Government funded a weapon to fight terrorism — and then used it in test on Blaze Media
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The lawsuit accused the government of actively intervening in the news media market through the Global Engagement Center “to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”
Prior to negotiating a deal with the State Department and settling the case last week, the Federalist obtained discovery evidence confirming that the Global Engagement Center had regularly backed and promoted censorial technologies including NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.
Blaze Media previously reported that NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index generated blacklists of supposedly risky or misleading news outfits with the aim of getting them demonetized and directing funds to news organizations that advanced establishment narratives.
In the Global Disinformation Index’s fall 2022 report, for example, NPR, the Washington Post, and other liberal news outfits were labeled as the “least risky sites,” whereas Blaze Media, Reason, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, and other conservative publications made the top 10 list of “riskiest sites” and were smeared as having the “greatest level of disinformation risk.”
It turns out that Blaze Media was targeted for more than just a blacklist.
Testing Americans
In an August 2020 press release, NewsGuard showcased that it and two other technology companies — PeakMetrics and Omelas — had won a $25,000 contract earlier that year offered jointly by the State Department and the Pentagon to develop solutions that would help the departments evaluate “disinformation narrative themes in near real time ‘by identifying online sources spreading COVID-19 disinformation or misinformation narratives.'”
The Federalist obtained evidence that these Global Engagement Center-funded companies ran a test from Dec. 14, 2020, until Jan. 7, 2021, wherein Blaze Media was apparently a featured target.
The Global Engagement Center reportedly explained ahead of time that the test would entail PeakMetrics “first identify[ing] popular yet potentially divisive narratives relevant to the U.S. elections that are trending across channels.”
Omelas, in turn, was supposed to provide “evidence of direct attribution of these narratives to state-sponsored sources of disinformation.”
After PeakMetrics and Omelas assessed which narratives were becoming “integrated into domestic messaging,” NewsGuard “would highlight which sites the narratives continue to surface from and ‘provide information on the reliability, popularity, and endurance of the sites and dissemination platforms,'” reported the Federalist.
This proposed plan apparently made at least one person at the State Department uncomfortable. In a September 2020 email, the person apologized for a lack of clarity regarding the proposed test, noting that the agency had “explained to CYBERCOM” that it would be “impossible” to “focus on domestic audiences” and that “this test will NOT focus on US audiences.”
A PeakMetrics report — produced by the State Department and reviewed by the Federalist — suggested these reassurances, which prompted a department official to approve the test, were misleading.
The report explained that the outfits “collaborated to create a mockup of a joint dashboard incorporating all three companies’ capabilities.”
PeakMetrics noted further that it had performed a preliminary analysis on “Omelas’ ‘Unrest and Violence in America’ narrative,” then integrated its “technology enrichment for sources,” allowing “operators to garner insights such as technology stacks used for a site, IP addresses (and IP2GEO) associated with the site, and potentially affiliated sites using the same ID for particular technologies.”
The report added that “analysis of this metadata can provide unique insights into networks of disinformation propagators.”
PeakMetrics’ report featured two examples of so-called “disinformation propagators”: Sputnik News — a Russian state-owned news agency — and Blaze Media, one of America’s largest independent media companies, which the report claimed had a “record of promoting conspiracies [sic] and misinformation surrounding prominent figures and elections.”
Through a grant of over $2 million to a third party, the State Department funded the testing of the three companies’ technology and financed the test bed on which they collaborated, the Federalist noted.
“Our government financed testing for private technology companies to improve their products — products that target American[s’] speech and seek to silence domestic media outlets,” the Federalist summarized.
PeakMetrics and Omelas did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
Matt Skibinski, the COO of NewsGuard, attempted to downplay the finding, telling Blaze News, “This small contract with the Trump administration’s Global Engagement Center was exclusively for the purpose of tracking narratives emanating from Chinese and Russian media outlets. The scope of work was extremely specific, even going so far as to list the foreign-owned publications that would be the subject of our monitoring.”
Skibinski did not deny that Blaze Media was used in the test.
“PeakMetrics simply incorporated that publicly available rating into its dashboard to test whether this would be useful,” said Skibinski. “Again, this was not part of the scope of work we were paid for, and again, The Blaze [sic] was rated well before we had this unrelated small Trump administration [Global Engagement Center] contract covering foreign disinformation.”
“We did it because we thought it might be a useful capability that could lead us to future contracts,” said Skibinski.
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