U.S. taxpayer dollars, via the State Department, are funding the censorship of and blocking advertising revenue to primarily independent American media, according to a new report by the House Committee on Small Business.
The 66-page report was prepared by investigators on the committee who sought funding records from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) on its programs fighting alleged "disinformation and misinformation."
“This interim report outlines how government agencies are working with the private sector to ensure that certain businesses do not have a fair chance to compete online,” said Texas Republican Rep. Roger Williams who chairs the committee. “Even worse, this report uncovers how taxpayer dollars contributed to the censorship that picks winners and losers in the online marketplace.”
Formed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama, the GEC works closely with the Defense Department, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies. Since 2019, the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division has regularly met with social media platforms, while the office awarded many direct and sub-award grants to entities pushing U.S. fact-checking initiatives, the House report found.
The House investigation began following a series of Washington Examiner reports on the State Department office bankrolling the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) — a British group pressuring advertisers to defund American conservative media outlets like WorldTribune.com. While the impact on other news sites were not publicly available, WorldTribune.com advertising revenues for the first six months of 2024 were 34 percent of that from the same period in 2022 despite no significant changes in readership or traffic, according to accounting records.
The GDI has two San Antonio-based affiliates with nonprofit status that have raked in huge monetary benefits under the guise of tracking disinformation, according to the Washington Examiner.
Tax records for 2020 cited by the news site ProPublica show Disinformation Index Inc. had total revenue of $345,000, while Disinformation Index Foundation raked in $569,219 — an increase of more than 2,800% compared to the previous year, when its revenue totaled $19,612.
The London-based GDI is run by Clare Melford, a former senior vice president for MTV Networks, and Daniel Rogers, who sits on the board of Human Rights First, a leftist nonprofit group that blames the spread of disinformation for fomenting “violent extremism and public health crises.”
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The group’s blacklist is compiled with input from members of an advisory panel that includes journalist Anne Applebaum, who had dismissed the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop as “not interesting.”
The GDI blacklist contains at least 2,000 sites, according to Melford, and is sent to big advertising firms, which have more and more leaned on the "nonpartisan" organizations to combat "disinformation."
The firms are then pressured to cease doing business with conservative news outlets — among them Newsmax, The Federalist and the New York Post, according to the Examiner.
The report by the House Committee on Small Business notes that GDI received at least four federally funded awards; one directly from the U.S. government through the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge; and three from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was created by Congress and is largely funded by congressional appropriations from the State Department, totaling nearly $1 million.
The Washington Examiner noted that the release of the committee's report "comes as the Global Engagement Center, which has an estimated budget of $61 million and a staff of 125, faces the potential to lose funding over GOP-led frustrations about its involvement with apparent domestic censorship groups. A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC. The office is also facing a lawsuit from conservative media outlets over the $100,000 the GEC sent to GDI and its support of a company called NewsGuard that rates the 'misinformation' levels of news outlets."
As summarized in its 2020 application for NED funding, the GDI aims “to disrupt, defund and down-rank disinformation sites, and [the GDI] work[s] collectively with governments, business and civil society to achieve it.”
The House Committee on Small Business report states:
The GDI estimates the online advertising industry amounts to $385 billion globally, with nearly $250 million in online ad revenue earned by ‘disinformation sites’ each year.99 By removing this financial incentive, the GDI believes it will stop outlets from sharing this information and conform to the GDI’s preferred narratives in order to get better ratings — harming the viability of businesses that do not. This curtails speech the GDI does not agree with, because it is not just false information that the GDI labels as disinformation. Outlets are scored using subjective application of arbitrary criteria, and outlets expressing speech that does not align with those subjective determinations are subject to the GDI’s interference."“No Federal funds should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press,” the report continued. “Though the government is no longer in a relationship with NewsGuard or the GDI, the damage has already been done — they have already received the backing of the Federal government in hosting their products on the GEC’s Testbed and recommending them to its partners, using their services, and helping to grow their products.”
The New York Post noted that many of same organizations pushing to blacklist conservative sites "have rated left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio, The New York Times, USA Today, Insider, and HuffPost as 'least risky' when it comes to spreading “disinformation,” the Examiner reported.
Many of these "least risky" outlets knowingly pushed the false Trump-Russia collusion story for more than four years.
