House Republicans are now pulling at another thread in the web of the Censorship Industrial Complex that has been directly funded by the American taxpayer.

New reporting by Washington Examiner reporter Gabe Kaminsky unveiled that the House Small Business Committee drafted a subpoena demanding that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken appear before the Committee on June 27. The subpoena also requires that the State Department hand over “all documents and communications” related to which organizations the State Department’s Global Engagement Center funded and how much money it gave through grants, awards, or cooperative agreements from 2018 to the present.  

The legal document includes a list of specific State Department funded projects that must be included in order to satisfy the subpoena’s requirement. The list included infamous website traffic cops NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index. The GDI was previously exposed by a House Judiciary investigation for authoring a “hate groups” blacklist that primarily targeted conservatives and faith-based organizations.    

The subpoena additionally demanded “documents sufficient to identify each of the 366 programs featured on the GEC’s Disinfo Cloud platform, mentioned in the document named ‘2023.02.14 GEC-GDI-BLACKLIST.docx.’” Disinfo Cloud was a technology platform designed to facilitate censorship by providing a testing lab for various censorship technologies. Beyond Disinfo Cloud, the subpoena also required documents listing “the application and approval process of each program” and the aforementioned “BLACKLIST” document. 

The Committee is also seeking to learn about any State Department efforts “planning for any successors to the Disinfo Cloud Platform,” which was shuttered in 2022.

The Global Engagement Center has been in the public spotlight for its role in facilitating government censorship. The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a preliminary injunction in February requesting that a federal court order the State Department to cease funding censorship operations like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index. 

NewsGuard in particular, which is now also under Congressional investigation for its ties to the federal government, has been exposed by MRC for a clear and persistent bias against right-leaning outlets. MRC’s latest study found that NewsGuard rated left-leaning outlets an average of 25 points higher than outlets on the right (91 percent versus 66 percent). 
 

Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.