Big Tech’s Influence in Biden Ticket, 2020 Election Raises Concerns

Big Tech companies have been accused of meddling in the 2020 election, and their employees have obtained influential roles within the Biden-Harris organization, which critics say could signal a return to the friendly stance held by the Obama administration toward Silicon Valley.

At issue is how these companies used their funding or engaged in censorship ahead of the election. A report from The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society alleges that $500 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was given to election officials and used to violate election laws. The money was allegedly used to improperly influence the election in favor of Biden, with the bulk of the funds going to a progressive nonprofit.

That raises “serious legal concerns,” according to Scott Watnik, member of the litigation department and co-chair of the cybersecurity practice at the law firm Wilk Auslander LLP.

“What appears to have happened here is that dollars sourced from Zuckerberg have been used to fund a public function that is to be performed under the auspices of public election officials with taxpayer funding,” Watnik told The Epoch Times. “But when it comes to election infrastructure, each state is required to treat people equally under the law—the 14th Amendment applies.

“It’s no secret at this point that the funds were not disbursed in an even-handed way in terms of election infrastructure,” he added. “Far from that, the funds were distributed to favor select, left-leaning demographic areas over others, including in swing states.”

Another point of concern, critics say, is that dozens of Big Tech alumni have joined Biden’s transition team or have gained influential positions in his administration.

Christian Tom, who was announced as digital director for the Biden-Harris Presidential Inaugural Committee on Dec. 28 had worked at Twitter, Google, and YouTube in revenue roles before...

whilst FakeNewsMSM/Deep State spent years going on about FB allegedly interfering in the 2016 elections in a minor way, it’s VERY DIFFERENT now that it’s blatant interference on a massive scale:

audio is different from article; also there are some details on Philadelphia & how they spent their FB money which won’t copy, but is worth a read:

AUDIO: 8 Dec: NPR All Things Considered: How Private Money From Facebook’s CEO Saved The 2020 Election
(AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE: Editor’s Note: Facebook is among NPR’s financial supporters)
By Tom Scheck
Bill Turner knew he had a tough job. He took over as acting director of voter services in Chester County, (Pennsylvania), in September, just two months before a divisive presidential election amid a pandemic. Huge voter turnout was expected, and COVID-19 required election managers like Turner to handle mail-in ballots on a scale they’d never seen and confront the threat of their staffers becoming sick...

With a tight budget and little help from the federal government, Chester County applied for an election grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a previously small Chicago-based nonprofit that quickly amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to help local election offices — most notably, $350 million from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
“Honestly, I don’t know what we would have done without it,” Turner said...

Turner is one of 25 election directors from swing states interviewed by APM Reports who said the grant money was essential to preventing an election meltdown amid worries over a pandemic and a president who continues to openly question — without evidence — the legitimacy of the process.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life gave grants to more than 2,500 jurisdictions this year to help departments pay for election administration...

Pennsylvania was pivotal to Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump, and his win in the state was fueled in part by his success in Chester County. He won it by 17 percentage points — nearly double Hillary Clinton’s margin four years earlier.

Turner used the grant to buy 14 drop boxes for ballots, pay staff to watch those sites and purchase body cameras that recorded employees collecting ballots from the drop boxes. He also spent a large portion of the grant on additional equipment and people to ensure that ballots were mailed out and counted quickly. The county processed 150,000 mail ballots for the November election in 36 hours...

With little action from Congress, the private sector, led by Zuckerberg and Chan, stepped up. The couple awarded $400 million to nonprofits for election assistance — with most of it going to the Center for Tech and Civic Life...

The full extent of the grants isn’t known. The Center for Tech and Civic Life declined repeated interview requests from APM Reports to discuss the funding and how it was used. In late October, the group listed the jurisdictions that received funding on its website but didn’t disclose dollar amounts or funding priorities for each jurisdiction.

But through a series of interviews, public records requests and a review of public meetings, APM Reports pieced together the details of grant awards in the five swing states that decided the election. APM Reports obtained more than 30 applications and grant agreements between local election offices and the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The documents show requests mainly focused on the logistics of the election: increased pay for poll workers, expanded early voting sites and extra equipment to more quickly process millions of mailed ballots...

But an APM Reports analysis of voter registration and voter turnout in three of the five key swing states shows the grant funding had no clear impact on who turned out to vote. Turnout increased across the U.S. from 2016. The APM Reports analysis found that counties in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona that received grants didn’t have consistently higher turnout rates than those that didn’t receive money...

***The nonprofit is also continuing to offer grants to communities that are holding runoff elections in Georgia in January...

“It’s really important that it’s a one-time thing,” said Rachael Cobb, associate professor of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University in Boston. Cobb said the private money was critical for election administration this year, “but over time, it in and of itself is corrosive.” She said continuing to use private money for such purposes “sullies [the election] in a way that we don’t need it to be sullied at all.”

But other election analysts say private funding is the best option if the federal government isn’t going to commit to sustainable long-term funding for election offices.

They also say the grants helped avert a potential disaster where long lines, missing mail and slow counting could have led Trump to further question the integrity of results in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.

David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said that without the grants, “it certainly would have taken them a lot longer to process and count those absentee ballots, which would have only made this post-election period more unbearable.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/943242106/how-private-money-from-facebooks-ceo-saved-the-2020-election

15 Dec: Fox News: Top Facebook, Twitter execs donated tens of thousands of dollars to Biden campaign
No Facebook or Twitter executives were found to have donated to Trump’s campaign
By Brooke Singman, Peter Hasson
The Biden campaign also noted that the president-elect has been critical of Facebook and pointed to instances where Biden has urged the social media company to more aggressively police misinformation.

“The Silicon Valley mafia was always in the tank for Joe Biden and everyone knew it. It’s why they blocked the sharing of the Hunter Biden story, to protect their boy Joe Biden. That was election interference, plain and simple, while they also targeted President Trump and other Republicans with censorship,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told Fox News Monday. “So it should surprise no one that they have also showered money on him.”...

“Of course Silicon Valley billionaires donated to Joe Biden. But their political bias doesn’t end at their checkbooks,” a Cruz spokesperson told Fox News. “By censoring President Trump and news organizations, Big Tech stacked the deck for the Democrat Party and against the American people.”....
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/facebook-twitter-biden-campaign-donations-censorship

17 Dec: The Federalist: With Election Over, Facebook and Twitter Pause Some Efforts To Crush Conservatives
by Jordan Davidson
Now that the election is over and Silicon Valley got the results they wanted, companies like Twitter and Facebook are pausing their efforts to quell conservative voices by reinstating certain retweet and algorithmic functions.

Beginning on Thursday, Twitter reinstated its immediate retweet operations, removing the cumbersome “quote tweet” feature that began plaguing users in October. Instead of requiring “commentary” to retweet something, Twitter once again allows users to quickly share content with one click of a button...
In addition to reinstating fast retweets, Twitter also announced that it would be scaling back its context descriptions for trending topics on the “for you” page.
The threat of arbitrary fact-checking for trending phrases, names, or hashtags, however, still looms...

Facebook also confirmed that it will begin to withdraw its throttling of specific news outlets after the election, which limited the distribution of posts from certain pages and accounts under the guise of combating “false and misleading claims” about election results and fraud.
After successfully using a “secret internal ranking system” called news ecosystem quality scores (N.E.Q.) to determine which news stories the company would allow to circulate on the platform, Facebook directed digital traffic to corporate media news outlets such as CNN, NPR, and The New York Times while openly suppressing content from conservative sites...

Throughout the the election season, both Facebook and Twitter ran election interference that benefited the left, suppressing and removing the New York Post’s reporting about the Biden family’s corruption, censoring conservative voices and President Donald Trump, as well as enacting features and fact checks meant to curb the spread of what each big tech company arbitrarily declared was “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/17/with-election-over-facebook-and-twitter-pause-some-efforts-to-crush-conservatives/

who is FB really?

9 Dec: Investopedia: Top 5 Shareholders of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg is Facebook’s largest shareholder by far. As mentioned, he co-founded Facebook and has been the company’s longtime chairman and CEO. At the age of 35, Zuckerberg is also ranked seventh on the Forbes World’s Billionaires List with a net worth of $54.7 billion. He currently holds over 400 million shares of Facebook, comprising a market value of around $82.2 billion. Zuckerberg’s holdings also give him a disproportionate share of voting rights. He controls 57.9% of the total voting shares, giving him effective control of the company.

Vanguard Group Inc.
Vanguard is one of the world’s largest investment management companies with about 425 low-cost traditional funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The firm has about $6.2 trillion in global assets under management (AUM). The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) is one of the company’s largest ETFs with about $130 billion in AUM. Vanguard’s funds hold approximately 184.0 million shares of Facebook with a combined market value of about $37.7 billion.

(Wikipedia: In China, Vanguard has in 2020 rolled out a digital adviser and is building up an investment team. In October 2020, Vanguard returned about $21 billion in managed assets to government clients in China)

BlackRock Inc.
BlackRock is one of the world’s leading asset and investment management firms with approximately $6.47 trillion in AUM. The firm offers a wide range of mutual funds, iShares ETFs and closed-end funds. The iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) is among one of BlackRock’s largest ETFs with approximately $180.3 billion in AUM. BlackRock’s funds hold about 158.2 million shares of Facebook with a combined market value of $32.3 billion.

(Wikipedia: In August 2020, BlackRock received approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission to set up a mutual fund business in the country. This makes BlackRock the first global asset manager to get consent from China to start operations...In 2017, BlackRock expanded its presence in sustainable investing and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) with new staff and products both in USA and Europe with the aim to lead the evolution of the financial sector in this regard...BlackRock started using its weight to draw attention to environmental and diversity issues by means of official letters to CEOs and shareholder votes together with activist investors or investor network like the Carbon Disclosure Project, which in 2017 backed a successful shareholder resolution for ExxonMobil to act on climate change) ETC
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-shareholders-facebook-fb.asp

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