Obama-era interagency organization ‘blacklisted’ Americans in attempt to curb ‘foreign disinformation’: Report

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A U.S. government interagency organization created to counter international terror organizations and foreign propaganda allegedly used resources to censor Americans, according to a new installment of the Twitter files.

The "Global Engagement Center," (GEC), established in 2016 as part of an executive order by then-President Barack Obama, has a budget of roughly $74 billion and reportedly gave money to at least 39 different organizations, whose names were redacted in an inspector general report.

According to reporter Matt Taibbi, the GEC "funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer and insidious—and idiotic—new form of blacklisting."

The GEC is part of the State Department but also partners with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Special Operations Command and the Department of Homeland Security. The GEC also funds the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).

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DFRLab Director Graham Brookie denied the claim that they use tax money to track Americans, saying its GEC grants have "an exclusively international focus."

In the new report, Taibbi offered various instances in which the DFRLab and the GEC sent Twitter a list of accounts they believed were engaged in "state-backed coordinated manipulation." However, a quick glance from Twitter employees determined that the list was shoddy and included the accounts of multiple American citizens with seemingly no connection to the foreign entity in question.

In one instance, the GEC sent Twitter a list of 5,500 names they believed were affiliated with the Chinese government and actively engaging in systemized propaganda.

At the time, then-Twitter Trust and Safety lead Yoel Roth called the government correspondence "a total crock" after it was determined the list included "multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees based abroad."

On June 8, 2021, the DFRLab emailed Twitter, stating, "Hi guys. Attached you will find… around 40k Twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior… and Hindu nationalism more broadly."

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While the lab suspected these accounts were "paid employees or possibly volunteers" of India's Bharatiya Janata Party, the list was full of ordinary Americans with what seemed to be no connection to India or the country's politics.

Twitter agreed that the DFRLab's claim was dubious. Roth replied to the email and said he had spot-checked a number of the accounts, "and virtually all appear to be real people."

During one correspondence, GEC asked Twitter to review 499 accounts as "foreign" disinformation because they used Signal to communicate and tweeted the hashtag, #IraniansDebateWithBiden.

Many of the problems within the GEC appeared to stem from a 2020 report, "Russian Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda."

The report, in part, stated that along with state actors, groups that "generate their own momentum" should be viewed under the umbrella of a "propaganda ecosystem."

"The 'ecosystem' is not a new concept. It's been with us since Salem: guilt by association," Taibbi wrote.

He added that any Twitter account that posted positions synonymous with any Russian government position could be labeled "Moscow controlled."

A Twitter executive appeared to mock the U.S. government methodology through internal correspondence, writing, "If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you could become Russia-linked."

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Twitter employees often reviewed the information sent by the GEC before it was labeled as foreign disinformation.

"This made them a tough crowd for the GEC," Taibbi wrote. "Fortunately, there's an easier mark: the news media. GEC's game: create an alarmist report, send it to the slower animals in journalism's herd, and wait as reporters bang on Twitter's door, demanding to know why this or that "ecosystem" isn't obliterated."

Noting that Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) was quoted in a New York Times story on Russian disinformation, Roth wrote, "Seems like ASD are back at their old tricks."

Roth was likely referring to ASD's decision to create Hamilton 68, a dashboard that claimed to track accounts linked with "Russian influence activities." These accounts were largely comprised of Americans.

Based on internal Twitter communications, Taibbi concluded that the company knew from the early days of the "foreign interference mania" that media stories frequently included bad actors playing up cyber-threats for "political or financial reasons" and that GEC included these actors in their reports.

In one email thread, a top Twitter official claimed that the GEC has doubled its budget over the last several years by "aggressively overstating threats through unverified accusations."

The GEC's official mandate is "to recognize, understand, expose and counter foreign… disinformation." However, a former intelligence source speaking with Taibbi said the interagency organization is an "incubator for the domestic disinformation complex."

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"All the s--t we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home," the source added.