A progressive billionaire-funded network of Democratic propaganda sites masquerading as legitimate news websites is leading the push to keep former president Donald Trump off Facebook and Twitter.
Courier Newsroom, which bills itself as the "largest left-leaning news network in the country," organized a petition this week to pressure Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Elon Musk to keep Trump off their platforms. Facebook said Thursday it would reinstate Trump "in the coming weeks." Twitter reinstated Trump in November, but the former president has not posted on the site. Both sites banned him in January 2021, under pressure from Democratic lawmakers and liberal advocacy groups.
"We cannot allow him to rejoin these platforms and spread more hateful, inaccurate information. Sign the petition now to keep Trump off of Facebook and Twitter," Courier’s petition says. Blue Amp Action, a Democratic consulting firm, circulated the petition in an email to Courier supporters. The consulting firm has worked for a number of Democratic campaigns. President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign paid Blue Amp Action around $230,000 for media production services in 2020.
Maintaining a ban on Trump could help Democrats in 2024 by depriving the early GOP favorite of access to two of the country’s biggest media platforms. And that aligns with the political goals of Courier Newsroom’s biggest backers.
Laurene Powell Jobs, who inherited $20 billion from her late husband, Apple founder Steve Jobs, was a major funder of ACRONYM, the digital media company behind Courier Newsroom, the Washington Free Beacon reported. While the exact nature of Powell Jobs’s ties to ACRONYM and Courier Newsroom are unclear, she is not the only progressive megadonor propping up the group.
In October 2021, the progressive billionaire George Soros and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman formed an organization called Good Information, Inc. The group acquired Courier Newsroom, which operates websites designed to look like legitimate local news publications. Soros, the Democratic party’s biggest donor, gave $1.2 million to Courier Newsroom through his Open Society Foundations in 2021 to support the group’s "non-partisan journalism."
While Courier Newsroom aims to root out political disinformation online, Hoffman has funded multiple projects that used disinformation to help elect Democrats. In 2017, he funded a project in which tech firms created fake social media personas in order to suppress Republican voter turnout in Alabama’s 2017 special Senate election.
Other Soros-funded advocacy groups have pressured Facebook to maintain its ban on Trump.
Media Matters for America, which received $500,000 in Soros cash in 2021, partnered with Accountable Tech to form the "Keep Trump Off Facebook" campaign. MoveOn.org, one of the largest progressive groups in the country, has purchased ads on Facebook to circulate a petition to keep Trump off the platform. Soros donated $450,000 to MoveOn in 2021.