State Department’s ‘disinformation’ efforts are a censorship sham

The State Department is using taxpayer money to smear its critics — those who have exposed its funding of censorship groups that attack right-wing news organizations, including The Post, under the pretext of fighting “disinformation.”

A sensational report by the Small Business Commission confirmed what independent journalist Matt Taibbi and the Washington Examiner reported: “The federal government is fueling an ecosystem of censorship that affects not only the First Amendment rights of individuals but also the ability of some small businesses to compete online.”

One group, the Global Disinformation Index, has created a “blacklist” of conservative publications that advertisers should avoid, smearing The Post and other major media outlets as “risky” potential sources of misinformation.

Between October 2021 and March 2022, GDI received $100,000 from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

Another group named in the report, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, ran a private email list that included GEC employees called “FakeNewsSci,” whose members denigrated conservative news organizations that had applied to join the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles.

In response, the State Department press team has been dishing out arguments in an attempt to discredit Taibbi, who exposed the GEC censorship in his “Twitter files” posts in early 2023, and Washington Examiner reporter Gabe Kaminsky, who broke the GDI story, by portraying them as clumsy and uninformed.

State officials also say that GEC “did not fund GDI to research, analyze, or report on social media platforms or accounts in the United States” and that “GEC’s work with GDI was limited to disinformation activities in East Asia and Europe.”

But GDI he did the target is US-based conservative media and GEC he did finance GDI.

As the Chamber report states, “While GEC does not fund domestic initiatives focused on its image, many of them have an impact in the United States.”

State authorities are trying to cover their tracks, but the report is clear: federal authorities are “funding, developing, and promoting entities that seek to demonetize news and information services for their lawful speech.”

But this is not an isolated incident, whether it’s the FBI pressuring social media companies to crack down on right-wing accounts or the Harris-Biden administration’s efforts to create a Department of Homeland Security “disinformation council.”

Every time the government claims to be fighting “disinformation,” it is simply attacking information which self-proclaimed “experts” do not want to make public.

The proper way to combat fake news is to share the truth, not censor and smear as the Harris-Biden team is trying to do.