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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday his department’s artificial intelligence overhaul includes testing new technology to combat foreign disinformation as part of an ambitious media monitoring and analysis project that spans the globe.
The State Department’s previous work in the field has come under congressional scrutiny following complaints that the federal government played a role in stifling speech.
With the future of the State Department’s disinformation-fighting efforts in jeopardy amid concerns about government censorship, new AI tools may give the department another means to pursue the same goals.
Mr. Blinken told a session with State Department workers in Foggy Bottom on Friday morning that AI tools can help automate routine tasks, summarize and translate research, and make it possible to monitor much more media.
“We can use this technology to actually improve our analysis, to unearth new insights,” Mr. Blinken said. “We’ve seen already, as we’ve been testing things out, using AI as a tool for helping negotiations in multilateral organizations, we’ll talk about that; using it as a way to combat disinformation, one of the poisons in the international system today.”
The scale and scope of the State Department’s new AI-powered media monitoring capability is vast. Mr. Blinken detailed a program for scanning and understanding foreign information sites and sources that he said could be otherwise impossible for the department’s employees to accomplish.
“We have one program that we’re using that is able to basically ingest a million articles every day from around the world — to be able to do that in a couple hundred countries in over a hundred languages — and then immediately translate, synthesize and give you a clear picture of what’s happening in the information space immediately,” he said.
The State Department is also using AI to scour social media to benefit its public diplomacy workforce abroad, according to Mr. Blinken and Matthew Graviss, the department’s data and AI chief.
Mr. Blinken cited “the ability to take social media platforms and sites and immediately take all of that in, translate it as necessary into English and give our [public diplomacy] officers an incredible resource for understanding what’s actually happening in the information space in a given place, on a given issue, at a given time.”
“Super innovative, it’s called Northstar, and was launched a couple of months ago,” Mr. Graviss interjected onstage at the State Department. “And so [I] would encourage everybody to check that out.”
While the workforce experiments with new AI tools to thwart disinformation, the department’s leading anti-disinformation agency, the Global Engagement Center, is under congressional scrutiny. The center was conceived as a clearing house to identify and stop foreign adversaries from spreading false information designed to dupe people.
House Foreign Affairs Committee lawmakers, led by Chairman Michael McCaul, wrote to Mr. Blinken last year with concerns that the center strayed from its mission. The lawmakers cited concerns that the State Department unit had “subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions — particularly by established conservative media and individuals — through grants, partnerships and awards to entities.”
Separately, the House Committee on Small Business said this year it is also investigating the center’s role in potential censorship and the “revenue interference of American small businesses by proxy.”
Mr. Blinken, however, defended the disinformation center at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in May.
“Our Global Engagement Center is critical,” Mr. Blinken said at a committee hearing. “It’s a critical tool for countering the threat of information manipulation by China, by Russia, and others, and we urge you to extend its sunset clause before it goes into effect in the coming months.”
Lawmakers’ evaluation of the federal government’s work on countering false information, however, comes amid troubling news that the U.S. government may have engaged in proactive manipulation in Asia.
According to Reuters, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to sow doubt about vaccines from China during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reuters said in June it identified hundreds of accounts on the social media platform X that matched an anti-vaccine operation aiming at the Philippines.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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