State Department Scrambles To Scuttle $100M Censorship Network Before Trump Takes Office
The State Department revealed in a Monday filing that they are "substantially likely" to shut down their $100M Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was revealed in early 2023 to have been funding a "disinformation" tracking group which worked to pressure advertisers to demonetize outlets it accuses of spreading "disinformation."
Except, they're really just "realigning" the "Center's staff and funding to other Department offices and bureaus for foreign information manipulation."
The move comes amid a lawsuit from Texas AG Ken Paxton and several conservative media outlets listed a GEC-funded "dynamic exclusion list" of websites it doesn't like, which it would then distribute to ad tech companies - such as Microsoft's Xandr - in order to try and "defund and downrank these worst offenders," and deprive said sites of ad revenue.
h/t Autism Capital
As Headline News' Ken Silva notes further; it’s unclear how the GEC’s closure will affect the lawsuit. Monday’s court filing said lawyers for all parties are still discussing the implications.
[Elon] Musk put the GEC on the map in March 2023, when he deemed it to be the “worst offender in U.S. government” when it comes to censorship and media manipulation.
According to revelations from the “Twitter Files”—a trove of internal records about the censorship decisiosn made within the social media company—the GEC funded groups such as the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which in turn compiled blacklists of Twitter accounts that were supposedly tied to foreign disinformation campaigns. The Digital Forensic Research Lab sent those blacklists to Twitter so that the company could deactivate the accounts listed.
Federalist senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland further revealed in April 2023 that the GEC marketed anti-conservative censorship products to private-sector tech firms. Cleveland also noted that the GEC apparently worked with infamous FBI Agent Elvis Chan, who was revealed in the Twitter Files to be in constant touch with the social media firm about censorship issues.
Despite those scandals, Democrats had been pushing to renew the GEC’s $100 million budget before it expires at the end of the year.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who drafted the original legislation in 2016 that led to the GEC, argued last year that the censorship network was crucial to counter foreign disinformation.
“There’s no way to combat Russian and Chinese misinformation without the GEC,” Murphy insisted.
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