This week, former US president Donald Trump amplified the work of a shadowy nonprofit with ambitions to fund right-wing media influencers and a history of disseminating disinformation when he shared a number of AI-generated images that inaccurately depicted Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing his presidential campaign.
John Milton Freedom Foundation photos of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts were among those that Trump shared on his Truth Social platform. In its self-presentation as a press freedom group, the Texas-based nonprofit aims to “empowering independent journalists” and “fortifying the bedrock of democracy” since its launch last year.
Reviewing the group’s tax records, investor documents, and social media output, it appears that their daily operations center around sharing engagement bait on X and soliciting millions of dollars from donors for a “fellowship program” headed by a high school sophomore. The program would grant $100,000 to Twitter personalities like Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo, and Lara Logan. A number of inquiries on the John Milton Freedom Foundation’s activities and fellowship program went unanswered.
Soon after the group began retweeting conservative media figures and reiterating Elon Musk’s assertions that free speech is being threatened by left-wing forces, one of their comments reached Trump and his millions of followers.
Generative AI has the potential to decrease the bar for developing misleading content and jeopardize election-related information, according to disinformation researchers who have long warned about this. Images of Trump, Kamala Harris, and other political personalities have been appearing in an influx of artificial intelligence content since last week, when Musk’s xAI startup unveiled its mostly unregulated Grok picture generator. A number of little organizations, including the Milton Freedom Foundation, have taken to posting what they label “AI slop” on social media.
Trump receives AI slop from a fringe nonprofit.
The conservative @amuse account shared photos of Swift fans created by AI with almost 300,000 people during the peak of AI images on X. “Sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation” was the watermark that appeared on the “satire” post’s text. On Truth Social, Trump shared a copy of the tweet from @amuse.
About 390,000 people follow the @amuse account on X, and they post dozens of times a day, giving it a huge reach. Alexander Muse, who is part of the Milton Foundation’s investor prospectus as a consultant and who blogs for the right-wing website Substack, where he discusses election conspiracy ideas, seems to be running @amuse. Many Muse-related links exist under the @amuse account. X is associated with a Substack account that replicates Muse’s content on LinkedIn, where he uses the login “amuse” (a combination of his first and last name). That very Substack account is listed as the publisher of Muse’s book on how to get startup investment, which includes examples of him requesting ChatGPT to act like Musk and give business advise.
Notable accounts, like Musk’s, have shared and responded to postings by @amuse. The account’s most recent posts featured sexualized pictures of Harris and AI renderings of Trump battling Darth Vader. At the moment, it features an artificial intelligence-generated image of Trump flanked by ladies wearing “Swifties” shirts as its banner picture. Claiming that Harris relinquished hundreds of thousands of children to human traffickers in her role as “border czar” is one example of the deceptive pro-Trump headlines posted on the account. Watermarks reading “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation” accompany the headlines and Trump’s virtual Swifties.
A website, an investment prospectus, and an X account with less than 500 followers make all the little internet presence of the John Milton Freedom Foundation, which is named after the 17th-century British poet and writer. The five-person team behind it has varied levels of expertise in Republican politics and is based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, according to its own materials. The daughter of Muse, who is listed as an honor student in tenth grade on the website of the nonprofit, is the “fellowship chair” of the Milton Foundation.
In order to pay out $100,000 grants to a group of right-wing media figures known as “fellows,” the foundation has publicly revealed its intention to solicit $2 million from large contributors. Examples of such individuals include an anti-trans children’s book author and Lara Logan, a former CBS journalist turned far-right star who was fired from Newsmax in 2017 for making QAnon-inspired claims that world leaders consume the blood of children. By investing in these well-known figures, the organization hopes to “increase their reach by more than 10x in less than a year,” as stated in the investment prospectus.
Aside from the @amuse account, which frequently participates with the foundation’s postings and features a prominent link to the group’s community page, no fellows mentioned on the foundation’s site mention the organization on their X profiles.
There is uncertainty regarding the foundation’s financial resources and the familiarity of all media figures named as members of its 2024 fellowship class. A single anti-vaccine account from Texas identifies as a “JMFF” fellow in their bio, whereas the others make no such claim. Freedom Foundation falls well short of the millions it seeks, according to the most current tax documents, which classify it as a nonprofit with gross receipts (total monies collected from all sources) ranging from zero to fifty thousand dollars.
Brad Merritt, a reputedly seasoned Republican organizer who has reportedly raised $300 million for multiple charities, serves as chair of the organization’s board of directors. Shiree Sanchez, a former executive in the healthcare sector, and Mark Karaffa, an experienced Republican organizer, are also members of the board.
Compared to the other members of the nonprofit, Muse seems to have significantly more experience in digital media. Aside from his blog, he asserts to have collaborated with James O’Keefe, the ex-CEO of the right-wing group Project Veritas, who was renowned for covert camera stings until his removal last year due to accusations of missing cash. The prospectus calls Muse a “serial entrepreneur,” and she writes a blog on generative AI as a means to generate income.
