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(LifeSiteNews) — The Daily Wire and The Federalist are suing the U.S. Department of State for its role in the censorship of conservative publications through its Global Engagement Center (GEC). The companies aim to “put an end to one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.”
Texas has also joined the lawsuit against the State Department. The Lone Star State treats social media companies as “common carriers” that are not allowed to censor speech.
The GEC, a State Department entity, “funded, promoted, and/or marketed two American censorship enterprises: the Disinformation Index Inc., operating under the name Global Disinformation Index (‘GDI’), and NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. (‘NewsGuard’),” according to the lawsuit. NewsGuard is a supposedly neutral site that checks the accuracy of news outlets, but in reality is heavily biased against conservatives. Microsoft pre-installs the extension into its browser package.
READ: Elon Musk slams leftist rating group NewsGuard as ‘scam’ that ‘should be disbanded immediately’
“These entities generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting and demonetizing the disfavored press and redirecting money and audiences to news organizations that publish favored viewpoints,” the lawsuit states.
They also “reduce Media Plaintiffs’ revenue, and upon information and belief, their visibility on social media, and ranking results from browser searches, thereby reducing their circulation, readership, and reach, and otherwise negatively impacting their operation.”
Both The Daily Wire and The Federalist are on the blacklist. The lawsuit is separate but related to the ongoing Missouri v. Biden case concerning federal officials working with Big Tech to censor voices critical of problems with the 2020 election, the COVID shots, and other hot topics. New Civil Liberties Alliance is representing plaintiffs in both cases.
The lawsuit states:
This lawsuit focuses on a different wing of the government’s Censorship-Industrial Complex: the State Department Defendants’ funding and promotion of censorship technologies and private censorship enterprises that blacklist Media Plaintiffs, negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.
Anti-terrorism law used to silence conservative voices
The GEC, created in 2011, was intended to counteract Al-Qaeda propaganda. However, the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act expanded its power to include countering “propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interest.”
This has been weaponized against conservative voices, according to the lawsuit. This has been done in violation of the plain language of the law, which targeted only “foreign propaganda.”
“While Congress forbade GEC from using funds appropriated or otherwise made available to it to counter Americans’ speech, as detailed throughout this complaint, many of GEC’s activities and initiatives targeted speech spoken in America among Americans, including Media Plaintiffs’ speech and press rights,” the lawsuit states.
The State Department did so through an “alter ego” company it funds called “Park Advisors” or “Disinfo Cloud.” Disinfo Cloud worked closely with Big Tech companies to censor speech, including helping the corporations “identify appropriate counter propaganda and disinformation tools and technologies to suit different groups’ needs.”
“More than 365 tools and technologies were transferred to the Disinfo Cloud repository and funded, promoted, and/or marketed by the State Department Defendants, including two media rating companies—GDI and NewsGuard—which are widely used to suppress Media Plaintiffs’ speech and the distribution of Media Plaintiffs’ reporting, as well as to destroy Media Plaintiffs’ advertising opportunities,” the lawsuit says.
GDI maintains a “Dynamic Exclusion List,” which companies then use to pull ads on these sites. “The sites with the highest level of disinformation risk were the New York Post, Reason Magazine, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Wire, TheBlaze, OAN, The American Conservative, The Federalist, Newsmax, and The American Spectator,” a public document from GDI states.
The “lowest-risk” sites were all liberal outlets, except for the Wall Street Journal, whose news section skews to the left but whose opinion section is center-right. Highly-rated sites included Huffington Post, The New York Times, and National Public Radio (NPR).
NewsGuard similarly ranks The Federalist and The Daily Wire as unreliable. The company says it maintains a “WhiteList” of “legitimate news sites to advertisers, which will cut off revenues to fake news sites.”
The lawsuit provided examples of executives at the companies boasting about how their technology has been used to take revenue away from news outlets they deemed untrustworthy.
It also detailed how the State Department awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to the company through “tech challenges.”
NewsGuard said it would detect COVID “hoaxes” as part of its application for taxpayer dollars. The company declared the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, a hoax. That theory has since been deemed credible.
Plaintiffs said they want to see the censorship regime torn down.
“The government is engaged in an ongoing illegal effort—funded by our taxpayer dollars—to destroy our business and our First Amendment rights because of our politics,” Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway stated. “The days of conservatives sitting back and doing nothing while a corrupt censorship-industrial complex actively bulldozes the First Amendment are over. We will not stop until this entire corrupt edifice has been torn down, brick by brick, and every single person involved has been held accountable.”
“The Biden administration is illegally funding organizations with the stated goal of financially crippling media outlets whose coverage does not walk in lockstep with the government’s ideological agenda,” The Daily Wire stated. “We sued the Biden administration before over its unconstitutional vaccine mandate, and we won. This time, we’re suing for our rights, all news organizations’ rights, and the constitutional guarantee of a free press that all Americans deserve.”
“I am proud to lead the fight to save Americans’ precious constitutional rights from Joe Biden’s tyrannical federal government,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stated. “The State Department’s mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American.”
Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop more online censorship laws