Germany’s snap election is just around the corner, and the elites from parties making up the caretaker government (but not only) continue to exhibit a high degree of contentious behavior, with X and Elon Musk being a favorite target.
Now we have two NGOs – Society for Civil Rights (GFF) and Democracy Reporting International (DRI) – suing X for allegedly refusing to disclose its data, that would have helped them “track election disinformation.”
The two groups are citing the EU’s (online censorship law) DSA, saying that X is violating it by withholding the data they are demanding to have access to.
GFF and DRI have at least one thing in common – according to their websites, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations are among their donors (in DRI’s case, this is through membership in the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD) network.
But DRI’s by far main funding source is the European Commission, with €5.7 million in 2023 alone.
When it comes to GFF – the group describes its activities as keeping an eye on elections around the world, as well as “monitoring” social media regarding “election disinformation” – with offices in Berlin, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and, Ukraine.
Other than getting money from the Soros’ outfit, GFF has also been funded, among many others, by the European Artificial Intelligence Fund (specifically for “the work on the DSA”) – but also, interestingly, the Mozilla Foundation – and this grant goes to the heart of the lawsuit that’s been announced now.
The Mozilla Foundation felt generous with its money (a huge majority of which came from Google, via a search engine deal) in order to “support (GFF) for the enforcement of research data access based on the DSA.”
If you thought that was thought-provoking – how about this: DuckDuckGo is also listed as a donor on GFF’s official site.
And now, onto the lawsuit.
“Other platforms have granted us access to systematically track public debates on their platforms, but X has refused to do so,” said Michael Meyer-Resende (DRI).
Meanwhile, Simone Rug of GFF shared with the media the belief that the lawsuit is “important” – and then “reinvented the wheel” that has been turning for the last eight years at least: “Platforms are increasingly being weaponized against democratic elections.”
Ruf was doing so well, but then so revealingly for this era, added, “We must defend ourselves.”
