Through a lawsuit filed against the U.S. State Department after officials stonewalled legitimate Freedom of Information Act requests, AFL received a trove of more than 300 documents showing names of individuals largely responsible for the censorship of some online content. “EXPOSED — A secret list of journalists pushing propaganda on behalf of the US govt has been revealed as a result of our litigation against the State Dept to uncover the dark truth about the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” AFL wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread revealing some of the documents. The State Department’s GEC says it’s a data-driven body leading interagency efforts to address attempts by foreign adversaries to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda. AFL says the department is a core component of a sprawling, state-directed censorship network. “We obtained more documents from our lawsuit against the State Department about the GEC, exposing the international censorship czars. Meet the 11 ‘journalists’ who decide what you can see online,” AFL wrote on a post featuring a document that listed fact-checkers in multiple countries. “Key Takeaway: The global cabal of ‘fact-checkers’ do not appear to be the benevolent truth-seekers they say. They appear to be highly ideological activists, affiliated through the Poynter network, backed by the same money to say the same thing,” AFL explained. “Their claim of independence is farcical. Independent means free from the influence of others. But as we will see, all fact checkers claim the credential of IFCN, a Poynter-backed organization that gives them their ‘legitimacy’ to influence content moderation online.” The Poynter Institute for Media Studies provides journalism education and houses the International Fact-Checking Network, which, as AFL explains, was funded by the State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Poynter also owns Politifact, a fact-checking site with a left-leaning bias. The individuals named in the report have appeared in other investigations that determined various governments used their power to lean on companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor people on the government’s behalf. The full Twitter thread can be viewed here:Documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL) reveal that a network of individuals hired to operate as independent fact-checkers are actually journalists being paid for political activism.
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