Newly released documentation shows more private-public election interference. Leftist billionaire Pierre Omidyar did indeed finance 2020 election censorship, an effort tied to a government agency.
Independent investigative journalist Lee Fang reported on June 8 that he obtained documents through an open records request confirming eBay founder Omidyar’s financial and influence peddling of 2020 election censorship. Fang unveiled that Omidyar financed the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS) “specialized portal” to “facilitate the swift removal of predominantly conservative messages” on both Facebook and Twitter.
That’s deliberate election interference from Omidyar.
The portal, said Fang, “served to rapidly identify and remove instances of alleged misinformation.” Omidyar, whose financial backing through The Democracy Fund was supporting a broader censorship campaign overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, also happened to be among the biggest donors to pro-Biden campaign groups, Fang added. Omidyar reportedly funneled at least $45 million into the liberal dark money behemoth Sixteen Thirty Fund, which spent an estimated $410 million to defeat former President Donald Trump and Republicans in the 2020 election.
Fang’s reporting was outright damning. “On one hand, learning of collusion between government and Big Tech oligarchs is becoming redundant,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “But on the other hand, it should shock the conscience that there is this massive effort to interfere in our elections, to the detriment of conservatives.”
The leftist billionaire paid for CIS to establish a Misinformation Reporting Portal (MiRP), Fang wrote. The DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) also oversaw the portal. CIS revealed in a post-election report that it had a team monitoring this MiRP portal 24 hours. This went on between September 28 and November 6, 2020, Fang explained —all for the purpose of facilitating censorship.
Fang obtained the documents in question through an open records request to University of Washington Associate Professor and then CISA advisory panel member Kate Starbird. The report suggested ideas for elections in the future, including more federal government censorship funding.
Tax records also apparently confirm Omidyar’s election censorship funding, Fang noted, as “The Democracy Fund’s 990 disclosure shows that it donated $130,000 to CIS in 2020.” The CIS grant is vaguely marked for helping “election security best practices.”
CIS boasted of how 61% of the content it flagged was censored, even “honest mistakes.” The whole scheme looks even worse in light of how blatantly biased it was:
“This MiRP system was used by a coalition of liberal-leaning research groups and overseen by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), a sub-agency of the DHS that has led the government’s push to censor social media. Despite government backing for the project, the effort was partisan – the Democratic National Committee was part of the consortium, but not the Republican National Committee, indicating a partisan bias.”
In addition, CISA apparently also wasn’t the only government agency involved in the free speech-squashing effort. CIS reportedly stated that “‘In addition to sharing all reports with CISA, some reports were shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI].’”
“In essence, CIS and CISA worked in close collaboration to exert pressure on platforms like Twitter, aiming to remove conservative political expression deemed untrustworthy,” Fang emphasized. “The project was a public-private venture, overseen by government agencies, and supported by a system financed entirely by a Democratic donor.” It was partisan election interference.
Omidyar has a long history of bankrolling leftist, anti-free speech causes through his organization, The Omidyar Network. For instance, The Network gave $509,500 in 2021-2022 to Accountable Tech, a group that pushed a corporate boycott of Elon Musk’s Twitter. Omidyar also launched a so-called “ambitious” journalism program to spread radical anti-capitalist propaganda in the United States. And the leftist billionaire is no stranger to election interference, as he worked to buy Latino votes before the 2022 midterm elections.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that government agencies uphold the U.S. Constitution and Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on election-related censorship and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
