Microsoft-Backed 2020 Election Censors Reposition Themselves as ‘AI Deepfake’ Authorities 

2020 Election censors True Media are repositioning themselves as “AI Deepfake” authorities heading into the 2024 election thanks to backing from tech giant Microsoft.

Microsoft is positioning itself as an authority on fighting election-related “disinformation” caused by AI deepfakes, and is lobbying for new regulations in this area. Yet a closer look at its anti-disinformation projects reveal the involvement of extreme Democrat partisans with a track record of pushing political censorship.

LinkedIn founder and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman and “Chief Question Officer,” Trevor Noah are promoting the Microsoft-partnered project True Media — an organization ostensibly focused on curtailing deepfakes but advised by the same far-left, pro-censorship activists behind the now discredited Election Integrity Project, the DHS-linked consortium that played a leading role in censoring Republican speech during the 2020 presidential election.

Russell Dye, Spokesperson for the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), commented:

The House Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government continue to conduct oversight of how and the extent to which the executive branch has coerced or colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech. As part of this oversight, the Committee and Select Subcommittee have examined the risk artificial intelligence (AI) poses to free speech, and have uncovered how the Biden-Harris Administration is already seeking to influence the development of private AI models and is funding the development of AI-powered speech-monitoring tools that could enable the mass censorship of American speech. Reports that the censorship-industrial complex is seeking to pressure AI companies like they did social media companies is deeply troubling and represents a serious risk to free speech in our country.

In an interview  with True Media CEO Oren Etzioni for Microsoft’s podcast The Prompt, former Daily Show Host Trevor Noah (who was previously exposed for failing to disclose his affiliation with Microsoft when giving softball interviews to the company’s execs) Noah calls the 2024 election “one of the most consequential elections of all time.” Reinforcing the argument for third-party authorities to moderate and regulate the AI space, Etzioni said Americans “cannot figure this stuff out on their own.”

Hoffman linked to the video on X and added that he was “excited to see new technologies being created to help detect political deepfakes and ensure that our elections are free and fair.”

The threat of “deepfakes” has emerged as a favorite narrative among those pushing for tighter top-down control of online content, with familiar rhetoric. According to True Media, “Disinformation, transmitted virally over social networks, has emerged as the Achilles heel of democracy in the 21st Century.”

True Media’s “Scientific Advisory Board” Includes some of the leading lights of the Disinformation Industrial Complex, two of whom were directly involved in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).

• Kate Starbird and Jevin West head the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Report on “The weaponization of ‘disinformation’ pseudo-experts and bureaucrats”  described Starbird as “one of the central figures involved in the EIP’s operation.” America First Legal sued the Center for its involvement in working with the Biden Administration to censor “disinformation”  about COVID, noting “the Biden Administration provided Kate Starbird’s UW disinfo lab with a $3 million government grant (jointly with Stanford) just months after Starbird’s lab helped censor the Biden Administration’s political adversary during the 2020 election.”
• Renee Derista headed the Stanford Internet Observatory. As the Weaponization Subcommittee’s report on pseudo-experts noted, “the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of ‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.” As Michael Shellenberger explained, “It was created in June 2019 by director Alex Stamos and research manager Renee DiResta. SIO monitors social media and promotes Internet censorship.”
• Darrell West is a fellow at the left-wing Brookings Institute, where he focuses on the need for the government to take action against so-called disinformation. He wrote the book Power Politics: Trump and the Assault on American Democracy.

After being exposed as quasi-government censors, these “experts” are now poised to insert themselves at another nexus of censorship and regulation, this time under the pretext of preventing the harms of AI deepfakes.

When it comes to disinformation, Hoffman, Noah, and Microsoft have less than stellar records. As the NY Post recently exposed, the former Daily Show host Noah has quietly promoted Microsoft’s policies and products on his podcast while not disclosing his ties to the company, effectively misleading the public about his impartiality.

Reid Hoffman’s top political advisor Dmitri Mehlhor has engaged in wild conspiracy theories, suggesting that reporters consider the possibility that Trump’s assassination attempt “was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash,” which he described as “a classic Russian tactic.”

Russiagate hysteria is shared by Microsoft partner NewsGuard, whose co-founder suggested that 2020’s Hunter Biden laptop story was a “hoax perpetrated by the Russians.”

And, in 2017, Hoffman himself admitted to funding “fake Twitter accounts with Russian-sounding names,” and having them follow Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, in what the campaign’s own internal reports, obtained by the New York Times, described as a “false flag” effort to discredit Moore.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.