James Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer during Russiagate and later a key operative inside Twitter’s pre-Musk censorship apparatus, has resurfaced on the board of a fresh institutional effort to lock down online speech.
As revealed in a new report from the Foundation for Freedom Online, Baker is seated on the board of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI), a relatively new addition to the maze of “counter-disinformation” organizations that sprung up after Donald Trump’s first election victory in 2016.
Founded in 2024, KGI is a “counter-disinformation” hub co-founded by the Knight Foundation and Georgetown University. A top priority is state lawmaking – it is currently shopping a “toolkit” to state-level legislators, aimed at guiding the regulation of social media feeds.
As well as Baker, KGI’s board includes Alondra Nelson, Joe Biden’s acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who oversaw a whole-of-government disinformation crackdown spanning 26 agencies, 14 universities, and 20+ NGOs. Another member is Nahiba Syed, a lawyer who defended the Steele Dossier in court.
In March 2025, KGI published its flagship manifesto, Better Feeds, supplying three suggested changes to social media feeds:
- Bridging – algorithms should favor “positive dialogue” over raw engagement, in effect suppressing content deemed too conflictual.
- Surveys – platforms should constantly poll users about what kinds of content they want to see, subtly nudging behavior.
- Quality metrics – content flagged as “toxic” or low quality should be downgraded, while exalted “award-winning” journalism or high-status outlets are boosted.
The “quality” standard is elastic — and subjective by design. Baker and his colleagues also openly praise censorship tools like NewsGuard and Google Jigsaw’s Perspective AI, both already weaponized to suppress conservative voices. NewsGuard, for instance, has blacklisted well-known conservative publications such as Breitbart News, Newsmax, and The Federalist.
FFO’s report also details the Knight Foundation’s long history of bankrolling the censorship industry:
As of June 2024, Knight Foundation said it has donated more than $107 million towards researching and fighting disinformation, algorithmic bias, antitrust enforcement, and related topics. This has led the Knight Research Network to help fund more than 900 publications across 300 journals and media outlets, testified before Congress 15 times, and more. Notable recipients include of Knight Foundation grants include:
FFO adds:
In 2024, the Knight Foundation directly intervened in the presidential election, with just under $7 million in funding for newsrooms in swing states. Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, CEO of the Knight Foundation, a leading funder of journalism and media innovation, insisted to The Chronicle of Philanthropy that Knight was not taking sides in the election.
She went on to use Russiagate as an excuse. Per the Chronicle, Wadsworth said that the grant focused on newsrooms in swing states due to U.S. intelligence reports that Russia continues to flood social media sites with false information, especially related to those states, in an attempt to secure the election of Donald Trump.
Although the Trump Administration has clamped down on federal efforts to push online censorship, the Knight-Georgetown Institute’s activities show that the cottage industry of “disinformation” professionals intends to reassert itself at the state level.
Read more at the Foundation for Freedom Online here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
