Conservative media lawsuit highlights former State Department ‘censorship’ tool
State Department Faces Lawsuit from Conservative Media Over Funding ‘Censorship Scheme’
A “censorship” tool once housed under the State Department is the major focus of a new lawsuit accusing the United States government of suppressing conservative voices.
“George Orwell, call your office: The Disinformation Governance Board is back!” Peggy Little, senior litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, said in a statement. “Your State Department — which may only address foreign affairs — has been secretly scheming with and funding private companies to create blacklists of conservative media outlets to defund and silence speech with which it disagrees.”
The lawsuit was filed in the Lone Star State’s U.S. District Court for the Eastern District and is the latest and, one of the most significant, attempts by conservatives to stop the U.S. government from supporting organizations taking aim at right-leaning voices on the internet. It comes as Congress mulls a provision through the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that would bar the Defense Department from contracting with the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard, and other similar “fact-checking” groups.
‘Targeted American speech’
“Blacklists” against conservatives crafted by the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, which have received grants or contracts from the Global Engagement Center, “reduce Media Plaintiffs’ revenue, and upon information and belief, their visibility on social media, and ranking results from browser searches, thereby reducing their circulation, readership, and reach, and otherwise negatively impacting their operations,” the conservatives alleged in the Tuesday lawsuit.
The GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is leaning toward not reauthorizing the Global Engagement Center in 2024 over concerns the interagency organization, which works with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal bodies, has “censored” Americans and, according to a September 2022 inspector general report, failed to meet its ”mission” to fight ”foreign state and non-state propaganda.”
Disinfo Cloud received a $3 million contract, according to the new lawsuit, which cites the NDAA in fiscal 2017. The Washington Examiner reported in February that the GEC in 2018 began bankrolling Disinfo Cloud, a platform managed by an investment group called Park Advisors.
In turn, in 2021, $100,000 quietly flowed from the GEC, to Park Advisors, to the Global Disinformation Index for a program purportedly to fight “disinformation” in East Asia and Europe, the Washington Examiner also reported in February.
The U.S. Embassy in Paris, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and British government collaborated with the GEC on the 2021 program, which, in part, prompted House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and other congressional committees to launch investigations in 2023 into the Global Disinformation Index.
Still, the Tuesday lawsuit noted that “a search of the government’s official webpage for grants, contracts, or awards” finds ”no grants or contracts awarded to Disinfo Cloud, Park Advisors, or Park Capital Investment Group,” and only a $40,000 COVID-19 relief loan to the company in 2020.
Silicon Valley
Disinfo Cloud’s “Countering Propaganda and Disinformation” platform, which the lawsuit said “targeted American speech, including Media Plaintiffs,” previously ”included supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology.” Initially, access to Disinfo Cloud’s website was only available to military and government users, though the private sector later was able to gain access, the lawsuit said.
The GEC, which sought to engage social media companies to help thwart “disinformation,” formed a “Silicon Valley Engagement” initiative in 2019, documents show.
“Through its Silicon Valley Engagement initiative, GEC marketed censorship technology to American companies, including the major social media companies, such as Twitter (now X), Meta, LinkedIn, and others,” the lawsuit stated, noting that discovery in Missouri v. Biden showed that then-GEC adviser Samaruddin K. Stewart was “a permanent disinformation liaison between the government and Silicon Valley” and “held a series of meetings with LinkedIn to discuss ‘countering disinformation.'”
Meanwhile, Disinfo Cloud maintained a Twitter account that “amplified,” for instance, a GDI post “that expressly acknowledged its goal was to ensure websites” deemed to be peddling ”disinformation” would be prohibited from profiting on digital ads, according to the lawsuit.
Disinfo Cloud also “promoted the censorship” operations of NewsGuard and, in April 2021, “featured censorship tools and technologies that reached American outlets” in Disinfo Cloud’s information digest to the public, including NewsGuard’s “Responsible Advertising for News Segment,” which it said “help[s] advertising companies avoid websites known to host or produce mis/disinformation,” the lawsuit said.
‘Pre-bunk’
NewsGuard, which the lawsuit said ranks the Federalist and the Daily Wire as “unreliable” media outlets, was awarded $25,000 in 2020 from the GEC to provide its “Misinformation Fingerprints database to a joint Global Engagement Center-Pentagon program to ‘pre-bunk’ Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns targeting Americans and our allies with false claims,” NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
In 2022, NewsGuard was also sent $50,000 from the GEC to lend its technology “to track how false Russian claims are picked up and promoted by propaganda operations run by the socialist government of Venezuela, including to spread these claims to other countries in Latin America,” Crovitz said. Federal records show that in 2021, NewsGuard was given roughly $750,000 from the Pentagon for it to license its data.
“We are proud of how our Misinformation Fingerprints database is used to identify and counter aggressive hostile information operations targeting Americans and our allies from the regimes running Russia, China and Iran,” the co-CEO added.
The $25,000 that boosted NewsGuard in 2020 was in connection to a state-run “COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation” tech challenge, while the actual funds were paid out through Disinfo Cloud, the lawsuit noted.
The plaintiffs hold that the GEC’s coordination with outside parties represented a widespread effort “to silence, down-rank, de-amplify, deplatform, de-boost, demonetize, denigrate, or otherwise abridge Media Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights,” according to the lawsuit.
“Upon information and belief, Defendant GEC maintains a platform of censorship technology and tools, including those that target segments of the American press and Americans’ speech,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit also highlighted how Disinfo Cloud administrator and Park Advisor director Christina Nemr in 2022 founded Becera, a company that “bridges the public and private sectors to create innovative approaches that solve operational, governance, and administrative challenges through technology discovery and application,” according to its website. Becera has pocketed more than $1 million from the State Department as a “sub-grantee,” the lawsuit said.
The State Department declined to comment. The Global Disinformation Index did not respond to a request for comment.
“The government is engaged in an ongoing illegal effort — funded by our taxpayer dollars —to destroy our business and our First Amendment rights because of our politics,” Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of the Federalist, said in a statement. “The days of conservatives sitting back and doing nothing while a corrupt censorship-industrial complex actively bulldozes the First Amendment are over. We will not stop until this entire corrupt edifice has been torn down, brick by brick, and every single person involved has been held accountable.”
The Daily Wire said in a statement: “The Biden administration is illegally funding organizations with the stated goal of financially crippling media outlets whose coverage does not walk in lockstep with the government’s ideological agenda.”
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What concerns led the House Foreign Affairs Committee to consider not reauthorizing the Global Engagement Center, as mentioned in the September 2022 inspector general report
“State Department Faces Lawsuit from Conservative Media Over Funding ‘Censorship Scheme'”
The State Department is at the center of a new lawsuit that accuses the United States government of suppressing conservative voices through a funding “censorship scheme.” The lawsuit, filed in the Lone Star State’s U.S. District Court for the Eastern District, aims to stop the government from supporting organizations that target right-leaning voices on the internet.
The lawsuit alleges that the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, both of which have received grants or contracts from the Global Engagement Center, have crafted “blacklists” that reduce the revenue and visibility of conservative media outlets. These blacklists negatively impact the operations and reach of these outlets, according to the conservatives who filed the lawsuit.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by the GOP, is leaning towards not reauthorizing the Global Engagement Center in 2024 due to concerns about censorship and its failure to combat foreign propaganda, as highlighted in a September 2022 inspector general report.
The lawsuit points out a $3 million contract awarded to Disinfo Cloud in 2017 and additional funding that flowed from the Global Engagement Center to Park Advisors to support the Global Disinformation Index in 2021. However, the government’s official webpage for grants and contracts does not list any awards to Disinfo Cloud or Park Advisors, except for a $40,000 COVID-19 relief loan in 2020.
Disinfo Cloud’s “Countering Propaganda and Disinformation” platform is accused of targeting American speech, including conservative media outlets. The lawsuit alleges that the GEC marketed censorship technology, such as fact-checking technologies and media intelligence platforms, to American companies, including major social media companies like Twitter (now X), Meta, and LinkedIn.
NewsGuard, which ranks the Federalist and the Daily Wire as “unreliable” media outlets, received funding from the GEC to provide its “Misinformation Fingerprints database” for a joint GEC-Pentagon program. This program aimed to “pre-bunk” Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns. NewsGuard also received funding to track false Russian claims and their promotion by propaganda operations run by the Venezuelan government.
The lawsuit raises concerns about the government’s involvement in supporting organizations that engage in censorship and the negative impact on conservative media outlets. It highlights the need for transparency and accountability in government funding decisions that affect free speech and media circulation.
As the lawsuit unfolds, it will be interesting to see how the court weighs the allegations against the State Department and its potential implications for government support of organizations involved in fact-checking and combating disinformation.
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