Disinformation Inc: GOP slams government for funding group blacklisting conservative news
Gabe Kaminsky
This is part of a Washington Examiner investigative series on self-styled ‘disinformation’ monitors that are secretly blacklisting and aiming to defund disfavored speech. Here you can read other stories in the series.
EXCLUSIVE — Republican senators and representatives are raising concerns over the State Department bankrolling a “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media outlets.
The State Department has granted hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups that is feeding blacklists of conservative media to advertising companies, according to multiple Washington Examiner reports. Now, GOP members of Congress are slamming the government over this funding, which First Amendment lawyers have said appears troubling.
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DISINFORMATION INC: MICROSOFT REMOVES CONSERVATIVE SITES FROM BLACKLIST ‘DEFUNDING’ OUTLETS
“It ought to scare everybody in this country, regardless of whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, that the government is that involved in censoring speech,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), told the Washington Examiner. “The unholy alliance between government and Big Tech must be dismantled.”
The Washington Examiner revealed that GDI, which operates a “dynamic exclusion list,” received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities. The first entity was the Global Engagement Center, which provided $100,000 to GDI as part of the U.S-Paris Tech Challenge. The challenge aimed “to advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” overseas, according to documents.
Second, GDI received $250,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group that gets about all of its money from annual congressional appropriations. The NED’s board, which includes Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Joaquin Castro (D-TX), “controls” how grants are allocated, according to the NED’s website.
“The State Department should not be funding woke organizations who seek to censor and demonetize conservative outlets,” Stefanik told the Washington Examiner. “House Republicans will assert our oversight over the State Department’s funding of these type of groups.”
“We’ve seen recently how the U.S. government has tried to use the tech sector to control the narrative on many issues,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), a member of the House Judiciary Committee. “Outlets such as the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed are among the biggest pushers of disinformation yet are ranked as very trustworthy by the index.”
Rep. Austin Norman (R-SC), a member of the House Committee on Financial Services, said it is “absolutely unacceptable” for the U.S. government “to be involved, in any capacity, with efforts to censor free speech.”
“And using public funds to help outsource those efforts is no less atrocious,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The State Department must answer to Congress and the American people as to how this was allowed to happen.”
One company that has subscribed to GDI’s blacklist is the Microsoft-owned Xandr, which is now conducting an internal review and has stopped using the disinformation tracker’s services. That latest action is the result of a Washington Examiner report on Xandr’s own blacklist of conservative media, which was leaked by whistleblowers in the ad industry.
The 10 media outlets that GDI has labeled as the “riskiest” are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News Network, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
Contrarily, GDI has ranked the 10 “least risky” as the Wall Street Journal, NPR, ProPublica, the Associated Press, Insider, the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, and HuffPost, according to a 27-page GDI memo.
“There is no doubt that a dark money industry that claims a mission of advancing truth and fact has weaponized itself to target not disinformation but disfavored free speech,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told the Washington Examiner. “The Examiner’s reports raise serious questions that need real answers, and the Congress has a clear interest in knowing if and how much the State Department has invested in the censorship of conservative media and the blacklisting of viewpoints that challenge the Biden administration.”
Another lawmaker, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), said that “government-by-proxy censorship” is “unacceptable.”
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“Taxpayer dollars have no place funding anti-speech organizations that are actively waging war against conservative outlets,” he told the Washington Examiner. “As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I look forward to conducting oversight into this funding to ensure Americans’ First Amendment rights are respected and protected.”
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.