SUMMARY A British media agency is at the center of a diplomatic row after allegations of election interference from the Slovakian government, under the pretext of “countering disinformation.” The agency, Zinc Network, has received over $12 million from the UK Foreign Office and over $13.7 million from USAID, the U.S. Department of State, and the…
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SUMMARY A new British censorship law threatens American liberties. The Online Safety Act went into force in the UK on July 25th. The Act requires tech companies to clamp down on hate speech, dis- and misinformation, and “racially or religiously aggravated” offenses. Under its provisions, American employees of non-compliant tech companies could face criminal charges…
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A growing theme across the western world has been the weaponization of the judiciary to crush populist uprisings. Recent cases include the five-year election ban against Marine Le Pen in France, and the overturning of the first-round victory of a Romanian presidential candidate on grounds of “Russian disinformation.” Speaking at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit in…
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SUMMARY Under the previous administration, DHS spent $7 million, funneled through FEMA, to push media literacy lessons into schools. Ideologically biased, pro-censorship organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center and NewsGuard have led the way in building media literacy curricula. Numerous states including California, Rhode Island, Texas and Florida have passed new laws to ensure…
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SUMMARY Founded in the UK, Bellingcat is an “open source investigations” organization that received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED is an international NGO created by the U.S. government in the 1980s to perform influence operations previously carried out by the CIA. Bellingcat has been a major supporter of efforts to censor…
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SUMMARY Housed at DHS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s ostensible purpose is to help American communities respond to major disasters. FFO research has discovered that in the last 5 years, FEMA diverted to a new role: censorship and political indoctrination, by disbursing funds to Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, a DHS “counter-extremism” program that…
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On August 15, 2024 Microsoft published a lesson plan for teachers on “Information literacy fundamentals” as part of its Search Coach program, which involved NewsGuard as a partner. On this particular lesson plan, Microsoft worked with the Digital Inquiry Group, a NGO whose other partners include the Council on Foreign Relations, the Library of Congress,…
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SUMMARY Publicis Groupe is one of the world’s largest ad agencies, handling advertising and PR for a wide range of corporate clients including major pharmaceutical companies. Publicis subsidiaries have received over $500 million from lucrative U.S. government contracts, including the CDC’s national tobacco awareness campaign. In 2018, Publicis Groupe led the seed round for NewsGuard,…
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SUMMARY The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded a $2.6 million contract for “dis-, mis, and mal-information analysis” to Guidehouse Inc, a subsidiary of Bain Capital, in September 2024. FEMA is a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), home of the now-terminated “Disinformation Governance Board” and incubator of the Election Integrity Partnership, which…
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SUMMARY White House publications from 2022 shows that under the previous administration, the Federal government attempted to coordinate the global “counter-disinformation” industry, in an effort that spanned private and public sectors and traveled across borders. These efforts materialized in a White House-led interagency working group on “Information Integrity Research and Development,” overseen by the White…
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