Disinformation Disengagement

The State Department is getting rid of its disinformation department:

The move comes amid a lawsuit from Texas AG Ken Paxton and several conservative media outlets listed a GEC-funded "dynamic exclusion list" of websites it doesn't like, which it would then distribute to ad tech companies - such as Microsoft's Xandr - in order to try and "defund and downrank these worst offenders," and deprive said sites of ad revenue. As Headline News' Ken Silva notes further; it’s unclear how the GEC’s closure will affect the lawsuit. Monday’s court filing said lawyers for all parties are still discussing the implications. According to revelations from the “Twitter Files”—a trove of internal records about the censorship decision made within the social media company—the GEC funded groups such as the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which in turn compiled blacklists of Twitter accounts that were supposedly tied to foreign disinformation campaigns. The Digital Forensic Research Lab sent those blacklists to Twitter so that the company could deactivate the accounts listed.

Looks like they'll have to censor people the old-fashioned way...