State Department Will Shutter Propaganda Agency Tied To Domestic ‘Disinformation’ Censorship

A State Department apparatus that was created to counter violent terrorists abroad, but instead allegedly worked to suppress Americans’ speech, is “substantially likely” to disband on December 23, the department said in a court filing.

In February, The Daily Wire sued the State Department along with The Federalist and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over the Global Engagement Center’s relationship with anti-“misinformation” outfits like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The suit alleges that those outfits were focused on suppressing American conservative media, and the Global Engagement Center’s support of these groups violated the First Amendment.

On Monday, the State Department filed a “notice of case development” to “inform the Court of an upcoming development that is substantially likely to occur on December 23, 2024—termination of the Global Engagement Center.”

The Center was created in 2016 to create propaganda “directed at foreign audiences abroad in order to counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations and other violent extremists abroad.” But after the controversy around Russia in the 2016 election, it became concerned with targeting “disinformation” on social media platforms. That was evident in the Twitter Files—internal communications about the government’s efforts to pressure the social media platform that were released after Elon Musk bought the company.

The department said the Obama-era law creating the Global Engagement Center had a sunset date of eight years from its creation, and that “Congress has not extended the termination of the GEC thus far, and it is Defendants’ understanding that reauthorization is unlikely to occur.” It said the State Department has sent Congress a plan to “realign the Center’s staff and funding to other Department offices and bureaus for foreign information manipulation and interference activities in the event that the termination is not extended.”

“Defendants are conferring with Plaintiffs about the implications of these developments for this litigation,” it said.

Neither the State Department nor the Global Engagement Center are allowed to operate on Americans. But a Global Engagement Center platform called Disinfo Cloud promoted products designed to suppress so-called disinformation, and the center even opened up an office in Silicon Valley to allegedly gain influence over American tech firms that control what Americans hear about.

The State Department admitted in the lawsuit to funding the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard through a middleman, Park Capital Investment Group. The Global Engagement Center ran a “Disinformation Cloud” that retweeted social media posts from GDI and NewsGuard and advertised that “NewsGuard launched a new tool, Responsible Advertising for News Segments (RANS), to help advertising companies avoid websites known to host or produce mis/disinformation.”

The Global Engagement Center refused to provide information about the activities even to Congress, forcing the House Small Business Committee to subpoena it.

NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index were paid after Disinfo Cloud ran contests for companies developing technology to identify “misinformation.” 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.

NewsGuard has a partnership with the teachers union and aims to train American schoolchildren to only trust certain news sources.  The Global Disinformation Index put American media outlets on a “Dynamic Exclusion List” that was distributed to advertisers. The group named mainstream publications like the New York Post, Reason Magazine, The Daily Wire, and the Federalist as “risky.”

“Defendants deny the allegation that GDI and NewsGuard are ‘government-funded and government-promoted censorship enterprises,’ and that Defendants have an ‘unlawful censorship scheme,'” the State Department’s lawyers wrote.

The Twitter Files revealed that an FBI agent, Elvis Chan, repeatedly pressed Twitter to take down posts that it thought violated Twitter’s “terms of service,” despite that not being a government concern. Chan was deposed by Congress, and even he was bewildered by the activities of the Global Engagement Center.

Chan said he spoke regularly with Sam Stewart of the Global Engagement Center, and that the center would present software from vendors that social media companies could use. But Chan had concern that “The State Department is primarily a foreign-focus agency… they do not have the same type of legal training that I do specifically about First Amendment protections.”

The Daily Wire’s lawsuit was filed in federal court in Texas. The State Department tried to have it moved to a Washington, D.C., jury, but the judge denied the motion.