy pretty much gives up,” Bard gloomily noted. “She ends her essay arguing that there may simply be no way to combat such advanced disinformation.” Bard noted that Murphy accused some social media, notably X, of not crushing speech enough.
X and Telegram have more “disinformation” now, argued Murphy and Bard, “because [perpetrators] know that the legacy platforms are putting resources into” censorship. X does have Community Notes, which add labels to and then demonetizes posts. Community Notes is censorship under another name, so it’s no surprise that anti-free speech Bard seemed undetermined on whether to critique or praise them.
X’s Community Notes uses the open source pol.is software, Bard explained. It added, “We featured pol.is software at the 2022 Hannah Arendt Center Conference” talk by the pol.is founder. Bard also cited technology researcher Carl Miller, who argued that Community Notes’ crowdsourcing could be a plus: “Twitter made the crucial decision to surface notes not by simply selecting the most popular, but those that win the broadest consensus…[Polis] is among the few examples of technologies shown to coax agreement out of online debate.”
Leftist, anti-free speech billionaire Soros has certainly rewarded Bard for such problematic comments in the past. MRC Business previously highlighted the fact that Soros gave Bard College over $500 million in donations and pledged between 2016 and 2021. In 2022, Soros’s OSF gave Bard no fewer than 13 separate grants, for a total of over $610.8 million. Altogether, Bard has received over a billion dollars from Soros.
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