State Department’s ‘Global Engagement Center’ Accused of Censoring Americans Shuts Its Doors

The State Department’s foreign disinformation center, accused by conservatives of censoring U.S. citizens, shut its doors due to lack of funding this week.

Elon Musk had deemed the Global Engagement Center (GEC), established in 2016, the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation,” and its funding was stripped as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Pentagon’s yearly policy bill.

{snip}

Lawmakers had originally included funding for the GEC in its continuing resolution (CR), or bill to fund the government beyond a Friday deadline. But conservatives balked at that iteration of the funding bill, and it was rewritten without money for the GEC and other funding riders.

The agency had a budget of around $61 million and 120 people on staff.

At a time when adversaries like Iran and Russia sow disinformation throughout the world, Republicans saw little value in the agency’s work, arguing that much of its disinformation analysis is already offered by the private sector.

The GEC, according to reporter Matt Taibbi, “funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious — and idiotic — new form of blacklisting” during the pandemic.

Taibbi wrote last year when exposing the Twitter Files that the GEC “flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’”

{snip}

A 2024 report from the Republican-led House Small Business Committee criticized the GEC for awarding grants to organizations whose work includes tracking domestic as well as foreign misinformation and rating the credibility of U.S.-based publishers, according to the Washington Post.

The lawsuit was brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire and The Federalist, who sued the State Department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other government officials earlier this month for “engaging in a conspiracy to censor, deplatform and demonetize American media outlets disfavored by the federal government.”

The lawsuit stated that the GEC was used as a tool for the defendants to carry out its censorship.

{snip}