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In Carroll, Iowa, a fourth-generation newspaper publisher named Doug Burns joined forces with the Democratic California congressman Ro Khanna to ask Khanna’s Silicon Valley donors to help Iowa’s newspapers by putting $4 million toward a project to combat misinformation. The goal was for social media companies to atone for the damage they had done to democracy by backing a proposal to push accurate reporting and buoy struggling newspapers. When he was turned down, Burns told a Facebook executive, “When the revolution starts, and we have a civil war in this country, and someone’s dragging you and your family out of your Silicon Valley homes, before the knife goes into you, you’re going to think, maybe I could have stopped this.”[
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