Disclosures brought about by Missouri and Louisiana’s tech First Amendment lawsuit against the federal government reveal that the U.S. State Department actively marketed government-funded online censorship tools to Big Tech companies.
As reported by the Federalist, an official at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, or GEC, sent an email to the popular business networking platform LinkedIn advertising the so-called “disinfo cloud,” a GEC-funded project that sought to identify “disinformation” online.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., speaks during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
GEC senior advisor Samaruddin Stewart first wrote to LinkedIn in February 2020, requesting a meeting, saying he had been “tasked with building relationships with technology companies,” and that he was reaching out to companies interested in “countering disinformation.”
In another email to LinkedIn employees following the meeting, Stewart advertised the GEC’s censorship tool.
“I’ll send information… about gaining access to Disinfo Cloud — which is a GEC funded platform that offers stakeholders an opportunity to discover companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation,” said Stewart.
The Disinfo Cloud was advertised to firms as a “one-stop shop” for a tech company to “identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation.”
In addition to funding the Disinfo Cloud, the GEC also helped fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that sought to blacklist conservative media as spreaders of misinformation, financially attacking them by spreading the smear to advertisers.
This is just the latest explosive revelation brought about by the lawsuit, brought by state attorney general Jeff Landry of Louisiana, and former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt, who is now a U.S. Senator.
The lawsuit alleges the Biden Administration infringed the First Amendment by colluding with tech companies to censor Americans, and has revealed more information about that collusion as time has gone on.
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.