“The press has become the propaganda arm of the state, and that is a dangerous development.” – Murray Rothbard
What happens when the media becomes an arm of the government? Well, if you saw the latest iteration of the Twitter Files, it will give you an idea.
The activist media has been slipping further and further into becoming nothing more than an incubator and disseminator of progressive propaganda. The rise of former President Donald Trump sped up the process, but now it appears the evolution has been complete.
Journalist Matt Taibbi recently posted another thread detailing how the federal government, through the State Department-sponsored Global Engagement Center (GEC), tried to pressure Twitter to target certain accounts that were deemed to be part of foreign disinformation campaigns. It also revealed that members of the activist media were more than willing to partner with the government toward this end.
In one of the tweets on the thread, Taibbi highlighted how the GEC, provided funding to a “secret list of subcontractors,” who were companies that supposedly specialize in rooting out disinformation. In reality, these are bad actors with a political motive to censor conservative and libertarian views on Big Tech platforms.
The Global Engagement Center is a government operation established in 2016 under the State Department. Its supposed mission is to counter propaganda and disinformation coming from foreign governments – especially on the internet. Its primary aim is pushing back against propaganda campaigns launched by Iran, China, and Russia. But in reality, the organization has used this mission as a cover for targeting American citizens who express opinions that are right of center.
In one instance, GEC asked Twitter to look at 499 accounts as “foreign” disinformation. Their reason? These accounts used the Signal app to communicate and posted tweets with the hashtag #IraniansDebateWithBiden.
That’s it.
The agency also gave Twitter 5500 names, telling the company that they were supposedly Chinese accounts that were participating in “state-backed coordinated manipulation.” “It takes about negative ten seconds to find non-Chinese figures,” according to Taibbi.
While Twitter’s executives and staffers were found to have been engaged in shady business in other instances, it appears they wanted to do the right thing in this situation. They were not as quick to label certain accounts or tweets as foreign disinformation as the GEC would have liked.
In several cases, emails between employees cast doubt on what the GEC was claiming. In some, they expressed annoyance and frustration at the agency for labeling accounts as propaganda that were actually regular people – and Americans.
So the GEC had to adopt a different strategy – using the press to sensationalize the issue and pressure Twitter to come up with some foreign disinformation accounts. Taibbi tweeted:
GEC’s game: create an alarmist report, send it to the slower animals in journalism’s herd, and wait as reporters bang on Twitter’s door, demanding to know why this or that “ecosystem” isn’t obliterated.
Twitter emails ooze frustration at such queries. UGGG! reads one.
Taibbi alleges that GEC was trying to pump up the numbers so they could get more taxpayer money to fund their fallacious operations.
Several media outlets participated in the ruse, including CNN, Politico, the New York Times, and other outlets that published reports making it appear that Twitter and other social media platforms were awash with Iranian, Russian, and Chinese propaganda. The truth was that this was not happening nearly to the extent that the GEC wanted people to believe. In most of these cases, the agency was referring to accounts run by Americans – not foreign bad actors.
Other iterations of the Twitter Files show that the GEC, the FBI, and a slew of other intelligence and law enforcement agencies were using their power to pressure the company to censor accounts expressing right-leaning views on the platform. It was a way for them to get around that pesky First Amendment that prohibits the state from enacting laws that would allow them to shut down people they don’t like.
But the fact that the press is all-in on this front is troubling. It is yet another threat to liberty. If the once-vaunted Fourth Estate is unwilling to speak to power, and is helping to advance an increasingly statist agenda, how can regular folks be free? Indeed, they already use their positions to propagandize the American public into believing that only progressive ideas are acceptable and true. When we have a media industrial complex that is more focused on influencing the public than informing them, it is not hard to see that our liberties are in peril.