Overtly sappy interviews like the one PBS just did for the socialist CEO of a wacky, originally foreign-based censorship organization is a perfect reminder why that decrepit network should never get one dime of taxpayer money ever again.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), whose organization first started in the U.K. before branching out to the U.S., took to News Hour December 26 to whine like a triggered MS NOW panelist over the Trump administration’s threats to deport him and other leaders of foreign censorship organizations.
Responding to substitute anchor William Brangham’s note that Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to Ahmed and the leaders of other organizations as “foreign censors,” Ahmed tried to play dumb by calling the accusations “terribly confusing.” He continued, obfuscating the pressure campaigns CCDH launched against social media companies that allowed opinions they didn’t like to be platformed: “[w]e're a nonprofit, and we can't therefore be censoring things, which is, of course, something that the government does.”
“Something that the government does?” That’s like saying giving the fox the key to the henhouse isn’t wrong because it’s the fox that actually hunts the chickens. The CCDH became notorious for blasting out its “Disinformation Dozen” report in 2021 which name-dropped social media accounts of COVID-19 vaccine skeptics. Former Biden White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki wielded that report to push Big Tech platforms to increase censorship of the vaccine critics CCDH identified.
But Ahmed tried to make it seem like the online “hate” they tackle are simply bipartisan issues everyone should agree are terrible, with practically zero pushback from Brangham:
The work that the center does, looking into things as diverse as the spread of online hatred against Jews, antisemitism on social media platforms, which we worked on with the first Trump administration in 2020, and we have continued to work on a bipartisan basis globally, including in the United States with both the federal and state governments, and the work that we do protecting children online, looking at the spread of eating disorder and self-harm content, this is, first of all, important work that needs to be done to protect the public.
What a load of crapola. The “digital brownshirts” at the CCDH also attacked the Media Research Center and other right-leaning outlets like The Daily Wire, Breitbart News, The Washington Times, Townhall Media and Newsmax for daring to question the left’s religious fundamentalist views on climate change.
In its “Toxic Ten” report, CCDH listed three recommendations to censor the organizations the group doesn’t agree with. These include: “Stop monetizing” their content; stop allowing them to buy ads and even cried for social media firms to “comprehensively label” what it subjectively considers to be “climate denial.”
When Facebook didn’t follow through sufficiently on censoring MRC and others’ climate-related posts in 2022, Ahmed threw a fit: “Meta keeps claiming it cares about climate change, but they have failed to stop the spread of misinformation about climate change on their platform.” Did Brangham bring any of this up? Of course not!
The PBS anchor just teed up Ahmed to further whine that his free speech rights were supposedly being violated, even as his own organization pushed Big Tech platforms operating under federal Section 230 protections to dubiously actively act as publishers and censor content that ran afoul of his leftist dogma. In 2023, Ahmed’s CCDH launched a campaign against Google to coerce the censorial search engine giant into silencing the ads of pro-life centers.
All of this is public knowledge, but Brangham didn’t mention any of it. Need any more reasons to see why the PBS schmoozing of Ahmed is such a nauseating spectacle? Brangham soft-balled: “I mean, you seem to be arguing that your free speech rights are being violated, which is precisely what the administration argues you are doing. Do you have a sense as to why your organization and why you in particular were targeted."
Oh, but it gets spicier. CCDH is funded by the Switzerland-based, left-wing Oak Foundation, which the Capital Research Center labeled as “The Left’s Green Giant.” “In 2018, Oak gave $1 million to ClimateWorks Foundation ‘to support the greening of the Belt and Road Initiative,’ a global trade infrastructure project pushed by Chinese President Xi Jinping to link the communist country with the rest of Eurasia,” according to the Capital Research Center.
Xi Jinping reportedly saw the “‘One Belt, One Road’” grand strategy “as a lethal weapon that can hopefully help China replace the United States in 20 years’ time as the world’s No. 1 superpower,” according to an article by Hong Kong outlet EJ Insight in 2016. More recently, CCDH received a $250,000 grant in 2024 from censorship financier George Soros, the same year MRC released a report showing how the leftist billionaire poured $80 million into groups pressuring Big Tech to heighten censorship operations ahead of the 2024 elections.
Apart from CCDH, Ahmed himself has a sordid history acting as a socialist agent for Britain’s leftist Labour Party. He also co-authored a book attacking free market economist Friedrich Hayek titled “The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them.” The book says that it “considers the case for creating an empowering state which actively intervenes to improve on market-based outcomes and ensure greater opportunities for all.”
Not that any of this apparently mattered enough to PBS or Brangham. He supportively inquired: “How comfortable are you that the U.S. justice system will continue to protect you … Do you have a sense as to how close you were to being deported before this judge [who temporarily blocked his deportation] stepped in?”
