AP
Ahead of the election, Republican lawmakers are raising alarm bells about Texas billionaire John Arnold, who was appointed to Meta’s board earlier this year — warning he could undermine the efforts to keep speech free and open on Facebook ahead of the presidential election.
Arnold, who is worth an estimated $2.9 billion according to Forbes, has spent tens of millions of dollars bankrolling left-wing causes, including bail reform in New York State and George Soros-affiliated organizations that slam “disinformation.”
“John Arnold is a far left radical who funded pro-criminal projects in Indiana and pro-censorship organizations nationwide. His board appointment should make every patriotic American nervous about Big Tech interfering in the 2024 presidential election, just like they did last cycle,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told The Post.
“Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that he wanted to promote free speech and not manipulate the upcoming election,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), a member of the committee, told The Post of the Meta CEO. “I’d like to believe that, but it defies credulity when John Arnold, funder of millions to pro-censorship groups, sits on Meta’s board. Americans deserve to speak freely without the leftist dark money network feeding the censorship industrial complex and working against their right of free expression.”
In an August letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said he would push against censorship after acknowledging Facebook had demoted The Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, and that it had bowed to pressure by the Biden administration to censor Covid-related content.
Zuckerberg wrote that “I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret I was not more outspoken about it.”
But Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), another member of the committee, believes Arnold’s role at Meta signals Zuckerberg may be unwilling to completely move away from censorship.
“Meta is notorious for censoring conservative speech. Only after Zuckerberg got caught engaging in election interference by censoring the [Post’s] Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 did he promise reform to Meta’s ‘content moderation procedures,” Steube told The Post.
“Seems like John Arnold, who has spent millions upon millions involved in censorship efforts, should be the last person on Meta’s board if Zuckerberg had a bit of seriousness in his pledge.”
A spokesperson for Arnold told The Post: “John strongly believes that the bedrock principles of the First Amendment must be protected at all costs, which is why he has supported The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) since 2013, and it is one of the reasons why he is now supporting the University of Austin Texas, an institution committed to free speech on campus.”
Asked about Arnold’s role on Meta’s board, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) criticized the company’s past efforts to suppress speech — “Is there anything more Orwellian?” — and noted the “board [is] stocked with left-wing academics deciding issues of free speech.”
While Meta has right-leaning members on its board, including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former George W. Bush administration official Robert M. Kimmitt, lawmakers note that Arnold is far more political than anyone else on the board — especially since conservative firebrand Peter Thiel left in 2022.
Arnold, 50, began his career as an energy trader at Enron before launching hedge fund Centaurus Advisors which earned him the title of America’s then-youngest billionaire in 2007. In 2012 he closed the fund and began donating to address public policy issues through his philanthropy Arnold Ventures.
He gave $1.5 million to the Social Science Research Council that operates MediaWell, which “curates research and news on digital disinformation and misinformation” between 2018 and 2022, according to 990 filings.
Topics of the research range from how to regulate “extreme-speech actors” on smaller platforms like Parler to “Fighting an indestructible monster: Journalism’s legitimacy narratives during the Trump Era” to criticizing the Covid lab-leak theory as “racist” and a “conspiracy theory.”
The organization has also advocated for policies like those implemented in the European Union that crack down on “deep extreme speech.”
In 2020, Arnold gave $500,000 to Global Witness, an NGO that left-leaning billionaire George Soros has supported since 2002. While Global Witness emphasizes its commitment to protect human rights, much of its recent research has focused on “election disinformation.”
Recent Global Witness investigations have suggested that X “elevate[s] right-wing views” and that tech companies are failing to properly rein in “climate disinformation.”
Arnold gave $13.5 million to the New Venture fund from 2016 to 2020. According to nonprofit Capital Research, the fund lobbied for increased government oversight of speech, including net neutrality. And a Washington Examiner report from 2022 suggests Arnold gave nearly $10 million more between 2019 and 2021 to “groups linked to the movement to combat so-called disinformation and misinformation.”
Over the last five years he has also given more than $45 million to organizations pushing for bail reform in New York, according to a Fox News report — even more than the $40 million Soros has given to these efforts.
While Arnold previously worked with Facebook by bankrolling a 2018 partnership that sought to study how social media was impacting elections, he doesn’t have much social media experience beyond that.
Last month, he acknowledged in a Bloomberg interview that his February appointment to Meta’s board of directorscame out of left field: “I am not a tech person, which made the invitation even that much more surprising.
“I think they were looking for somebody who had some energy expertise … the amount of infrastructure that’s required to run the data centers for AI is immense,” Arnold said.
He added that his philanthropic work fighting misinformation could be a boon to the company “My background in public policy is an asset to them.”
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.