Will Kessler
Left-wing megadonor Craig Newmark worked with several technology giants to launch a project that gives guidelines readers can use to determine what news stories should be trusted, according to its website.
The Trust Project lists eight “trust indicators” that are designed to inform readers about which news stories to trust, according to the website. The project’s funders include tech giants Microsoft, Google and Facebook, as well as Newmark, who is a prolific donor to journalism schools and left-wing media groups such as Mother Jones and ProPublica.
The seventh trust indicator, titled “Diverse Voices,” instructs readers to “look for voices less commonly heard in society, often because of race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ideology or the region they live in,” according to the website. It recommends readers ask whether there is “evidence that the journalist pays attention to diversity” and if communities are “included only in stereotypical ways, or completely missing.”
The project describes itself as “a collaboration funded by Microsoft that includes the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), the Trust Project, University of Washington’s Accelerating Social Transformation leadership program, and UW Center for an Informed Public,” according to its website.
One of the funders of the project was Democracy Fund, which was created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar’s groups paid out $1.2 billion between 2004 and 2022, with most of it going to left-wing organizations since 2014, according to the Capital Research Center.
Omidyar and his wife also gave $45 million in 2020 to the Civic Action Fund, a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund that financed attack ads against Trump and some Republican senators during the 2020 election, according to Politico. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a left-leaning dark-money group that gave $410 million to Democratic efforts in 2020.
Microsoft has been criticized for alleged censorship efforts. Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan claimed in 2021 that the tech giant censors conservative voices on various platforms like LinkedIn.
Russel Dye, a spokesperson for the House Judiciary Republicans, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in June 2021 that “Microsoft has used its power to promote a woke agenda and to help Democrats.”
The Trust Project, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Omidyar Network, Meta, Google and Microsoft did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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