Report on Campus Protests Funding
To read the report, please click here.
New Report Tracks Disinformation on Campus Protests:
Funding from Anonymous Chat Boards to Congress
(Washington, D.C.) — Today, The American Sunlight Project released a groundbreaking report tracking the origins of claims that democratic donors funded pro-Palestine campus protesters. The report follows these claims from their inception on anonymous internet message boards to their spread through mainstream media, official communications from members of Congress, a proposed congressional hearing involving the Secretary of the Treasury, and their use as a centerpiece in a major Republican fundraising campaign.
“Beginning in April, bad actors used the campus protests to shape a new narrative on anonymous Internet chat boards. That narrative went on to become the subject of a proposed congressional hearing involving the Secretary of the Treasury and the centerpiece of a major political fundraising campaign. Our researchers captured every step in that journey. This report is a roadmap for how disinformation was conceived on anonymous chat boards, became normalized through mainstream media, and was adopted and weaponized by political actors—all in about a month. It describes a dangerous disinformation cycle that will keep repeating until we stop it,” explained American Sunlight Project CEO Nina Jankowicz.
According to American Sunlight Project co-founder and Chief Communications Officer Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos:
“Effective disinformation usually takes a kernel of truth and marries it to pre-existing biases to achieve a strategic objective. In this case, bad actors exaggerated and contorted funding relationships to present direct linkages where none existed by building on the long-running antisemitic conspiracies about George Soros. That said, the Soros narrative and the extent of its falsity isn’t the story: The reason the Soros narrative matters in this context is that the specific accusation that he was funding protesters didn’t exist prior to April 12, which made it easier for us to isolate and track as it metastasized across the Internet.”
The report identifies at least six members of Congress who have either posted about or linked to media coverage of this false narrative in their official capacities.
“Now more than ever, our political leaders need to be responsible about the information they share with voters and use to make decisions. This report describes gross information negligence on the part of a major political party, members of Congress, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, and Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx. It suggests that our political leaders are becoming a part of the disinformation threat rather than being part of its solution. That needs to change immediately if our democracy is to survive the coming onslaught of AI-generated and algorithmically-targeted disinformation,” added Jankowicz.
The American Sunlight Project will continue to monitor the information environment for prominent malign narratives like those analyzed in this report and remains committed to ensuring that citizens have access to trustworthy sources to inform the choices they make in their daily lives.
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Contact: Eddie Vale, eddie@npagency.com
