Soros-Fund­ed Fact-Check­ers: Who Cares About Free Speech, Our ‘Facts’ Are What Mat­ter

Soros-Funded Fact-Checkers: Who Cares About Free Speech, Our ‘Facts’ Are What Matter

A fact-check­ing net­work fund­ed by left­ist bil­lion­aire George Soros is try­ing to shift empha­sis from free speech to pre-approved “facts.”
Left­ist Poyn­ter Insti­tute and its Inter­na­tion­al Fact-Check­ing Net­work (IFCN) only men­tioned free speech once in its 2023–2024 Impact Report — and such a men­tion was only to high­light an individual’s award. Rather, Poyn­ter empha­sized “Facts on the glob­al stage,” set­ting itself up as an arbiter of truth online. Poyn­ter open­ly boast­ed about its work to sup­press speech on social media plat­forms. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, this report comes after Poyn­ter Insti­tute received $492,000 in grants from Soros’s Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tions (OSF) between 2016 and 2019.
Poyn­ter only men­tioned “free­dom of expres­sion” when it high­light­ed the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize award­ed to Fil­ip­ina jour­nal­ist Maria Ressa for defend­ing free speech. Telling­ly, Ressa now trains fact-check­ers, which is the work Poyn­ter aimed to high­light. Ressa’s ne …