Taibbi pointed out the superficiality of the newly established "anti-disinformation" organizations, and criticized the willingness of news media to accept their unsubstantiated claims. “Most of these ‘experts’ know nothing,” he wrote. “Many have skill, if you can call mesmerizing dumb reporters a skill, but in the area of identifying true bad actors, few know more than the average person on the street.” He noted further, “The scary angle on GEC is not so much the agency as the sprawling infrastructure of ‘disinformation labs’ that have grown around it.”23.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. pic.twitter.com/Xkw7fOKZXL — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023
“It’s an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex,” a former intelligence source told Taibbi, as he noted in his thread. “All the shit we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home.” He noted: "GEC could have avoided controversy by focusing on exposing/answering disinformation' with research and a more public approach, as [United States Information Agency] did. Instead, it funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious – and idiotic – new form of blacklisting." The government-funded GEC “littered the media landscape with flawed or flat-out wrong news stories. Exacerbating matters, Americans in both cases paid taxes to become the subject of these manipulative operations,” he wrote. GEC passed some good information to Twitter, but mostly not good info, according to Taibbi's research. He added that the "root problem was exemplified by a much-circulated 2020 report, 'Russian Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda.'" GEC’s report on China was “more entertainment value than anything,” said one analyst, according to Taibbi. “It equates anything pro-China, but also anything against China in Italy, as part of Russia's strategy.” "Twitter staffers had professionalism. They tended to look at least once before declaring a thing foreign disinformation. This made them a tough crowd for GEC," he wrote. "Fortunately, there's an easier mark: the news media." Here's how it worked with GEC: "[C]reate 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." In short, our own government was (and still is) funding a psyop on Americans in the same way our intelligence agencies used to do in foreign countries. Sources include: ThreadReaderApp.com Brietbart.com46. Reauthorization for GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year. Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023
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