Democracy Dies Under the Light of Transparency
Perhaps that should be the new slogan for the state department’s global engagement center who has threatened to only reveal their records in camera settings to the congressional small business committee so news outlets they don’t like cannot learn anything about their domestic propaganda and censorship efforts and inform the electorate about them. Blinken’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has funded domestic propaganda efforts in direct contradiction to the Smith-Mundt Act, which it does through proxy NGOs such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index who maintain blacklists and site ratings, marketed for advertisers and the intel community, of U.S. media sites that do not publish narratives they like.
In August 2020, the State department and Pentagon hosted the Countering Disinformation Challenge announcing NewsGuard Tech Inc., as one of the three winners of a $25K grant, through Disinfo Cloud sponsorship, to conduct a joint pilot study with GEC. In 2021, Global Disinformation Index participated in the GEC’s U.S. Paris-Tech challenge and was one of the three awardees. The Atlantic Council posted this Tech Challenge on their youtube page for all of the world to see. The award for the awardees, according to the Atlantic Council, is receiving $250,000 in state department funding through Disinfo Cloud; GDI received $100K of that sum. That same year, they also received $315,750 in grant money under their trade name Disinformation Index, Inc. through the National Endowment for Democracy which despite being an “autonomous” NGO itself receives congressional funding through the state department. The NED edited out the $315K given to Disinformation, Inc. last year but the internet never forgets and we have an archive of the original list of grantees.
The GDI, co-founded by a CFR member, maintains a Dynamic Exclusion List of both foreign and U.S. media sites they want advertisers to revoke revenue from, which you can download from their site, exclusively listing right leaning and anti-establishment sites as “high and maximum” risk and left-leaning as well as right wing establishment sites like the Wall Street Journal as “low” risk. They also peculiarly define “disinformation” as "adversarial narrative” which are intentionally misleading; financially or ideologically motivated (as if their narratives are purely altruistic); and/or, aimed at fostering long-term social, political or economic conflict; and which create a risk of harm by undermining trust in science or targeting institutions or at-risk individuals.” Of course by “science” they mean profit motivate corporate science that starts with a presupposed conclusions about certain products and sets the terms of reference and study parameters to find any net benefit for the product they want approved and allowed on the market a very common phenomenon I’ve covered in a series of posts titled When The Media Says Experts They Mean Paid Corporate Shills. Such a broad definition of “disinformation” potentially includes any challenge or criticism of economic, political or social power that begins with acknowledging the existence of conflicting economic and social class interests and the fact that certain institutions serve or are deferential to specific class interests but it leaves the news rater with such a wide discretion over what to count as disinformation that it’s laughable to pretend that it can ever remotely serve as any sort of objective framework. And none of this would be newsworthy if GDI didn't have indirect funding from congress mediated through NGO proxies of the state department.
NewsGuard promotes their ratings lists as “Nutrition labels” for news and uses an AI software known as Misinformation Finger prints to keep tabs on narratives they don’t like and offers a browser extension called NewsGuard shield that steers you towards sites with narratives they like and unlike GDI do not appear to have an operational definition of misinformation but rather a set of criteria they selectively apply to sites they don’t like.
As I’ve noted in a prior post from 2022 the state department’s domestic censorship and propaganda efforts began in ernest at the tail end of the Obama admin with the passage of Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 (HR5181) which was trojan horsed through the 2017 NDAA. You can find the relevant portions of H.R. 5181 in Section 1287 of the NDAA of 2017, which starts on page 1396. Section 1287 established the aforementioned Global Engagement Center through statutory authority granted under (22 USC 2656) for the purposes of:
Lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.
Their mission creep into domestic affairs, outside the purview of the state department’s statutory authority over foreign affairs, began under the Trump admin with their participation in the Election Integrity Partnership with CISA, the Stanford Internet Observatory and Washington University’s Center for Informed Public which as I noted in The Censorship Industrial Complex admits that only 42% of the reports in their internal database, JIRA, were actually associated with an external fact check and often applied them where they were not relevant. GEC also created the Disinfo Cloud platform to host tech challenges under the Trump admin which they scrapped in December 2021, likely in anticipation of the failed Disinformation Governance Board.
Even the 2012 revision of the Smith-Mundt Act, which was Trojan horsed through the 2013 NDAA, contains the general prohibition that ‘No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States’ which GDI and NewsGuard are certainly in the business of doing.