Under a microscope during a Senate hearing two years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg insisted the key to detecting those trying to influence elections, including foreigners, was transparency.
“This is an area where I think more transparency will really help discourse overall and root out foreign interference in elections,” Zuckerberg testified in August 2018, a pledge about Facebook political ads that he delivered by providing more information about the ads and their sponsors to users.
But Zuckerberg’s own influence on the 2020 election — an unprecedented $350 million gambit to route money though the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life to local election districts across the country — remains shrouded in secrecy because the group won’t release the amounts and timing of its grants.
CTCL provided Just the News a link to a spreadsheet listing some 2,500 localities — scattered among red and blue states — that it granted money to in 2020 to help turn out voters during a pandemic. But CTCL refused repeated requests to provide the amounts and dates of grants to each district.
The latter data is necessary to calculate per capita spending in each community and determine whether the group has favored Democrats or Republicans with its grant making.
Early information obtained through open records requests and lawsuits has created concerns among conservative activists at least that CTCL used Zuckerberg’s money to benefit big blue urban areas and to dictate voter turnout outcomes.
For instance, official government memos from Wisconsin show the city of Racine, a reliable Democrat-led enclave in an otherwise red-leaning county in southeastern Wisconsin, was given an initial $100,000 grant from CTCL to develop a COVID-voting plan for itself and four other communities…
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