The federal government and the think tanks it funds asked Twitter to censor tens of thousands of users based on bogus analyses that pegged the accounts as pushing “foreign disinformation,” the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” reveals.
On Thursday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that in addition to the fraudulent Hamilton 68 dashboard, at least three other groups pushed faulty “foreign disinformation” models, including the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the Atlantic Council’s Forensic Research Lab, and the now-disband scandal-plagued group, New Knowledge, raising new questions about the breadth of the tangled Censorship Complex web.
The Global Engagement Center
The Global Engagement Center is an interagency center, housed in the State Department, that was tasked in 2016 with leading the federal government’s efforts to counter what it called “disinformation.” While the Global Engagement Center previously made several appearances in the “Twitter Files,” last week’s release of internal Twitter communications exposed a bigger scandal: The Global Engagement Center’s “ecosystem” approach to detecting supposed foreign disinformation was a “laughable” “crock,” according to Twitter’s experts.
To identify supposedly foreign disinformation accounts, the Global Engagement Center looked at hashtags and connections. “If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked,” one Twitter executive scoffed, adding: “Does not exactly resonate as a sound research approach.”
Other emails showed Twitter’s team bemused at the ridiculous rationales the Global Engagement Center offered to support censorship requests. For instance, it equated a high volume of tweets with being a bot, connected involvement in the
