The Department of Defense has awarded a contract to a tech firm run by Lisa Kaplan, a “disinformation” researcher who praised Twitter’s decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
Kaplan, who said that in censoring the laptop story, Twitter had decided “to address disinformation, making it so that people can’t share a link known to be false,” was awarded a $72,321 contract from the Pentagon for access to a service that tracks foreign disinformation.
FILE – The Pentagon is seen from Air Force One as it flies over Washington, March 2, 2022. The FBI wants to question a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard in connection with the disclosure of highly classified military documents on the Ukraine war, two people familiar with the investigation said Thursday, April 13, 2023.
This followed a $49,328 contract to Kaplan’s firm in 2021 to build a machine learning tool to “mitigate” disinformation.
Via the Washington Free Beacon:
The Defense Department in May inked a contract with a tech firm run by Lisa Kaplan, a disinformation researcher who said Twitter’s decision to block links to the New York Post’s October 2020 story about the troubled first son was a “good move.” On Twitter and in the press at the time, Kaplan applauded what she called the social media giant’s “efforts … to address disinformation, making it so that people can’t share a link known to be false.”
Kaplan’s support for the censorship of a legitimate news story could raise concerns about the reliability of her work for the Pentagon. According to government spending records, the Pentagon awarded a $72,321 contract this year to Kaplan’s firm, LCK Strategies, for a software tool that tracks global disinformation campaigns. That follows a $49,328 contract to LCK Strategies in 2021 to build a “machine learning tool” to detect and “mitigate” disinformation. LCK Strategies, which Kaplan launched in 2019, also operates under the name Alethea Group.
Kaplan’s contention that the Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation came from thin air. The story, originally reported on by Breitbart News’ Emma-Jo Morris, then a reporter at the New York Post, was instantly smeared as “disinformation” by the media upon release, and censored by Twitter and Facebook. The FBI, which knew the story was true, did not alert the tech companies to this fact despite being in regular contact with them throughout the election year.
It’s possible that the Pentagon’s decision to fund Kaplan’s firm will run afoul of the McCormick amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which forbids the military from funding organizations that promote censorship and blacklisting based on viewpoint.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.