US government’s censorship nerve center faces extinction
One of the federal government’s main censorship operation centers is facing extinction, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The Global Engagement Center (GEC) is an office within the State Department whose stated mission is to “counter foreign disinformation.” It has been described by former State Department official Mike Benz as “the first government censorship operation within the federal government.” House Republicans have referred to the GEC as “subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions.”
The GEC, which has a $61 million annual budget and is backed by deep state intelligence operatives, is under a seven-year mandate that ends on December 23rd. If Congress fails to renew it, the GEC will cease to exist.
Social media censorship
Some of the GEC’s projects include working with groups funded by billionaire George Soros and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to track “disinformation spreaders” on social media. GEC officials have frequently met with executives at Twitter, Facebook, and Google to advise them on what to censor. They have even sent lists of dissenters to social media platforms to be suspended or banned.
The Virality Project
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the GEC used taxpayer dollars to fund Stanford University’s Virality Project, which worked to suppress and remove any users or views that challenged the government’s narrative. Stanford operatives scoured social media platforms to weed out content that opposed government science, flagging actual science as “misinformation.” Some users targeted by The Virality Project included Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), and AFLDS Founder Dr. Simone Gold.
The Election Integrity Project
In 2020, the GEC also funded the Election Integrity Project (EIP), another initiative of Stanford aimed at suppressing questions about the presidential election. The EIP acted as a censorship “switchboard,” where around 100 operatives worked around the clock combing social media platforms for unapproved content. Once they flagged what they considered to be offending posts, the content was sent to the social media companies for removal.
NewsGuard
GEC officials also worked closely with the government-backed company NewsGuard, which Rep. James Comer (R-KY) referred to as a “backdoor attempt at censoring conservative media.” Praised by CNN as “the Librarian of the Internet,” NewsGuard employs a team of journalists and editors who issue “trust scores” for news websites. The organization claims to base these scores on certain criteria, which are used to determine whether a site is “trustworthy.”
Once it declares which sites are trustworthy and which are unreliable, NewsGuard sells the lists to advertisers so they can steer clear of the poorly rated websites. Studies conducted since the organization’s founding in 2018 show that NewsGuard rates Right-leaning news sites 27 points lower on average than Left-leaning news outlets.
NewsGuard has received nearly $1 million from the US government, mostly from the Department of Defense. In 2020, the Pentagon granted NewsGuard a $25,000 prize for winning a contest on “COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.”
During the pandemic, NewsGuard was a top promoter of the federal government’s messaging. The company claimed, for example, that the COVID-19 vaccine was the only cure for the virus. Its Coronavirus Misinformation Tracking Center continues to insist that scientific evidence showing the inefficacy of masks and social distancing is “false,” despite research findings to the contrary.
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