FB strong Buy as more censorship coming. Facebook has hired a group called DFRLab, which operates out of the NATO and arms industry-funded Atlantic Council, also founded by Saudi Arabia and a bunch of pro-freedom advocates in the Gulf – including Turkey, which arrests more journalists than any other country,” Blumenthal said.
That firm’s job, Blumenthal explained, is to “market Facebook’s findings and takedowns of these pages, and to justify it they put out a report on Medium.com, justifying taking down these pages which were said to be Russian, they tried to link them to Russia without coming up with conclusive proof...”
The report was authored by the Atlantic Council’s “resident bot hunter,” Blumenthal said, noting that he didn’t exactly do his job very well. He “falsely identified... a British pensioner... and a Ukrainian concert pianist as Russian bots.”
In September 2014, The New York Times reported that since 2008, the DFR organization has received donations from more than twenty-five governments outside of the United States, including $5 million from Norway. The New York Times accused foreign governments of buying influence.[10] Concerned that scholars from the organization could be covertly trying to push the agendas of foreign governments, legislation was proposed in response to The New York Times report requiring full disclosure of witnesses testifying before Congress.[11]
The Atlantic Council has worked with FedEx to promote a free trade agreement FedEx hoped will help its business. FedEx funded a report commissioned by the Atlantic Council on the agreement which led The New York Times to accuse it of buying influence.[12]
In 2015 and 2016, the three largest donators (each giving $1 million USD or more) were businesswoman Adrienne Arsht, Lebanese billionaire Bahaa Hariri (whose brother is the present Prime Minister of Lebanon), and the United Arab Emirates.[13][14]
