It is the hottest cause celebre for the global jet set. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has donated millions. Same with former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Not only is British royal Prince Charles on board, but so are Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
We are talking, of course, about the fight against disinformation.
“The disinformation crisis we are facing in America today is increasing polarization and eroding our trust in each other, which is having a corrosive effect on our democracy, jeopardizing public health and destabilizing our economy,” a press release from a new organization called Good Information, Inc., reads.
“This is no longer a political dispute about the truth, but the direct result of unregulated business models that are putting whole communities around the world at risk and putting democracy around the world in peril.”
Sounds important!
Good Information receives funds from billionaire Democratic activists George Soros and Reid Hoffman. Ironically, Hoffman has a history of funding disinformation himself, most recently in 2017, when he paid Democratic activists to create fake Twitter and Facebook accounts designed to distribute content that would divide Republicans during the special senate election in Alabama.
The choice to name Democratic activist Tara McGowan to lead Good Information is also raising eyebrows. In addition to funding the company that infamously screwed up the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus, McGowan also helped create a partisan new site called Courier Newsroom that only published articles politically helpful to centrist Democrats.
In 2020, the Courier Newsroom paid no attention to the Democratic presidential primary, immigration, or COVID-19. But it did cover everything centrist Democrats in swing districts did on agriculture, drug prices, and veterans issues. Courier Newsroom then spent millions on Facebook ads promoting these stories. Basically, it was designed and operated to be a Democratic super PAC. It is facing a Federal Election Commission complaint about not being transparent enough about its financial backing.
For her part, McGowan is unrepentant, justifying the strategy with this explanation: “Democrats are losing politically because they have invested in reaching the wrong audiences through the wrong mediums and formats at the wrong times.”
McGowan has since pledged that Good Information will be different. The organization will “make investments in entities across the political spectrum.” So, excuse us for being skeptical of McGowan’s newfound passion for nonpartisan truth.
