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.
Hellbound and Down 