The Media Research Center loves to dish out guilt-by-association attacks on George Soros, and it’s mainly mad that the organizations he funds call out right-wing lies and misinformation. Joseph Vazquez complained in a Feb. 14 post that a Soros-funded group endorsed the proper legal consequences for a Twitter troll who spread election misinformation:
A leftist legal group heavily funded by leftist billionaire George Soros is trying to convince a federal appellate court that the First Amendment right to free speech doesn’t necessarily protect … free speech.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL) actually argued that if the speech in question could be considered to constitute the murky concept of “harmful election disinformation,” First Amendment protections should be tossed to the curb. The group broke down its dystopian stance in a press release summarizing the sentiment of an amicus brief it filed with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals for the ongoing United States v. Douglass Mackey case. Soros injected LCCRUL with at least $10,729,441 between 2016 and 2021 alone.
The LCCRUL’s extensive monetary connections to Soros are especially concerning given the latter’s deep investment into undercutting free speech online writ large. MRC Free Speech America released a study in September 2023 uncovering how Soros had funneled over $14.8 million to at least 50 leftist anti-free speech groups attempting to quash so-called “disinformation” online and elsewhere between 2017-2021.
LCCRUL based its argument on the initial outcome of the Mackey case, which RealClearInvestigations Editor-at-Large Benjamin Weingarten referred to as a “straight-out-of-the-Soviet Union case.” The defendant — a Twitter troll — was sentenced to prison by a U.S. District Court judge for posting an anti-Hillary Clinton meme on Twitter in 2016. “Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” the spoof ad read. The Daily Wire noted that it was “unclear how many people, if anyone, fell for the meme and did not cast the vote they intended to cast; or were merely participating in the joke.” The Second Circuit Court later stayed the initial prison sentence in favor of Mackey until after his appeal was adjudicated. The Soros-funded LCCRUL was clearly triggered.
“[T]he First Amendment does not protect efforts to spread harmful election disinformation with the intention of disenfranchising” voters, the group whined in its press release. In essence, objectionable speech on elections must be verboten, even if it’s a meme!
As we pointed out when the MRC previously defended Mackey, he was not punished for a “joke” or a “meme” — Mackey sent out two tweets designed to look like they came from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign urging people to vote by text, which is not allowed in the U.S., and targeting black and Hispanic voters. Vazquez censored that information, as well as the fact that Mackey has a history of racist tweets — stating among other things that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that black people are easily deceived — which put his tweets in context, and around the same time he was sending tweets suggesting that it was important to limit “black turnout” at voting booths. Mackey’s intent to deceive was clear, which put the lie to Vazquez’s claim that this was merely a “joke” or “meme” and demonstrating that it really was deliberate disinformation. He then demanded that people should be deliberately misled about elections:
The LCCRUL proceeded to racialize the case in its rant by diminishing minority voters’ capabilities to determine facts for themselves. “There continue to be significant developments in the technologies that allow people to create misleading and harmful election disinformation and deter marginalized communities from exercising their voting rights. Our democracy cannot afford to let this trend continue unchecked,” propagandized LCCRUL senior counsel Marc Epstein in the press release. Free speech be damned!
Mackey is the one who “racialized” the case, not the LCCRUL. Vazquez seems not to know or care about it.
Cataherine Salgado used an April 5 post to repeat her employer-mandated narrative that merely fact-checking someone is “censorship”:
A fact-checking network funded by leftist billionaire George Soros is trying to shift emphasis from free speech to pre-approved “facts.”
Leftist Poynter Institute and its International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) only mentioned free speech once in its 2023-2024 Impact Report — and such a mention was only to highlight an individual’s award. Rather, Poynter emphasized “Facts on the global stage,” setting itself up as an arbiter of truth online. Poynter openly boasted about its work to suppress speech on social media platforms. Significantly, this report comes after Poynter Institute received $492,000 in grants from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) between 2016 and 2019.
Poynter only mentioned “freedom of expression” when it highlighted the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Filipina journalist Maria Ressa for defending free speech. Tellingly, Ressa now trains fact-checkers, which is the work Poynter aimed to highlight. Ressa’s news organization Rappler was a beneficiary of Poynter funds, as was USA Today, among others. “In 2023, Poynter’s IFCN awarded $1.875 million in grants to 55 different news organizations through IFCN’s GlobalFact Check Fund,” the group announced. “Poynter will award up to $4 million in additional grants in 2024.”
[…]In the same report, IFCN Director Angie Drobnic Holan raised the alarm that “[m]isinformation is on the march” and that “fact-checkers and other journalists face attack and harassment simply for doing their jobs.” Ignoring the fact that anti-free speech actions are a major factor in reducing trust in media, Holan then claimed, “We are on the side of truth. We are on the side of information integrity.”
Salgado didn’t explain why fact-checking isn’t also “free speech” under her employer’s definition — after all, people should have the freedom to call out lies and misinformation by others without it being falsely dismissed as “censorship.” Nor did she explain her apparent belief that lies and misinformation deserve more constitutional protection than the truth. Instead, she spread her own misinformation:
An example undermining Holan’s claims of objectivity is a 2020 article and Facebook fact-check still available on the Poynter-owned PolitiFact website. The article pushed the claim that “Russian operatives used a series of ‘active measures’ to hack campaigns, spread disinformation and sow discord in an effort to sway the election in favor of President Donald Trump.” PolitiFact cited and linked to the since-discredited Mueller Report, which actually found no evidence of “Russia collusion” with Trump.
Salgado offered no evidence the Mueller report is “discredited.” That false label allowed her to ignore the fact that the report did, in fact, find that Russia attempted to interfere in the the election and that the Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian operatives. The only thing we see being undermined here is Salgado’s partisan talking points.
Of course, any Soros funding these groups receive is irrelevant to what the MRC is attacking them over. The MRC has a longstanding agenda to build a hostile narrative around Soros as an evil boogeyman because it helps sell right-wing narratives.