Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leveraged $500 million in funding to create a “dark money apparatus of 10 nonprofits funded by 5 foundations” with the aim to “fundamentally undermine the electoral system.”
The Amistad Project, an election watchdog group, highlighted Zuckerberg’s efforts to increase turnout in Democrat precincts.
The group notes that of his nearly half-billion-dollar sum, $350 million was given to the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), which “used the money to illegally inflate turnout in key Democratic swing states as part of this effort.”
The New American previously reported on how the Fulton County, Georgia, board of commissioners voted to accept a $6.3 million grant as part of CTCL’s “Safe Elections” project. The commission did not ask any questions about the name of the group providing the funding, the money’s origin, or the details of what the funding would be used for.
In the county, Democrat Joe Biden got 381,144 votes compared to Donald Trump’s 137,240. Of the 523,000 total ballots submitted, Fulton County says 59,143 were Election Day votes, while 146,994 were absentee votes, 314,985 were early votes, and 3,537 were provisional votes.
Per the most recent tallies, Biden leads President Trump in the state by fewer than 12,000 votes.
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According to the Amistad Project, of “the 17 cities and counties that have received the largest ‘grants’ from CTCL, totaling more than $51,000,000 combined, just under $300,000 was given” to Republican-leaning counties, meaning 99.4 percent of Zuckerberg’s grants went to maximizing turnout in blue counties.
The Amistad Project links the efforts of CTCL to former Barack Obama campaign manager and Zuckerberg-Chan initiative strategist David Plouffe, who wrote “A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump”:
On page 81 of his book, Plouffe correctly identifies that the 2020 general election will come down to a “block by block street fight” to turn out the vote in the urban core, a key stronghold of Democrat Party votes. Plouffe specifically highlighted high turnouts in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia as the key to a Democrat victory. Soon after, we witnessed the rumblings of a previously sleepy 501(c)(3) organization entitled the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) whose previous annual revenues never exceeded $1.2 million.
Additional dark-money organizations involved in this effort to “privatize elections” are The Democracy Fund, New Venture Fund, Skoll Foundation, and The Knight Foundation. CTCL — along with the Center for Electronic Innovation Research, the Center for Civic Design, the National Vote at Home Institute, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and Rock the Vote — played a crucial role in the distributing these funds.
One of the achievements of these groups was to coerce state legislatures into adopting universal mail-in balloting, which boosted Democrat turnout.
The Amistad Project argues that the premise of the voter-turnout groups was faulty to begin with; states already had enough funding to conduct their elections through the Help America Vote Act and the CARES Act. They didn’t need Zuckerberg’s money.
“The injection of private funding into county and municipal elections circumvented State and Federal appropriations processes, violated protocols in HAVA state implementation plans, and resulted in inaccurate reporting under HAVA 254(a)(5),” the Amistad Project also noted.
The New American has reported on the wide disparity in support for President Trump and Joe Biden among high-level executives at Facebook and Twitter. Donations for the former vice president totaled in the tens of thousands; in many cases, they donated the maximum federally allowed sum of $2,800.
By contrast, only two Facebook employees with “manager” or “director” in their title donated to President Trump’s campaign; no Twitter employees with those titles donated to the president.
This news comes as states and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sue Facebook in two separate antitrust lawsuits on grounds that the social-media company is guilty of anticompetitive behavior and abused its dominant role in the digital marketplace.
In particular, the FTC wants a permanent injunction in federal court that could force Facebook to divest major assets such as Instagram and WhatsApp, breaking the company up as it currently stands. The states, likewise, are calling for the company to be broken up.
At the same time, many conservative voices, including President Trump, say the major social-media companies should lose their Section 230 protections under the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which currently safeguards them from liability for content posted on their platforms. The argument is that their constant censorship of conservative content demonstrates they are not neutral platforms, but publishers, and should thus be held legally liable for what is shared on their sites.
