Disinformation Inc: State university pressed by GOP over cash from conservative blacklister
Gabe Kaminsky
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EXCLUSIVE — A public university is being pressed for answers from a GOP lawmaker after the Washington Examiner revealed the school took cash from a State Department-funded “disinformation” tracker to help “censor” conservatives.
The State Department has been the target of Republican-led investigations over its grants to the Global Disinformation Index, a British group covertly feeding conservative website blacklists to advertisers to defund disfavored speech. But since the University of Texas at Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab was paid over $90,000 from GDI to conduct research for a widely scrutinized report slamming right-leaning news outlets, GOP Texas state House Rep. Brian Harrison is demanding the school perform “a full accounting” of all projects the lab has spearheaded, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner.
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“I respectfully request UT’s connection with GDI be severed immediately if that has not already occurred,” Harrison wrote in a Tuesday letter to James B. Milliken, chancellor of the University of Texas System. “Additionally, if these are the types of projects that the Global Disinformation Lab is participating in, I have grave concerns with the existence of the lab at all. I request a full accounting of the projects, both past and present, that the lab has participated in, as well as any outside entities the lab collaborated with in any manner.”
GDI was granted roughly $960,000 from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and National Endowment for Democracy, a government-backed nonprofit group, between 2020 and 2022. These awards have prompted federal lawmakers, including House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), to request documents from the State Department in connection to its ties to the self-styled “disinformation” group.
The National Endowment for Democracy has since announced it will no longer fund GDI, while the Global Engagement Center has defended its grant. The multinational software company Oracle also cut ties with GDI recently following their “brand safety” partnership, which came after Microsoft suspended its relationship with the group and launched a purported internal review. Microsoft has stonewalled on providing details about its said review.
On Thursday, the Washington Examiner published contracts it obtained through a records request showing that GDI steered $90,810 to UT Austin’s disinformation lab to prepare a December 2022 report that alleged the “riskiest” websites for falsehoods were the New York Post, RealClearPolitics, the Blaze, and other conservative outlets. The lab was established in 2020 “to encourage collaborative interdisciplinary academic research on the global circulation of a broad spectrum of information, misinformation, and disinformation via digital media,” records show.
Harrison, ex-chief of staff for former President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, told Milliken in his letter that taxpayer-funded schools like UT should not “be allowed to help censor free speech or push harmful ideology.” The lawmaker said he aims to “vigilantly defend the First Amendment rights of all Texans.”
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Internal messages from UT notably show that personnel at the disinformation lab expressed concerns that it would come under the national spotlight following a Washington Examiner report in February 2023 that laid bare GDI’s covert blacklist operation. The report led to an outcry among conservatives, who had long suspected that right-leaning websites were being targeted over their advertising revenue.
A contract agreement shows that GDI sought assistance from UT Austin to “conduct research on a selection of news domains applying a set of questions and data fields to determine each of the domain’s disinformation risk.” The university’s disinformation lab told the Washington Examiner in a statement last week that “no state money was used” as part of the GDI-related agreement.
“I look forward to working with you to address this issue and also to strengthen the integrity of Texas’s world-class academic institutions,” Harrison wrote in his letter.
The Texas lawmaker’s letter to UT Austin is the latest escalation of the GOP’s attempts to investigate relationships between state-backed entities and groups that have targeted conservative websites for being purported “disinformation” peddlers.
In late April, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed the heads of several agencies, including coordinator James Rubin of the Global Engagement Center, as part of an attempt to obtain records on the Biden administration’s alleged coordination with social media companies on “censorship” of opposing views.
Jordan’s staffers on Tuesday on Capitol Hill met with University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, a former member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board that was shuttered in 2022 amid conservative outcry, as part of the chairman’s ongoing “censorship investigation,” according to a source familiar. Starbird was sitting for a transcribed interview and deposition, the source said.
Two weeks ago, the committee was briefed by professors at Clemson University who, like Starbird, have sought to track alleged disinformation online, according to the source. Starbird co-founded the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, “which formed in 2019 around a shared mission of resisting strategic misinformation,” according to the institution.
Meanwhile, the GDI saga led to a right-leaning watchdog called Protect the Public’s Trust filing a lawsuit against the State Department in early May over the agency stonewalling the release of documents in connection to GDI.
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GDI’s two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, Disinformation Index and the AN Foundation, were accused in an IRS complaint by another right-leaning watchdog called National Legal and Policy Center in May of violating federal law over their extensive redactions on 2021 financial disclosure forms. The omissions were first reported on by the Washington Examiner in April.
The Washington Examiner reached out to UT Austin for comment.