State Department Funded Foreign Think Tank Working To Censor Americans

The U.S. State Department funds and partners with a U.K.-based think tank that collaborates with online platforms to censor perceived mis- and disinformation.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a British nongovernmental organization that styles itself as a research group working in partnership with several online platforms to combat extremism, hate and disinformation. However, the organization frequently classifies typical conservative discourse and journalism as hate and/or disinformation and has received funding from the U.S. government.

The State Department awarded the organization a grant in September 2021 to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in Europe and the U.K. after it won the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. The event, which was held in collaboration with the “U.S. Embassy Paris, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [and] the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),” was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization which reportedly seeks to demonetize conservative news sites.