Democrat President Joe Biden’s Department of State has been using taxpayer money to fund a radical “disinformation” research group that has been blacklisting conservative news outlets, according to reports.
The State Department funded the effort through its Global Engagement Center (GEC), a group recently exposed in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.”
The Biden admin helped facilitate funding for a group that reportedly works to demonetize conservative news sites by claiming it is disseminating “disinformation.”
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a United Kingdom-based nonprofit that styles itself as a “non-political” monitor working to “disrupt the business model of disinformation,” according to its website.
The GDI lists the Disinfo Cloud, a now-shuttered GEC project, as one of its funders.
However, GDI has worked to demonetize conservative news sites by collaborating with ad exchanges to flag alleged purveyors of disinformation, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday.
GDI maintains a “dynamic exclusion list” of the worst offenders of so-called “disinformation” online, according to its website.
The organization then provides this list to ad tech companies, which can then “defund and downrank these worst offenders” and thereby defund sites allegedly promoting disinformation.
While the exclusion list isn’t publicly available, popular conservative news site Breitbart is on the list, according to the Examiner.
It is “plausible” that any of the “riskiest” outlets would also be on the exclusion list, according to a member of the GDI advisory panel who spoke to the Examiner.
In this list of news outlets that were deemed the “riskiest” for the alleged promotion of “disinformation,” GDI identifies several prominent conservative news sites.
Those sites include the New York Post and the Daily Wire.
By comparison, the “least risky” sites were overwhelmingly left-wing.
Moreover, GDI flagged the Examiner itself as disseminating “anti-LGBTQ+” disinformation, according to an October 2022 GDI memo.
It also points to an Amazon ad displayed on the Examiner page.
The “anti-LGBTQ+” content in question was found in an opinion article.
In September 2021, the State Department’s GEC hosted the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge, an event seeking to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in Europe and the U.K.
The event was held in “collaboration with U.S. Embassy Paris, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)” and several other entities.
GDI, along with the U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), were two of the three winners; ISD also works to monitor and combat perceived “misinformation” and “disinformation,” and lists as government partners the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The three winners will receive grants totaling $250,000, according to the Atlantic Council, which partnered with the State Department to arrange the event.
GDI also lists among its funders George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Pierre Omidyar’s Luminate, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
