Congress, under pressure from President-elect Donald Trump and the DOGE’s Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has shut down the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a censorship office that was created in an Obama-era executive order.
The GEC, housed within the State Department, was supposedly created to thwart disinformation and misinformation, but “violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States,” Gabe Kaminsky wrote for RealClearPolitics on Dec. 30.
The GEC was established in 2016 as part of an executive order on counterterrorism issued by President Barack Obama.
Investigative reporting by Kaminsky for the Washington Examiner and Matt Taibi for Racket News revealed the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic NGOs trying to defund American news outlets the GEC claimed peddled disinformation .
Kaminsky’s reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push “adversarial narratives” such as the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Covid lab leak theory and then pressured advertisers not to do business with the websites.
“The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election,” Kaminsky wrote. “The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a ‘misinformation’ tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by the Federalist, the Daily Wire, and the State of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional ‘censorship scheme’ that suppressed voices on the right.”
Taibbi reported that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the Covid pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023: “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”
The GEC’s employees will likely remain in the Swamp, probably within the State Department, the agency said in a recent court filing.
Kaminsky concluded: “But make no mistake: We will be watching to see where the federal officials accused in court of facilitating ‘one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation’ end up next on the taxpayers’ dime. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
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