Posted on 09/13/2024 6:24:37 PM PDT by Libloather
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 the 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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Disinformation is more like the truth that certain people haven’t tilted.
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