and this seems to be another case of a major actor in our movement doing something that has massively poor consequences for the public perception of EA unless they can explain why

My only substantive disagreement with this comment (which I upvoted) is that I don't think FLI is a major actor in EA; they've always kind of done their own thing, and haven't been a core player within the EA community. I view them more as an independent actor with somewhat aligned goals.

I had a look at the Nya Dagbladet website. My quick impression is that it looks like a somewhat milder and less sensationalist version of Breitbart News. The top stories were (and I only read the headlines and leads): (1) the newspaper itself being close to bankruptcy due to its bank account having been frozen, (2) an ex-CEO of Barclays' being connected to Jeffrey Epstein, (3) high levels of shoplifting in Sweden, (4) record number of calls to a national child abuse hotline in Sweden, (5) a Swedish pediatrician's having been subjected to hate due to a study of his which suggested that the risk of children needing emergency care for COVID-19 was low, (6) more on the frozen bank account, (7) Kiersten Hening getting a $100K settlement after BLM kneeling controversy and (8) EU and NATO collaborating more closely.

I can't imagine a good rationale for giving a grant to Nya Dagbladet or associated ventures, and can only assume that FLI agreed to give the grant based either on material provided by Nya Dagbladet itself and/or other people (but without doing any independent review).

Tegmark's brother, Per, seems to be affiliated with the Populist, anti-vax right in Sweden (note,this is only after a very cursory Google search). The reasons this seems to be relevant is that Per has been a contributing writer for Nya Dagbladet in recent years.

Do you have a source for this? I wasn't able to find anything myself with a quick search.

This response is highly concerning and alarming.  Some followup questions:

• Are you confirming that the grant approval letter shown by expose is entirely genuine?
• What was the nature of the media project you intended to fund?
• Why was Nya Bagdlet chosen as the foundation, and not some other more reputable news source?
• How aware were you of the political leaning of Nya Bagdlet when you approved this grant initially? In particular the publishing of articles promoting holocaust revisionism, vaccine denial, and the campaign to "defend ethnic rights"? 
•  Is it normal to hand out grant approval letters before conducting due diligence on a project?
• How long did it take for the organisation to reject the project after initially approving it?
• Do you specifically condemn the Nya Bagdlet newspaper, right now? 

For Max and anyone else who thinks they might not be neo-Nazis, I assure you that they are. As an example, here's a Google-translated quote from an article they published:

Jewish interest groups have been and still are the most driving force behind the transformation of Western societies into multicultural and multi-ethnic societies. It is a controversial but well-documented fact, not only in countries like the USA but also in Sweden . Through media influence and a strong position in the international banking system, they have enormous influence over culture and politics, and have largely undisturbed been able to reshape Western societies according to their own will in a number of different areas also beyond immigration policy, completely contrary to the interests of the indigenous peoples and rights.

*I took this from another discussion of the topic; I think JWS is the one who found it?

is apparently not shared by the (center-left) former Swedish government, which not only certified the Foundation as charitable but granted $30,000 in government funding and support to Nya Dagbladet in 2021

Disclaimer: I previously knew nothing about the Swedish press; I still know almost nothing. I just thought this seemed weird and spent about 20 minutes looking into it.

Some context which I think would be useful to evaluate this claim.

It appears that in Sweden the government subsidizes newspapers in the form of "press support." From reading the Wikipedia page on press support, which is mostly actually about Norway not Sweden, it seems like support does not really constitute a government endorsement, but rather is provided to a lot of different newspapers and is mostly to ensure a healthy press. It's possible this differs between Norway and Sweden though.

The $30,000 figure comes from the expo.se piece, which says:

Nya Dagbladet applied to the Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority for public funding in 2020, but was turned down. The platform reacted angrily to the decision, and published a series of articles where specific officials at the agency were named and pictured. The public

Thanks for sharing this. However it doesn't really answer the core question of why FLI ever thought this was okay. "We ultimately decided to reject it because of what our subsequent due diligence uncovered" — given that your brother is a writer there, did you not know beforehand that Nya Dagbladet publishes horrific, racist content? I find it hard to believe this was not known until the due diligence stage.

I'm curious as to what kind of potentially existentially relevant proposal the NDF would have submitted? What did they think they had to offer?

(registering a tentative guess: sha256sum ..52ca22c6cd32)

Hi Shakeel,

Thanks for this. I agree with your post and upvoted it.

However, I do also wonder if they are following what seems to be a common theme in EA crisis comms recently, which is to say as little as possible (presumably on the basis of legal advice). You wrote about this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Et7oPMu6czhEd8ExW/why-you-re-not-hearing-as-much-from-ea-orgs-as-you-d-like

I agree with you that just about any comment or explanation from FLI would seem to help, and that passing the email exchange with Max over to Denton's seems to make the situation worse (slower responses, less full responses, bad optics etc.).

As an outsider (i.e. with no access to the legal advice or internal discussions at any of these orgs), I wonder how the legal risk is being weighed against the reputational risk in EA crisis comms at the moment. It seems like there is almost no communication coming out from EA orgs and leaders, which presumably is very legally safe but can have very damaging reputational consequences.

I expect you're constrained in what you can say in response to this but, candidly, I think it's important to note that CEA itself is choosing public silence, albeit about ... (read more)

This comment turned out to be entirely correct.