Conservative outlets and Texas request court halt Biden ‘censorship scheme’ in lawsuit

Texas and two conservative media outlets filed a motion for a preliminary injunction this week as part of their lawsuit accusing the State Department of funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme.”

The Tuesday evening motion requested that the court immediately halt the Biden administration and top officials from funding or encouraging “the development or use of technology that targets in whole, or in part, Americans’ speech or the American press,” according to a filing. The Daily Wire, the Federalist, and Texas alleged in a December 2023 lawsuit that the State Department skirted the First Amendment when its Global Engagement Center office awarded funds to the Global Disinformation Index, a British think tank that the Washington Examiner reported feeds advertisers blacklists of conservative websites to silence disfavored speech, and NewsGuard, a New York-based company purporting to track “misinformation” online.

“The U.S. Department of State through its Global Engagement Center is actively intervening in the news-media market to limit the reach of, the circulation of, and render unprofitable, disfavored press outlets by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” read a memo attached to the motion, which was submitted by attorneys for Texas and Ken Paxton, its Republican attorney general, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance on behalf of the two outlets.

Efforts by the plaintiffs to fight what they dubbed in a filing last year “the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation” come as House Republicans on the Small Business Committee continue to press the State Department to provide grant records as part of their broader “censorship” investigation. Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed the National Science Foundation on Tuesday for documents in connection to the panel’s oversight into “how the federal government has pressured and colluded with Big Tech and other intermediaries to censor certain viewpoints on social media in ways that undermine First Amendment principles.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a meeting with U.N. Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza Sigrid Kaag, not pictured, on Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024, at the State Department in Washington. (AP Photo/Jess Rapfogel) In the December 2023 lawsuit, which names Secretary of State Antony Blinken and top Global Engagement Center officials, Texas and the outlets argued the defendants uplifted an “alter ego” of the U.S. government “to fund censorship technology” called Disinfo Cloud — an unclassified and defunct platform through the GEC. Disinfo Cloud was managed by an investment group called Park Advisors, the middleman for $100,000 the GEC granted in 2021 to the Global Disinformation Index, purportedly to work on matters in East Asia and Europe, the Washington Examiner reported.

NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which has two affiliated nonprofit groups in the United States that likely skirted federal rules over hiding their financial disclosures, were notably named in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The defense policy bill passed last year and included a provision aiming to choke off Pentagon funds to both organizations.

“Defendants’ ultra vires censorship scheme causes irreparable harm to media plaintiffs who have been branded ‘unreliable’ and ‘risky’ by technology promoted by the State Department,” the injunction memo reads, referring to the Global Disinformation Index’s covert operations.

The memo pointed out that Congress appropriates funding to the State Department for the “administration of foreign affairs,” not domestic funding of entities blacklisting news outlets. It cited multiple stories by the Washington Examiner, including one from April 2023 detailing how Oracle was cutting ties with the Global Disinformation Index over free speech concerns.

Microsoft also stopped subscribing last year to the blacklister’s “dynamic exclusion list” to defund outlets.

“Defendants’ unlawful censorship scheme and misappropriation of tax dollars also inflicts an injury-in-fact on Texas, by interfering with Texas’s sovereign right to create and enforce a legal code, namely, HB 20, which requires social media companies with market power to act as common carriers,” the plaintiffs argued in the memo.

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The Washington Examiner reached out to the State Department and U.S. District Court for the Eastern District, where the lawsuit was filed, for comment.

The State Department declined to comment.

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