Tag: Influential

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Health

The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation On-line

The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online

For the past ten years, Dr. Mercola built a huge company to promote natural health regimens, spread and benefit from anti-vaccination content, said researchers who studied its network. In 2017, he filed an affidavit claiming his net worth was “over $ 100 million”.

And instead of saying directly online that vaccines aren’t working, Dr. Mercola’s posts often ask specific questions about her safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of its posts to be kept cautious, and companies have struggled to establish rules to remove nuanced posts.

“He was breathed new life through social media, which he cleverly and ruthlessly exploited to captivate people,” said Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which investigates misinformation and hate speech. His “Disinformation Dozen” report has been quoted in Congressional hearings and by the White House.

In an email, Dr. Mercola, it is “quite strange for me that I am being referred to as number 1 in disseminating misinformation”. Some of his Facebook posts were only liked by hundreds of people, he said, so he didn’t understand “how the relatively small number of shares in Biden’s multi-billion dollar vaccination campaign could so devastate”.

The efforts against him are political, added Dr. Mercola added, accusing the White House of “illegal censorship through collusion with social media companies.”

He did not elaborate on whether his claims about the coronavirus were real. “I am the lead author of a peer-reviewed publication on vitamin D and the risk of Covid-19 and I have the right to inform the public by sharing my medical research,” he said. He failed to identify the publication, and The Times was unable to verify his claim.

Updated

July 24, 2021, 10:55 a.m. ET

Dr. Mercola is from Chicago and started a small private practice 1985 in Schaumburg, Illinois. He switched to naturopathy in the 1990s and opened his main website Mercola.com to share his treatments, cures and advice. The website urges people to “take control of your health”.

Categories
Politics

Swiss Billionaire Quietly Turns into Influential Pressure Amongst Democrats

Swiss Billionaire Quietly Becomes Influential Force Among Democrats

These types of spending – which are usually handled through nonprofit groups that don’t need to disclose much information about their finances, including their donors – have been welcomed by conservatives after regulatory changes and court rulings, particularly those of the Supreme Court, eased campaign spending restrictions were made in 2010 in the Citizens United case.

While progressives and election guards denounced the developments as too powerful for wealthy interests, democratic donors and activists increasingly used dark money. During the 2020 election cycle, Democratic-affiliated groups spent more than $ 514 million on such funds, compared to approximately $ 200 million spent by Republican-affiliated groups, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Some of the groups funded by the Mr. Wyss Foundations played a key role in this shift, although the relatively limited disclosure requirements for these types of groups make it impossible to definitively determine how they spent funds from the Wyss Foundations.

Mr. Wyss and his advisors have developed a “strategic, evidence-based, metric-driven and results-oriented approach to building a political infrastructure,” said Rob Stein, a democratic strategist.

Mr. Stein, who founded the influential Democracy Alliance Club of Big Liberal Donors in 2005 and recruited Mr. Wyss to join, added that “unlike most affluent political donors right and left,” Mr. Wyss and his team “know how is going to achieve measurable, sustainable effects. “

85-year-old Wyss was born in Bern, visited the USA for the first time in 1958 as an exchange student and was enthusiastic about the American national parks and public areas. After getting rich and running the Swiss-based medical device manufacturer Synthes, he began donating his fortune through a network of foundations to promote nature conservation, environmental protection and other issues.

The foundations gradually increased their donations for other Democrat-backed causes, including abortion rights and minimum wage increases, and eventually for groups more directly involved in partisan debates, especially after the election of Mr Trump.

Categories
Business

High Bidder for Tribune Newspapers Is an Influential Liberal Donor

Top Bidder for Tribune Newspapers Is an Influential Liberal Donor

Mr. Wyss, who has pledged to donate half of his money to charity, has donated hundreds of millions to environmental and conservation causes. Through his foundations, he has gradually increased his donations to groups promoting abortion rights, minimum wage increases, and other progressive causes.

He became a member of the Democracy Alliance, a club of liberal donors, and the board of directors of the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington that began with the support of the Democracy Alliance donors. The think tank and its sister faction have received more than $ 6.1 million from foundations affiliated with Mr. Wyss, according to tax returns.

Mr. Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress, has also advised the Wyss Foundation on, among other things, the hiring of the executive director of the Hub Project, Arkadi Gerney, a former official of the Center for American Progress.

The Hub Project grew out of the idea that Democrats should more effectively convey their arguments through the news media and directly to voters. His business plan, a 21-page document prepared for the Wyss Foundation in 2015, recommended that the group be “funded entirely by the Wyss Foundation to begin with,” and work behind the scenes to “make the public debate and politics dramatic to change positions of key decision makers. The plan added that the Hub project “is not intended to be the public face of campaigns”.

The Hub Project is part of an opaque network managed by Washington-based consulting firm Arabella Advisors that has channeled hundreds of millions of dollars through a number of groups that support Democrats and progressive causes. The system of political funding, which often obscures the identity of donors, is known as dark money, and the Arabella network is a leading vehicle for this on the left.

The Arabella network is similar to the operation created by the Kochs. Democrats have long criticized the Kochs and others who participated in the elusive political issues partly sparked by the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case.

Arabella’s money goes through four nonprofits that serve as the umbrella structure for a number of groups, including The Hub Project. The nonprofits then pass some of the funds on to other nonprofit groups or super PACs.