Friday, March 21, 2025

USAID Censorship Scheme Exposed; Global Engagement Center Worked With UK Government And Media Firms To Deploy AI Tools

"America First Legal (AFL) released explosive new documents obtained through ongoing litigation against the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), exposing a vast, government-backed censorship operation to silence Americans under the guise of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” 
The documents reveal a disturbing alliance between the GEC, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, Development Office (FCDO), and media censorship organizations, all working in lock-step to manipulate public discourse, control media narratives, and suppress free speech.
The GEC, which was forced to shut down in December 2024, was designed to “combat foreign disinformation abroad.” However, through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, AFL uncovered that the GEC engaged in state-sponsored propaganda, repeatedly using willing participants from private media organizations. Further, AFL’s lawsuit against the GEC revealed that USAID had created an internal “Disinformation Primer” that explicitly praised private sector censorship strategies and recommended further censorship tactics.
The new documents released by AFL show: The GEC and USAID coordinated efforts to censor
COVID-19 misinformation” and counter COVID-19 propaganda.”
The GEC collaborated with officials in the
British Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office on disinformation efforts.
The GEC coordinated with private media censorship firms, including Poynter and NewsGuard, which provided samples of its Misinformation Fingerprints
artificial intelligence (AI) tool, designed to identify and rate websites based on their perceived “misinformation.”
The House Small Business Committee found that Park Advisors received a GEC cooperative agreement award of more than $6 million. Park Advisors then distributed subawards to several companies, including NewsGuard, the Atlantic Council, and the Global Disinformation Index, a project funded by George Soros that generated lists of conservative websites it urged advertising companies to boycott. Together, these groups, not subject to international restrictions like GEC was, tested disinformation products, which led to the creation of the “Disinfo Cloud,” an unclassified platform used by the
U.S. federal government, the European Union, the U.K. government, the Australian government, and the Estonian government “to counter adversarial propaganda and disinformation.”
Skibinski showed samples of the new GEC/U.S Cybercommand Testbed Pilot (Misinformation Fingerprints). This program utilized artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor “misinformation.” The House Small Business Committee report details that “there was no firewall in place to ensure that Federal resources were not being used to develop and promote technologies that would have domestic impacts.” 
ZeroHedge

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