Marco Rubio Tells Ben Shapiro Why He Nuked State Department’s Censorship Agency

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Ben Shapiro that the closure of the Global Engagement Center (GEC) put an end to a State Department agency that “was labeling American speech by Americans as foreign interference.”

“It metastasized and metamorphosed into a government-run entity that was targeting political speech in America, labeling it disinformation and silencing it, all paid for by the American taxpayers directly and indirectly,” Rubio said.

Biden’s regime used YOUR tax dollars to censor you. @SecRubio is nuking their propaganda machine—firing the censors, ending the abuse, restoring free speech.

Full breakdown on The Ben Shapiro Show tomorrow. Don’t miss it. pic.twitter.com/5V0KptOZyg

— The Ben Shapiro Show (@BenShapiroShow) April 16, 2025

President Donald Trump closed the agency, which was created to counter terrorists, but eventually shifted its focus to combating domestic “misinformation,” via executive order.

“What we are announcing today is that we are taking the whole thing down,” Rubio said. “We’re going to be in the business of promoting free speech in America and around the world.”

Rubio added that the organization’s record will be investigated for being “used as a weapon against the American people.”

The GEC was created in 2011 under President Barack Obama as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications. It was renamed the GEC in 2016. The organization was tasked with coordinating government communications “aimed at countering foreign terrorist propaganda, particularly from groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.” Its mission later expanded to countering misinformation from adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran.

But after the 2016 election, the agency turned its focus from terrorists to countering “misinformation” on American social media platforms, which was deemed a national security threat. GEC established an office in Silicon Valley to ramp up pressure on social media companies. The agency is accused of funding projects that created blacklists of media companies, especially right-wing media.

“They started it by saying Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and all of these terrible groups are radicalizing people online, we should do something about it,” Rubio said. “Then it metastasized, and they [said], ‘There is foreign interference in our elections, we need to start going after that. Well then, by 2020, it became a big movement to go after voices inside of American politics and begin to label people.”

Although GEC was forbidden from operating on Americans as a State Department program, it is believed that the organization may have circumvented the ban by funding private companies to classify news as “misinformation.” It reportedly paid groups like Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard.

The former labeled outlets, including The Daily Wire, as “risky” and put them on its “Dynamic Exclusion List” that was distributed to advertisers. In response, The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas sued the GEC for working to “render unprofitable, disfavored press outlets by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”

“The issue here is they put labels on people and then that was used to go to social media companies and used to go to outlets to say you have to deplatform these people, you have to cut back on how much views they’re getting,” Rubio said.

The organization fought to censor “conspiracy theories,” including the belief that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab, which has since been echoed by the CIA.

When the GEC hit its eight-year sunset, Republicans refused to refund it, leading to the Biden Administration rebranding it under a new name but with similar staff.