State Department skirted mandate funding ‘censorship’ groups: GOP
A recent congressional report has criticized the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a division within the U.S. State Department, for allegedly misusing taxpayer funds to support groups deemed as engaging in “censorship” against small businesses in the United States. According to the report, prepared by the Republican-led House Small Business Committee, the GEC has been working with the private sector in ways that undermine fair competition online. This follows a series of investigations by the House committee concerning the GEC’s funding of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization accused of pressuring advertisers to withdraw support from conservative media outlets.
The report, titled “Instruments and Casualties of the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” suggests that the GEC’s actions violate its mandate of combating foreign disinformation and instead promote initiatives that restrict domestic press freedoms. Among these initiatives was internal communication involving a group that targeted conservative media under the pretext of addressing “fake news.”
Furthermore, the report raises concerns about the lack of transparency and oversight in how the GEC manages its budget, which amounts to approximately $61 million. It points to substantial issues in record-keeping and insufficient auditing processes to track the usage of taxpayer money effectively. The findings have triggered calls from GOP lawmakers to prohibit future funding to the GEC, as it faces potential lawsuits from conservative media centers over its alleged funding practices.
Embattled State Department office skirted mandate in funding ‘censorship’ groups: House GOP
EXCLUSIVE — An office housed within the State Department is faulted in a new congressional report with flouting its mandate to thwart foreign disinformation through its funding of groups engaged in “censorship” against small businesses in the United States.
“This interim report outlines how government agencies are working with the private sector to ensure that certain businesses do not have a fair chance to compete online,” said Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), who chairs the House Small Business Committee. “Even worse, this report uncovers how taxpayer dollars contributed to the censorship that picks winners and losers in the online marketplace.”
The 66-page report was prepared by investigators on the Republican-led House Small Business Committee. For over a year, the panel has sought sprawling funding records from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on its programs fighting alleged disinformation and misinformation. That investigation began due to a series of Washington Examiner reports on the office bankrolling the Global Disinformation Index — a British group pressuring advertisers to defund right-of-center media outlets in the U.S.
The release of the report comes as the Global Engagement Center, which has an estimated budget of $61 million and a staff of 125, faces the potential to lose funding over GOP-led frustrations about its involvement with apparent domestic censorship groups. A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC. The office is also facing a lawsuit from conservative media outlets over the $100,000 the GEC sent to GDI and its support of a company called NewsGuard that rates the “misinformation” levels of news outlets.
Titled “Instruments and Casualties of the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” the House report argues the GEC promoted “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.” Moreover, the report argues the National Endowment for Democracy, a State Department-funded nonprofit group that awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI, “violated its international restrictions by collaborating with fact-checking entities in assessing domestic press businesses’ admission to a credibility organization.”
Formed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama, the GEC works closely with the Defense Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies. Since 2019, the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division has regularly met with social media platforms, while the office awarded many direct and subaward grants to entities pushing U.S. fact-checking initiatives, the House report found.
These initiatives, the report said, demonstrated the ways in which the GEC skirted its international mandate. One such initiative was a secret group chat targeting conservatives over alleged “fake news,” the Washington Examiner confirmed.
‘#FakeNewsSci’
The GEC, according to documents cited in the report, recently awarded taxpayer dollars to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a London-based entity that delivered a subaward to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. But the subaward “was used to convince international news outlets to join Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network’s (IFCN) Code of Principles, which is a group of news and information organizations that abide by a certain set of qualities denoting journalistic standards,” the report found.
To implement this award, the GEC was apparently added to a private email list in which apparent censorship activists “critiqued applicants, including domestic businesses such as the Daily Caller and its fact-checking organization,” according to the House report and documents obtained by the Washington Examiner through public records requests.
Internal documents show that in the email list titled “#FakeNewsSci,” participants were also affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy, Snopes, Poynter, Clemson University, and other entities. Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, has also participated in the listserv, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner through a public records request.
“I have no role with the email list Fake News SCI and I have only messaged it a few times, primarily to share our job postings,” Starbird told the Washington Examiner.
In one February 2021 email in the listserv, then-National Endowment for Democracy official Dean Jackson slammed the Daily Caller, noting, “I personally wouldn’t lend them the credibility.” He cited a link to an analysis article by writer Marlo Slayback titled “Public Schools Are Becoming Cesspools Of Woke Liberal Activism. What Happened?” Jackson also cited a link to a report in Snopes titled “Why Have So Many Daily Caller Writers Expressed White Supremacist Views?”
Jackson’s email, according to other records obtained by the Washington Examiner, came two days after a professor in the chat named Harith Alani said the Daily Caller “published several misinforming articles themselves.”
Meanwhile, in a February 2021 email in the private chat, Snopes founder David Mikkelson asked about the outlet’s funding for its fact-checking arm and foundation. An email signature for the Google group said, “All exchanges are to be treated as ‘off the record’ unless the member(s) in question explicitly agree otherwise.” Members, according to the email signature, “must be recommended by two other group members to be added to the group.”
“Check Your Fact is funded from the Daily Caller‘s newsroom budget, and the Daily Caller is funded by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF),” Mikkelson said. “So where does the DCNF get its money from? Providing tax forms that merely document how much revenue the DCNF takes in does nothing to answer that question.”
“One of the key requirements of IFCN certification is supposed to be transparency of funding,” Mikkelson wrote to the chat on Feb. 23, 2021, linking to an “About Us” page for the Daily Caller’s fact-checking arm. “If anyone can parse through this word salad and figure out who or what funds the Daily Caller’s fact-checking arm, I’d like to know.”
In the congressional report, the House Small Business Committee said it’s “not appropriate” for the GEC or the NED to “belong to a cohort that gatekeeps domestic press companies from belonging to a private credibility organization.”
The panel’s report, which cites various stories by the Washington Examiner last year along with separate funding records to “disinformation” groups, includes an audit of the GEC. The audit section notes that the GEC “has several issues in its recordkeeping and that there are not sufficient audit procedures in place to efficiently track its use of taxpayer dollars.”
“Despite State’s claims that it conducts rigorous oversight of subawardees, the GEC’s records indicate that there are numerous subawardees for which State has little or no information,” the report said.
“No Federal funds should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press,” the report continued. “Though the government is no longer in a relationship with NewsGuard or the GDI, the damage has already been done — they have already received the backing of the Federal government in hosting their products on the GEC’s Testbed and recommending them to its partners, using their services, and helping to grow their products.”
The full report can be viewed below:
" Conservative News Daily does not always share or support the views and opinions expressed here; they are just those of the writer."
