State Department Shutters ‘Misinformation’ Censorship Agency, Salts The Earth

The State Department said on Wednesday it had shuttered the propaganda office that funded efforts to deem media outlets “misinformation” and pressured social media companies to censor content, a major victory for conservative critics who have long pinpointed the agency as key cog of the censorship industry.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that though the Global Engagement Center (GEC) was defunded by Congress last year following scandal, the Biden administration had moved its staff to a similar unit. 

The 2016 authorization of the office had an eight-year sunset, and the Republican-controlled House refused to re-fund the agency in 2024. But before it gave up power, the Biden administration appeared to essentially rebrand the entity, keeping the same staff under a new name: “the Counter-Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub,” or R/FIMI. The State Department said in a court filing that it planned to “realign the Center’s staff and funding to other Department offices.” 

Rubio said all remnants of the operation will be eradicated. All 30 full-time staff that were working for R/FIMI were put on leave, and Congress was notified on Wednesday morning that all full-time staff positions under R/FIMI had been eliminated.

“Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” Rubio said in a statement. “This is antithetical to the very principals we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America. That ends today.” 

“Individuals in America have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions. That is not an America our Founding Fathers would recognize. It is the responsibility of every government official to continuously work to preserve and protect the freedom for Americans to exercise their free speech,” he added

GEC was created in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications. In 2016 it was renamed and tasked to “coordinate U.S. government communications aimed at countering foreign terrorist propaganda, particularly from groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.” 

But after the 2016 election, when Democrats began painting “misinformation” as a national security threat, the GEC turned its attention to American social media platforms, even setting up an office in Silicon Valley to pressure them to remove content, such as “conspiracy theories” like the idea that coronavirus came from a Chinese lab.

Like other State Department programs, GEC was forbidden from operating on Americans.

But it may have circumvented that ban by funding third-party groups to do it for them. GEC ran contests encouraging private companies to get into the business of classifying news as “misinformation,” and paid groups like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard. 

The Global Disinformation Index put American media outlets on a “Dynamic Exclusion List” that was distributed to advertisers and named mainstream publications like the New York Post, Reason Magazine, The Daily Wire, and the Federalist as “risky.”

NewsGuard’s business model is similar. In March 2023, its co-CEO, Gordon Crovitz, praised his company for “empowering governments… to support quality journalism and systemically defund sources of harmful misinformation.” NewsGuard has a deal with the teachers union promoting its media-rating browser extension in schools, and public libraries also use the software. The browser extension causes a “Proceed with Maximum Caution” flag to appear next to search results from flagged outlets.

GEC hosted a website called Disinfo Cloud that boosted products aimed at bankrupt conservative news outlets by convincing advertisers to boycott them on the basis that they are dangerous misinformation that should not be economically supported.

The State Department said the contests “were aimed at countering disinformation and propaganda overseas.” But “Defendants admit that Disinfo Cloud users included some members of academia, the private sector, and tech vendors, including some located within the United States,” it conceded in lawsuit filings.

Elvis Chan, an FBI agent involved in asking Twitter to take down posts including those related to the Hunter Biden laptop, told Congress that he worked regularly with GEC, and that GEC did not seem to be concerned with the First Amendment since it was used to operating in foreign countries.

In December 2023, The Daily Wire and The Federalist sued GEC, arguing that it was 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.”

“State Department disinformation tools were developed…as tools of warfare…in the context of national security” and “foreign relations,” then “misdirected to be used at home against domestic political opponents,” the suit said.

GEC “researched, assessed, funded, investigated, evaluated, tested, marketed, and/or promoted over 365 so-called Countering Propaganda and Disinformation or ‘CPD’ tools and technologies, including tools and technologies that target American speech and the American  press. These tools and technologies include so-called fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” a legal filing alleged. 

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Texas. The State Department sought to have it moved to a Washington, D.C., judge, but the Texas judge refused. 

GEC operated with a secrecy that suggested a guilty conscience. The State Department admitted in the lawsuit to funding the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard through a middleman, Park Capital Investment Group. It refused to provide information about the activities even to Congress, forcing the House Small Business Committee to subpoena it.