Matt Taibbi:

The issue wasn’t the size of the award, but rather what that money funded. GDI puts out a product called a “Dynamic Exclusion List” — a blacklist— designed to help firms like Google “eliminate digital advertising as a revenue source” for disfavored outlets. Nearly all GDI’s blacklisted outlets were conservative, while NPR (rated “neutral, fact-based content”) and The Atlantic (a perfect 100/100) topped trust lists.

In efforts to investigate GEC, Kaminsky and I ran into the same problem: almost no other records of GEC contractors were public. An April 2020 audit of GEC by the State Department Inspector General showed a list of 39 agency contractors. As noted here before, 36 were redacted. If GEC was funding one contractor like GDI that impacted domestic news in defiance of State’s explicit legal mandate to keep its eyes overseas, how many other such contractors were there? What mischief was under these black boxes?

…..

For that reason, I raised an eyebrow at the new Committee report, which contains an entry about GEC briefing employees at Zoom. “Zoom staff asked about ‘lists’ that could be shared around ‘malign actors,’” the Committee wrote, “to which the GEC recommended the GDI and the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard”: