Elon Musk said on Monday that a government organization that many people have never heard of is the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which has been attempting to influence Twitter moderation since February 2020, was recently highlighted by Elon Musk. Journalist Matt Taibbi once referred to GEC’s activities against internet behemoth Twitter during the coronavirus outbreak as a “fledgling analytic/intelligence” arm.
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“They are a threat to our democracy,” Mush wrote in a subsequent tweet. “That is the line they fed the media about me.”
When the GEC increased its vigilance in its twelfth issue of “Twitter Files,” Twitter accounts were scrutinized.
“The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,’” Taibbi wrote. “State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.’ ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.”
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former director of trust and safety, pushed back against GEC’s conclusion that “nearly 250,000” Chinese-linked accounts were spreading misinformation and spreading propaganda about COVID, which was supposedly based on intelligence from the Department of Homeland Security.
The GEC is committed to foiling attempts by foreign state and non-state actors to mislead, misinform, or influence public opinion. The GEC insists on complete transparency in the midst of today’s complicated international scene as a U.S.-led body dedicated to detecting propaganda and misinformation efforts in real-time, a work that is more urgent than ever before.
