I must have skipped one of the installments of the Twitter Files. This is my sixteenth set of notes on the Twitter Files (with one subpart), but Matt Taibbi has now contributed thread number 17 to the series beginning with the tweet below. The thread comes in 50 part that can be accessed here.
Taibbi has separately summarized each of the 17 threads here at his Racket News site. He summarizes the current installment as follows:
A review of the activities of the Global Engagement Center, or GEC, what one source called “an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex.”
Key Revelations: A GEC-funded think tank, the DFRLab, sent Twitter a list of 40,000 names of people suspected of supporting “Hindu nationalism” that somehow had scads of ordinary Americans with handles like @mad_murican and @TrumpitC on the list; GEC sent Twitter a list of 5500 “Chinese accounts” that among other things had three CNN contributors on it (“Not exactly Anderson’s besties, but CNN assets if you will,” commented Twitter’s Patrick Conlon), GEC sent another list of 499 accounts deemed Iranian disinformation, using criteria like: used Signal and Telegram to communicate and used hashtags like #IraniansDebateWithBiden. Other GEC reports deemed various actors part of foreign propaganda “ecosystems” for offenses like following more than one Chinese diplomat, retweeting an Iranian-created “FREE PALESTINE” meme, and for retweeting material that was “anti-Macron in nature.”
Taibbi previewed the thread in two Racket News posts: “Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists” and “The Original Sin of the ‘Anti-Disinformation’ Movement.”
In a New York Post column this morning James Bovard comments:
Journalist Matt Taibbi is back with perhaps the most bizarre installment yet of the Twitter Files.
Americans’ freedom of speech is increasingly endangered by a vast, federally funded Disinformation Industrial Complex.
The feds and their contractors are going on ever-more wild goose chases to suppress any views the Washington establishment disapproves.
Taibbi reveals the “devastating secret” behind the “sprawling complex of disinformation studies ‘labs’ at” top universities: “Most of these ‘experts’ know nothing.”
In 2016, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13721 to establish the “Global Engagement Center” to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.”
GEC is based in the State Department but also partners with the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
What could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
I would like to leave the notes on this thread in Bovard’s capable hands.