Republican lawmakers issue warnings to billionaire ‘left-wing Facebook’ board John Arnold

Ahead of the election, Republican lawmakers are raising the alarm about Texas billionaire John Arnold, who was appointed to Meta’s board earlier this year — warning that he could undermine efforts to keep free and open speech on Facebook ahead of the election. presidential.

Arnold, who is worth an estimated $2.9 billion according to Forbes, has spent tens of millions of dollars funding left-wing causes, including parole reform in New York state and organizations linked to George Soros that criticize “disinformation.” .

“John Arnold is a left-wing radical who funded pro-crime projects in Indiana and pro-censorship organizations around the country. “His appointment to the board should make every patriotic American nervous about Big Tech meddling in the 2024 presidential election, just as they did last cycle,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told The Post.

“Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that he wanted to promote free speech and not rig future elections,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), a member of the committee, told The Post of the Meta CEO. “I’d like to believe that, but it defies loyalty when John Arnold, funder of millions of pro-censorship groups, sits on the board of Meta. Americans deserve to speak freely without the leftist network of dark money that feeds the censorship industrial complex.” and does not work against their right to free expression.”

In an August letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he would push back against censorship after acknowledging that Facebook had downplayed The Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election and that it bowed to pressure from the administration. Biden to censor about Covid. the content.

Zuckerberg wrote that “I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret not being more vocal about it.”

But Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), another member of the committee, believes Arnold’s role in Meta signals that Zuckerberg may not be ready to move away from censorship entirely.

“Meta is known for censoring conservative speech. Only after Zuckerberg was caught engaging in election meddling by censoring [Post’s] The October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story promised reform to Meta’s ‘content moderation procedures,’ Steube told The Post.

“It seems that John Arnold, who has spent millions upon millions involved in censorship efforts, should be the last person on the Meta board if Zuckerberg had any seriousness about his promise.”

A spokesperson for Arnold told The Post: “John strongly believes that the basic principles of the First Amendment must be protected at all costs, which is why he has supported the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) since 2013, and is one of the reasons why he is now supporting the University of Texas, an institution dedicated to free speech on campus.”

Asked about Arnold’s role on Meta’s board, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) criticized the company’s past efforts to suppress speech — “Is there anything more Orwellian?” — and noted “the board [is] staffed with left-wing academics deciding free speech issues.”

While Meta has right-leaning members on its board, including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former George W. Bush administration official Robert M. Kimmitt, lawmakers note that Arnold is far more political than anyone else on the board. – especially since conservative pilot Peter Thiel left in 2022.

Arnold, 50, began his career as an energy trader at Enron before launching the hedge fund Centaurus Advisors, which earned him the title of America’s youngest billionaire in 2007. In 2012, he closed the fund and began giving to address public policy issues through his Arnold Ventures philanthropy.

He gave $1.5 million to the Social Science Research Council that operates MediaWell, which “curates research and news on disinformation and digital disinformation” between 2018 and 2022, according to 990 filings.

Research topics range from how to regulate “extreme speech actors” on smaller platforms like Parler to “Fighting an Unstoppable Monster: Journalism’s Legitimacy Narratives in the Age of Trump” to critiquing leak theory of the Covid lab as “racist” and “conspiracy theory.”

The organization has also advocated policies like those implemented in the European Union that crack down on “extreme deep speech”.

In 2020, Arnold gave $500,000 to Global Witness, an NGO that left-leaning billionaire George Soros has supported since 2002. While Global Witness emphasizes its commitment to protecting human rights, much of its research the latter have focused on “electoral disinformation”.

Recent Global Witness investigations have suggested that X “raises[s] right-wing views’ and that tech companies are failing to adequately curb ‘climate disinformation’.

Arnold gave $13.5 million to the startup fund from 2016 to 2020. According to the nonprofit Capital Research, the fund lobbied for increased government oversight of speech, including net neutrality. And a Washington Examiner report from 2022 suggests that Arnold gave nearly $10 million more between 2019 and 2021 to “groups associated with the movement to combat so-called misinformation and disinformation.”

Over the past five years he has also given more than $45 million to organizations pushing for parole reform in New York, according to a Fox News report — even more than the $40 million Soros has given to those efforts. .

While Arnold previously worked with Facebook, funding a 2018 partnership that sought to study how social media was influencing elections, he doesn’t have much social media experience beyond that.

Last month, he admitted in an interview with Bloomberg that his appointment to Meta’s board of directors in February came out of left field: “I’m not a tech guy, which made the invitation all the more surprising.

“I think they were looking for someone who had an energy expertise … the amount of infrastructure required to run data centers for AI is huge,” Arnold said.

He added that his philanthropic work to fight misinformation could be a boon to the company “My background in public policy is an asset to them.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for John Arnold declined to comment.