By V4 Agency
An organisation funded by George Soros and Bill Gates is declaring war on mis- and disinformation. The newly formed committee is packed with liberals. Meanwhile, another organisation affiliated with Soros has come up with a new study, presumably based on flawed methodology, about misleading posts on Facebook.
The Aspen Institute is a long-time beneficiary of Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF). According to foundation’s website, the institute received 25,000 dollars in 2019, besides a sizable amount of 275,000 dollars a year earlier.
A co-chair of the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder is Katie Couric, a leftist public figure known for her recent suggestion during a television show that members of President Trump‘s “cult” need to be “deprogrammed.” Another co-chair of the newly formed panel is Rashad Robinson, the head Color of Change, an the organisation which also receives funding from George Soros. The third co-chair, Chris Krebs, claimed that last year’s US election was the most secure in the country’s history. The three co-chairs are assisted by 15 commissioners, including Prince Harry of the British royal family.
However, the Aspen Institute enjoys the generous financial support of not just George Soros, but also Bill Gates, a known philanthropist. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation along with two organisations within OSF – the Foundation to Promote Open Society (2,5 million dollars) and the Open Society Institute (445 thousand dollars) – have funneled nearly 105 million dollars into the Aspen Institute, according to the Newsbuster portal, and the institute also received over 101,8 million dollars from Bill Gates’s organisation.
Recently, Soros has taken a keen interest in fake news, especially on social media, and his influence in this segment is also significant. Facebook’s Oversight Board, for instance, is staffed with many of his trusted allies. One of them is former Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of International Crisis Group, an NGO established and funded by George Soros.
In addition, an organisation financed by George Soros conducted a study looking at posts shared on Facebook that contained misinformation. The study concluded that these entries containing disinformation have a potential for reaching up to 10.1 billion views, something that could be prevented. The study, entitled “Facebook: From Election to Insurrection,” was carried out by an organisation called Avaaz. Avaaz co-founder Tom Periello is the executive director of the Open Society Foundations. The other co-founder and President-CEO, Ricken Patel, previously worked for left-wing organisations such as The Rockefeller Foundation and Res Publica.
The study relied on Facebook’s fact-checkers, who verify the authenticity of content to compile a list of “misleading” entries. However, the entries examined were not disclosed.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone issued a statement in response to the report.
“Avaaz used a flawed methodology” because it misled people into believing that “content that was clearly rated ‘false’ or ‘misleading,’ by fact-checkers automatically meant all the content of the creator falls within these categories,” he said.
Facebook’s fact-checkers are all part of the liberal Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), which received 300,000 dollars from George Soros, among other contributors.