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The of the Department of State The foreign disinformation center, accused by conservatives of censoring American citizens, closed its doors for lack of funding this week.
Elon Musk had deemed the Global Engagement Center (GEC), established in 2016, the “worst offender in US government media censorship and manipulation,” and its funding was stripped as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA ), the Pentagon’s annual bill.
“The Global Engagement Center will end by law (at the end of the day) on December 23, 2024,” a State Department spokesman said in a statement. “The State Department has consulted with Congress about next steps.”
Lawmakers had originally included funding for the GEC in their continuous resolution (CR)or bill to fund the government beyond Friday’s deadline. But conservatives opposed that iteration of the funding bill and it was rewritten without money for the GEC and other funding brokers.
The agency had a budget of about $61 million and 120 people on staff.
At a time when adversaries like Iran and Russia sowing disinformation around the world, Republicans saw little value in the agency’s work, arguing that much of its disinformation analysis is already provided by the private sector.
The State Department’s foreign disinformation center, accused by conservatives of censoring American citizens, closed its doors for lack of funding this week. (Graphic from Fox News via Getty Images)
The GEC, according to reporter Matt Taibbi, “funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped create an insidious and idiotic new form of blacklisting” during the pandemic.
Taibbi wrote last year when he expounded Twitter files that the GEC “flagged the accounts as ‘Russian individuals and proxies’ based on criteria such as ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered biological weapon’, blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus in the CIA”. ‘”
“The state also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter had banned the popular US website ZeroHedge, claiming it ‘sparked another flurry of disinformation narratives.'” ZeroHedge had made reports speculating that the virus had a laboratory origin.
The GEC is part of the Department of State, but is also associated with the Federal Bureau of Investigationthe Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Special Operations Command, and the Department of Homeland Security. The GEC also funds the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).
SPENDING BILL TO FUND STATE DEPARTMENT AGENCY ACCUSED OF CENSORSHIP, BLACKLISTING AMERICANS
DFRLab director Graham Brookie previously denied the claim that they use tax dollars to track Americans, saying their GEC grants have “a purely international focus.”
According to the Washington Post, a 2024 report by the Republican-led House Small Business Committee criticized the GEC for awarding grants to organizations whose work includes monitoring domestic and foreign disinformation and rating the credibility of US-based publishers.
Elon Musk had considered the Global Engagement Center (GEC), established in 2016, to be the “worst offender in US government media censorship and manipulation”. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Journalist Matt Taibbi wrote last year, when he exposed the twitter files, that the GEC “flagged the accounts as ‘Russian individuals and proxies’ based on criteria such as ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered biological weapon’, blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute.’ (Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage)
The lawsuit was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxtonthe Daily Wire and The Federalist, which 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 the media Americans disadvantaged by the federal government.”
The suit claimed that the GEC was used as a tool for the defendants to carry out their censorship.
“Congress authorized the creation of the Global Engagement Center specifically to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation,” the Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a news release. “Instead, the agency weaponized that authority to violate the first amendment and to suppress the constitutionally protected speech of Americans.
The complaint describes the State Department project as “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the nation’s history.”
The suit argued that The Daily Wire, The Federalist and other conservative news organizations were branded “untrustworthy” or “risky” by the agency, “starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech , all as a direct result of (the State Department’s) illegal censorship scheme.
Meanwhile, America First Legal, headed by Stephen Miller, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for deputy policy chief, revealed that the GEC had used taxpayer money to create a video game called “Cat Park” to “inoculate young people against misinformation”. “abroad.
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The game “inoculates players … by showing how sensational headlines, memes and manipulated media can be used to advance conspiracy theories and incite real-world violence,” according to a memo obtained by America First Legal .
Mike Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, said the game was “anti-populist” and promoted certain political beliefs rather than protecting Americans from foreign misinformation, according to the Tennessee Star.
