The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with an affiliated organization in the United States pressuring advertisers to boycott conservative media outlets, was a key focus of a Wednesday congressional hearing on alleged censorship and small businesses.
The hearing was held by the Republican-led House Small Business Committee, which issued a subpoena in June to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, first reported by the Washington Examiner, awarding $100,000 to GDI, among other groups. GDI crafts a blacklist of conservative websites that it sends to advertisers with the intent of defunding them, the Washington Examiner reported in February 2023.
One witness during the hearing was Jenin Younes, a lawyer for the nonprofit group New Civil Liberties Alliance that is representing two conservative websites, the Daily Wire and the Federalist, in a lawsuit against the GEC over its funding of GDI and a New York-based company called NewsGuard. A second witness was Benjamin Weingarten, a journalist for the outlet RealClearPolitics, which was blacklisted by GDI.
Federal funding of GDI and NewsGuard “clearly violates the First Amendment,” Younes told lawmakers.
“Companies such as NewsGuard and GDI targeted primarily, if not exclusively, conservative speech, which should strike any fair-minded person as suspect,” Younes said in the hearing. “It’s viewpoint discrimination, and it’s anathema to the First Amendment, which doesn’t tolerate government silencing views of political adversaries.”
“By the way, I’m not a political conservative or Republican,” Younes emphasized Wednesday. “I’m left-leaning, to say the least. I don’t agree with much of the speech that has been the subject of the censorship program. But I recognize that it’s extremely dangerous to put the government in charge of deciding who or what should be heard and who or what should be silenced.”
Weingarten echoed criticisms of GDI and its efforts to defund conservative websites. He also aligned with criticisms of the GEC funding the organization. The GEC’s cash to GDI is a problem because the British group threatens “the viability of media companies that dare to dissent from established orthodoxy,” he testified.
“GDI’s blacklist isn’t public, but its 2022 report on ‘disinformation risk’ among U.S. sources betrays a similar bias,” Weingarten said. “The Censorship Industrial Complex has made a highly competitive business harder and placed us at a competitive disadvantage. Our ad revenue has declined materially, forcing us to devote substantially more time and resources to fundraising.”
RealClearPolitics, among other media outlets, has notably fundraised off revelations from the Washington Examiner‘s “Disinformation Inc.” series, records show.
However, not all witnesses were on the same page regarding the impacts of GDI and NewsGuard. Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University, claimed Republicans have made “false accusations” that prompted “extensive harassment” of self-styled disinformation researchers.
“It is not censorship. It is quite the opposite,” Franks testified. “It is the First Amendment protected right to choose to disassociate from speech with which you disagree.”
It’s a line of thinking that Weingarten pushed back heavily against.
“The government has the bully pulpit and a whole slew of other tools to express its viewpoint,” Weingarten testified. “Funding entities that exist to bankrupt media companies that propagate dissenting viewpoints, to me, is un-American, unconstitutional, and, frankly, just wrong on its face.”
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The hearing, featuring a familiar back-and-forth between lawmakers on the matter of alleged censorship, comes as the House Small Business Committee presses ahead with its GEC investigation.
The GOP-led panel declined this week to say whether there were any updates about document production for its subpoena to the GEC. It is led by Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), who said in the hearing that the U.S. government “has been caught collaborating with private entities to censor narratives they don’t like.”
