The State Department sought to denigrate two reporters and a member of Congress as part of damage control attempts over having helped fund an advertisers’ “blacklist” of The Post and other outlets allegedly spreading “misinformation,” according to internal documents.
In March 2023, the department distributed press guidance about how to counter bombshell reports by “Twitter Files” scribe Matt Taibbi and Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky concerning State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).
Taibbi’s first report about the GEC, in a lengthy Twitter thread published Jan. 3, 2023, revealed efforts to pressure US social media platforms early in the COVID-19 pandemic to censor Americans online, purportedly to counter “disinformation.”
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” Taibbi testified to Congress in March of that year.
Those moderation requests included flagging proponents of the so-called “lab leak theory,” despite distinguished virologists maintaining there was far more evidence for the accidental emission of COVID-19 from a lab in Wuhan, China than for natural transmission of the virus from animals to humans.
Kaminsky also uncovered a $100,000 grant from GEC to the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) in 2021 and 2022, an entity that calls itself “the world’s first rating of the media sites based on the risk of the outlet carrying disinformation.”
Despite GEC’s mandate proclaiming that it is only involved in international affairs, GDI went on to concoct a blacklist of 10 outlets, including The Post, with conservative or libertarian-leaning opinion sections in an effort to demonetize them.
Ad associations further participated in GDI’s efforts to blacklist the media outlets, though some called the list “bewildering” for having “somehow placed the NYPost [sic] as ‘at most risk’ paper in the USA for disinformation.”
Both the GEC grant, distributed between October 2021 and March 2022, and another $545,000 government-funded grant from the National Endowment for Democracy to GDI, have not been renewed.
Other GEC grants went to non-governmental entities like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab to flag social media posts for suppression.
The State Department records, exclusively obtained by The Post, make no mention of these taxpayer-funded entities’ conduct, choosing instead to fault Taibbi, Kaminsky and now-X owner Elon Musk for spreading alleged falsehoods about GEC.
“Elon Musk’s retweet of Taibbi’s thread insinuates that the [US government], and the GEC in particular, pressured Twitter to close U.S. accounts of which the [US government] disapproved,” the guidance document reads. “The evidence offered for this claim is often missing, inferred, or presented out of context. The thread comes to no firm conclusion, and switches blame to the FBI near the end of the string.”
It also waves away Kaminsky’s series of reports on GEC by stating the reporter “did not ask for an interview,” while acknowledging he “sent questions repeatedly” to the State Department press office for information on the grant to GDI.
“The State Department had numerous opportunities to respond to my reporting on it funding the Global Disinformation Index, but they declined to answer basic questions,” Kaminsky told The Post, citing roughly a dozen requests for comment made between January and February 2023.
The talking points only quote from two lawmakers about GEC’s funding, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), portraying the latter favorably by linking to a Twitter thread in which he claims the extensive reporting by Taibbi and Kaminsky was “MADE UP OUT OF THIN AIR.”
Banks was quoted as having told a Russian state media outlet that he would seek to ban future funding for entities that stifle Americans’ free speech — but the citation was paraphrasing his original quote to Kaminsky.
The selection suggests that Banks’ defense of the First Amendment was being linked to Russian influence operations — and to downplay the thrust of the Washington Examiner reports.
“The Department of State has been and continues to be responsive to dozens of reporters requests for comment and congressional inquiries,” a spokesperson told The Post. “The bottom line remains the same: the Global Engagement Center does not engage in censorship, and it is focused on countering foreign disinformation overseas, not on the domestic information environment.”
Earlier statements have also noted that “GEC’s work with GDI was limited to disinformation efforts in East Asia and Europe,” without providing details.
The internal State Department document stipulates that there was “a more precise focus on [the People’s Republic of China] and Russian disinformation activities.”
The former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, said that was one of the reasons their platform had been reluctant to do any work with GEC since it was engaged in “offensive influence” operations.
“We were dedicated to rooting out malign foreign interference no matter who it came from,” Roth testified to the House Judiciary Committee in February 2023, “and if we found that the American government was engaged in foreign malign interference, we’d be addressing that as well.”
A House Small Business Committee report released last month found that GEC also “has several issues in its recordkeeping and that there are not sufficient audit procedures in place to efficiently track its use of taxpayer dollars,” the Washington Examiner first reported.
Taibbi and Banks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
