Billionaire George Soros, who earlier this year demanded that the European Union take a more aggressive role and regulate social media giants Facebook and Google claiming that voters’ minds were being controlled and “manipulated”, recently spent millions purchasing large sums in social-media stock after bashing the companies.
Soros argued the magnitude of social media firms made them a “public menace” and they had led people to vote against globalist causes – Hillary Clinton – including electing President Donald Trump, in an article for The Guardian.
In the Guardian article, he wrote that social media can “influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it” and “this interferes with the functioning of democracy and the integrity of elections”.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Soros made the purchases through his Soros Fund Management during the second quarter. The purchases include 159,200 shares in Facebook (valued at $31 million), 250,000 shares in Twitter (valued at $11 million), and 54,500 shares in Apple (valued at $10 million), Security and Exchange Commission filings show.
WND reports:
The numbers come from Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the report said.
Soros lashed out at the social-media companies as a “menace” during the first quarter, when he did not have holdings in any of the companies.
“[A]s Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware,” he claimed at the time.
“They claim they are merely distributing information. But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access,” Soros said.
Just last week Media Matters, a Soros-funded operation, boasted in a secret document from last year about a collaborative plan with social-media giants to silence conservative voices and resist Trump.
Media Matters said one of the products of its work was to convince the Facebook CEO to take “fake news” seriously and “commit to taking action to fix the problem.”
As WND reported, the 49-page memo for defeating Trump was presented by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors. The plan mirrors the recent wave of censorship of conservatives on the internet by tech giants Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube and Apple.
As some members of Congress who have grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others have argued, the problem with admittedly left-leaning Silicon Valley social-media platforms censoring “fake news” is that one man’s fake news is another’s real news.
And it’s clear in the memo that when Brock refers to “fake news,” he’s talking more about conservative media on the web, mentioning outlets such as Breitbart and the Media Research Center, than he is articles generated by Russian sources to influence the election, which Facebook has told Congress comprised a minuscule portion of the traffic generated by 2 billion users.
In his memo, Brock states that during the 2016 election, Facebook “refused to do anything about the dangerous rise of fake news or even acknowledge their role in promoting disinformation,” with Zuckerberg calling the notion that fake news is a problem “crazy.”
But in November 2016, Brock writes, Media Matters “launched a campaign pressuring Facebook to: 1) acknowledge the problem of the proliferation of fake news on Facebook and its consequences for our democracy and 2) commit to taking action to fix the problem.”
Media Matters met with Facebook to discuss how to crack down on fake news, according to the memo, providing “a detailed map of the constellation of right-wing Facebook pages that had been the biggest purveyors of fake news.”
Last month House Republicans, noting Facebook’s recent blocking of a post of the Declaration of Independence as “hate speech,” held a hearing with representatives of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter on the alleged suppression of conservative viewpoints on social-media platforms.
