Liberal donor-backed ‘free speech’ group decries GOP push to obtain ‘censorship’ records
Gabe Kaminsky
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A “free speech” group bankrolled by top liberal foundations is taking aim at Republicans over their efforts to obtain records from taxpayer-funded universities on their “censorship” of conservatives and “disinformation” tracking plans.
Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) of the House Judiciary Committee and other top GOP lawmakers have escalated their investigations recently into universities through public records requests and letters purportedly to understand their roles in helping to throttle speech deemed as “disinformation.” Now, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, a self-styled free speech group that has taken cash from influential left-wing nonprofit groups, including the George Soros-led Open Society Foundations, is labeling the committee’s constitutionally guarded actions as a “troubling” level of “intimidation.”
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“It’s remarkable and very troubling that a congressional panel that purports to be investigating censorship is engaged in the intimidation of researchers,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director for the institute, said in a statement Tuesday evening. “There’s nothing at all nefarious about researchers studying online speech and sharing their conclusions with social media platforms — and this activity is indisputably protected by the First Amendment. The panel should withdraw its sweeping demands, which undermine the very freedoms it says it is trying to protect.”
Columbia’s institute was also co-founded by the left-leaning Knight Foundation, which gave $31,200 to the Global Disinformation Index in 2020, grant records show. The Washington Examiner revealed earlier this year that GDI has been blacklisting conservative websites and received roughly $960,000 combined between 2020 and 2022 from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and a government-funded nonprofit group called the National Endowment for Democracy.
As for the institute, it received $600,000 between 2021 and 2022 from the Ford Foundation, at least $1.15 million from 2017 to 2020 from the MacArthur Foundation, and also donations over the years from the likes of OSF, the Omidyar Group, and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation, according to grant database records.
The comments from Jaffer, ex-deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, came after a Tuesday Washington Post story quoted University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, a former member of a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency advisory committee, alleging there are “false claims” and “false accusations about our work.” Starbird, which the Washington Examiner learned sat for a transcribed interview and deposition Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, has come under fire in connection to her role with the university’s Center for an Informed Public, “which formed in 2019 around a shared mission of resisting strategic misinformation.”
The Washington Post story described how Jordan and right-leaning watchdog groups, such as Protect the Public’s Trust led by former Trump Education Department official Michael Chamberlain, have used legal public records request tools to demand universities turn over documents on purported government grants to study “disinformation.” Protect the Public’s Trust sued the State Department in May in connection to the agency’s stonewalling of records on its grants to the Global Disinformation Index.
Alex Abdo, the Knight First Amendment Institute’s litigation director, charged in a Tuesday evening statement that “Congress should establish new legal protections to ensure that researchers can do their important work without interference,” as opposed to trying to “intimidate and punish” researchers.
But according to the Functional Government Initiative, a right-leaning ethics watchdog group, it is “strange” that a group claiming to support the First Amendment is “shouting harassment when publicly-funded entities are asked to provide records.”
“It’s worth asking why ‘free speech advocacy groups’ are coming to the defense of academic institutions who regularly participated in efforts directed, funded, and coordinated by the government that undeniably resulted in discrimination against certain speech,” Pete McGinnis, a Functional Government Initiative spokesman, told the Washington Examiner. “Transparency has always been a key disinfectant for misconduct, and this situation appears no different.”
Jordan’s investigation has also focused on Stanford University, which houses the Stanford Internet Observatory, an entity that studies technology, social media, and “disinformation,” according to its website. The congressman threatened last week to use legal action against the university for skirting his committee’s April subpoena for records related to its alleged coordination with social media companies on “censorship of disfavored speech.”
Jordan’s office declined to comment on the subpoena or the Knight First Amendment Institute’s allegations.
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The chairman’s GOP colleagues on the Small Business Committee notably demanded “unredacted” grant records from the Global Engagement Center on Wednesday in a letter that cited multiple Washington Examiner stories on the Global Disinformation Index.
The Knight First Amendment Institute did not reply to a request for comment.