Twitter Files: Another Acronym Government Entity Censoring

Read our summaries of previous Twitter Files here and here.

Have you ever heard of The Global Engagement Center (GEC)? I had a vague knowledge of GEC before today’s WILD thread from

Matt Taibbi

. Here’s a quick summary of what he found:

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

1. TWITTER FILES #17 New Knowledge, the Global Engagement Center, and State-Sponsored Blacklists

In this Twitter thread, Matt Taibbi exposes the Global Engagement Center (GEC) and state-sponsored blacklists that were (are) censoring American Twitter users. The thread starts with an analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) writing to Twitter about 40,000 Twitter accounts suspected of engaging in inauthentic behavior related to Hindu nationalism. However, many of the accounts on the list were ordinary Americans with no connection to India or Indian politics. Twitter agreed and confirmed that most of the accounts were real people. DFRLab is funded by the US government's Global Engagement Center (GEC), which denies using tax money to track Americans, but Americans on DFRLab’s list are unconvinced its focus is “exclusively international.”

Taibbi goes on to describe how the GEC was created in Obama’s last year as an interagency group “within” the State Department, with initial partners including FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.

Its mandate is “to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign... disinformation.” However, GEC funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer a new form of blacklisting that created an alarmist report and sent it to the slower animals in journalism’s herd, creating flawed or flat-out wrong news stories. The root problem is exemplified by a much-circulated 2020 report, “Russian Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda,” which contradicted itself by offering reasoned evidence of a specific outlet being partnered with the Russian Foreign Ministry while also advancing a far lazier idea.

Twitter largely disagreed with GEC’s alert about Russian “disinfo” in South America, which appeared to confuse cause and effect. The Hamilton 68 dashboard creator, J.M. Berger, was on the GEC payroll until June of 2017, just before the dashboard’s launch. GEC and its subcontractors used junk science that often lumped true bad actors in with organic opinion, and the “disinformation studies” has mostly become a con, where non-experts mesmerize reporters with what one former GEC staffer calls “hairball” charts. GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year, and the TwitterFiles expose the need to stop paying to blacklist Americans.

Key bullet points:

• DFRLab, funded by the US government's Global Engagement Center (GEC), has a list of suspected inauthentic Twitter accounts related to Hindu nationalism that contains ordinary Americans with no connection to India.

• GEC was created in Obama’s last year and partners with FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.

• GEC funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer a new form of blacklisting that creates flawed or flat-out wrong news stories.

• The Hamilton 68 dashboard creator, J.M. Berger, was on the GEC payroll until June of 2017, just before the dashboard’s launch.

• GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year, and the TwitterFiles expose the need to stop paying to blacklist Americans.