Soros-funded publications are doing their financier’s bidding by pushing for censorship and advocating against bans on the Chinese Communist Party-tied TikTok in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
Leftist magazine The Chronicle of Philanthropy published an article Sept. 20 with an ominous headline, “Fighting Online Lies and Deception Requires Large-Scale Philanthropic Response.” The radical publication Just Security published an attack on existing and potential bans on the censorship-obsessed TikTok Sept. 19. Both outlets received funding from leftist billionaire George Soros. Open Society Foundations (OSF) gave The Chronicle of Philanthropy $300,000 in 2022 and Just Security received $975,000 between 2017 and 2021. Just Security’s founding editor, Jennifer Daskal. personally worked for Soros at his Open Society Institute as a “fellow” and was tapped to lead President Joe Biden’s now-defunct, dystopian Disinformation Governance Board.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy gave a platform to a pair of writers who also work at other organizations funded by Soros, Courtney Radsch and Michael Jarvis. They demand censorship and exhibited little patience for “case-by-case basis” approaches to shutting down speech.The article’s authors instead promoted an anti-free speech approach, one they contend “limits” the “proliferation [of lies and falsehoods] in the first place.” The authors also call for their allies to “coordinate better” and avoid a “piecemeal approach” to censorship.
Radsch is director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute (OMI), a Soros-funded outfit that pushed for the Biden administration to “investigate” Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter. Jarvis is executive director for the Transparency & Accountability Initiative, which maintains a particular obsession with drumming up global fears over the left’s climate change boogeyman. “Climate change threatens the natural systems that our lives and economies depend on, so it is simultaneously an environmental, economic, and developmental issue. But it is also an equity issue,” TAI bleated in one 2019 post..
Radsch and Jarvis lamented that “many platforms have scaled back their efforts to fight mis- and disinformation,” decrying any easing of the censorship regime. The authors also mention the Soros-funded “International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute” (IFCN) as a solution to address so-called “misinformation.” The IFCN works with and sometimes even pressures social media giants such as Youtube to censor content.
What the authors did not do is mention that Soros also has ties to the IFCN. Soros gave $492,000 to the IFCN between 2017 and 2019.
The day before Radsch and Jarvis published their pro-censorship propaganda, Just Security author Xiangnong Wang ran cover for the Beijing-tied TikTok.
Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute (which received $25,000 from OSF), referenced a lawsuit filed by his employer against a Texas ban on TikTok on government issued devices. He quoted security technologist Bruce Schneier to call the ban “ineffective, unnecessary, and even counterproductive.”
As reported by MRC Free Speech America, a Beijing-based company, which is owned by three CCP entities, owns a 1% stake in ByteDance, TikTok's infamous parent company. Furthermore, Fox News China expert Gordon Chang told MRC Free Speech America that “The 2017 national intelligence law of China articles 7 and 14 require every Chinese entity to spy if demanded.”
Reports by The Wall Street Journal and Forbes indicate that users should be extremely concerned about what TikTok does with their data and payment information. Current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has criticized TikTok and commended state government actions against the platform, after a study that gave TikTok the “‘worst’ score compared to industry peers” for data security risk. As mentioned in the Just Security article, multiple states have moved to ban TikTok in some way.
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