A new congressional report accuses an office within the State Department of funding groups that targeted and censored small businesses in the United States, overstepping its mandate to combat foreign disinformation.
The Washington Examiner outlines a recently released report by the Republican-led House Small Business Committee that raises serious concerns about the activities of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC). The 66-page report alleges that the GEC, which has an estimated budget of $61 million and a staff of 125, has been funding groups engaged in domestic censorship, thereby skirting its primary mandate of thwarting foreign disinformation.
The investigation, which began following a series of reports on the GEC’s involvement with the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British group pressuring advertisers to defund right-of-center media outlets in the U.S., has uncovered a pattern of questionable funding practices. The report argues that the GEC promoted “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.”
