The State Department reportedly funds a George Soros-backed organization based in the UK that helps six Big Tech platforms censor Americans.
Reclaim the Net reported Feb. 16 that the US State Department funds the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). ISD partners with platforms to flag alleged “misinformation” and disinformation.” Unsurprisingly, the disinformation group has been “accused of classifying conservative viewpoints as hate and disinformation,” Reclaim the Net said. The ISD apparatus received at least $2,029,863 from leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations between 2017 and 2021.
The ISD won the US-Paris Tech Challenge in September 2021 and the State Department then awarded ISD a grant to supposedly “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK specifically and Europe more generally.
Reclaim the Net also cited The Daily Caller to note that another winner of the US-Paris Tech Challenge was the leftist Global Disinformation Index (GDI), another State Department-backed entity which was just revealed to have blacklisted conservative websites to deprive them of ad revenue in a series of Washington Examiner exposés. MRC Free Speech America revealed that GDI has three advisory board members with ties to Soros.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded ISD, Reclaim the Net explained, supposedly to do research on Russian “disinformation tactics on Wikipedia.”The State Department still claims it does not censor social media users, though GEC was recently caught by America First Legal as having allegedly coordinated with Big Tech platforms to censor Americans.
The State Department-funded ISD is partnered with social media platforms for “content moderation,” Reclaim the Net said. “Content moderation” is just an overused euphemism for censorship. Denigrating the free exchange of ideas online is certainly in line with the Soros brand. Soros-funded groups fueled with at least $80,233,084 of the leftist billionaire’s cash pressured Big Tech platforms to clamp down on election-related speech before the 2022 midterm elections. It’s also revealing that ISD lists censorship-obsessed Big Tech giants like Facebook, Google and YouTube as co-funders of the organization.
ISD is also reportedly part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program, which can flag more content for censorship than ordinary users, and ISD is also partnered with Google to “counter hate and extremism in the UK and Europe.”
ISD is a member too of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, which advises the platform on “misinformation” responses, and ISD partners with Amazon’s Audible, Microsoft, and Facebook. So State Department-funded ISD is partnered with no fewer than six Big Tech platforms for censorship purposes.
“ISD is mostly focused on extremism and terrorism,” but also targets alleged misinformation and hate speech, according to Reclaim the Net. The outfit recently released propaganda targeting Twitter owner Elon Musk for daring to interact with so-called “right-wing accounts” like Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, Libs of TikTok and satire site The Babylon Bee.
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