In a court order Tuesday, a U.S. District judge rejected the Biden State Department's attempts to dismiss a censorship lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas.
The Daily Wire lawsuit, filed jointly by the New Civil Liberties Alliance with The Federalist and Texas in December of 2023 to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleges that the U.S. State Department is engaging with and promoting censorship technology designed to bankrupt domestic media outlets with disfavored political opinions.
"State Department Defendants' active intervention in the news media market to make disfavored media unprofitable thus had devastating consequences to Media Plaintiffs." Also funded by the State Department is for-profit company called NewsGuard, which said it aimed to "Cut off revenues to fake news sites" by coming up with a whitelist that purported to name every legitimate news site.
The Washington Examiner reported that the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy apparently funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars more to GDI. The National Endowment for Democracy later acknowledged its "Mandate is to work around the world and not in the United States," and thus would no longer fund GDI. The State Department also co-sponsored a "COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation" tech challenge that gave a prize to NewsGuard.
NewsGuard said in a press release that it planned to "Help" the State Department by flagging COVID "Hoaxes." One of the "Hoaxes" flagged by NewsGuard was that COVID might have come from a Chinese lab, a scenario now viewed by U.S. agencies to be likely.
"State Department disinformation tools were developed as tools of warfare in the context of national security" and "Foreign relations," then "Misdirected to be used at home against domestic political opponents," it said.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says he is "Proud to lead the fight to save Americans' precious constitutional rights from Joe Biden's tyrannical federal government." "The State Department's mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American," Paxton said.
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