The U.S. Agency for International Development–or USAID, coordinated closely with a State Department program to block what it considered “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” according to newly released government documents.
America First Legal, a conservative legal group, obtained more than 200 pages from the State Department through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit about the Global Engagement Center, or GEC.
The documents also show the controversial Global Engagement Center–which a congressional report concluded was federally-funded censorship–has cooperated with private journalism organizations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, spanning the last year of the first Trump administration and early years of the Biden administration, the GEC and USAID worked together to stop what the agencies deemed “COVID-19 misinformation” and oppose “COVID-19 propaganda,” the records show.
The State Department closed the Global Engagement Center in December 2024 after investigations from Congress.
After revelations of embarrassing expenditures, USAID was moved into the State Department during the Trump administration.
The documents show a widely sent email to USAID from the GEC’s “Liaison Planner to USAID” stated that GEC wanted to “sustain dialogue and connectivity during these unprecedented times” to help counter “misinformation” surrounding COVID-19.
The documents show that GEC and USAID teamed up to “counter-propaganda” and “disinformation and COVID-19 related products.” This included a risk analysis program demo for monitoring “disinformation” narratives surrounding the 2020 presidential elections in Moldova.
“The partnership between USAID and the Global Engagement Center is bad news for the American people,” Andrew Block, senior counsel for America First Legal said in a public statement.
“Add in the fact that they were coordinating with internet censorship enforcers at NewsGuard and Poynter, and you can start to see just how dangerous this unholy alliance is for free speech and free expression,” Block continued. “Thankfully, the GEC is shuttered, and USAID is being exposed — but lawmakers should take note of this example as they consider legislation to ensure the federal government actually serves American principles and interests.”
In its response to questions about the GEC, a State Department spokesperson told The Daily Signal, “We do not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”
Two days after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, NewsGuard Technologies’ General Manager Matt Skibinski sent an email to Park Advisors’ then-Director Christina Nemr, as well as to federal officials from the State Department, the National Security Agency, and divisions within the Defense Department.
In the email Skibinski demonstrated samples of the new GEC/U.S Cyber Command project called Misinformation Fingerprints, which used artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor “misinformation.”
For context, America First Legal points out that a September House Small Business Committee report into the Global Engagement Center says “There was no firewall in place to ensure that federal resources were not being used to develop and promote technologies that would have domestic impacts.”
America First Legal notes that Nemr is a former Obama administration State Department official. It also notes the House Small Business Committee found that Park Advisors received a GEC award of more than $6 million. From this, the company distributed subawards to several companies, including NewsGuard, the Atlantic Council, and the Global Disinformation Index. These groups created the “Disinfo Cloud,” an unclassified platform used by the U.S. federal government, the European Union, the British government, the Australian government, and the Estonian government “to counter adversarial propaganda and disinformation.”
The documents also show on Feb. 4, 2021, Vonda Wolcott, senior program manager at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, provided the GEC with contact information for Baybars Orsek of the Poynter Institute.
NewsGuard doesn’t censor or suppress any content, Skibinski countered.
“We were founded as a private-sector answer to the secret algorithms of the Silicon Valley digital platforms and to government censorship. We strongly oppose censorship,” Skibinski told The Daily Signal. “Our work instead gives consumers more information rather than restricting their access to information. None of the social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, etc.—that have been accused of censoring claims about topics like COVID-19’s origins, vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or the like have ever used NewsGuard’s data. And neither America First Legal’s email release, nor their piece accusing us of censorship, provide any evidence whatsoever of NewsGuard censoring anything–nor do they even identify any specific content that they accuse us of having censored.”
Similarly, Jennifer Orsi, vice president of publishing and local news initiatives at the Poynter Institute, called it “ridiculous and false” to suggest the organization engaged in censorship.
“The Poynter program funded by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting coached and mentored journalists in foreign countries such as Pakistan, Chile, and Sri Lanka to improve their skills and capacity to produce independent journalism,” Orsi told The Daily Signal.
“Additionally, America First Legal’s claim that fact-checking journalism is a ‘global false flag operation’ is itself a conspiracy theory,” Orsi continued. “Fact-checking organizations affiliated with the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute meet strict nonpartisanship standards through a longstanding verification process. This means no affiliations with political parties or candidates, no policy advocacy, and an unwavering commitment to objectivity and transparency.”
