Key government censorship center prepares to shut down
The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a key facilitator of government censorship within the State Department, is preparing to shut down its operations.
Under the pretext of “countering foreign disinformation,” the GEC began censoring Americans shortly after Donald Trump took the White House in 2016. Armed with a $60 million budget, the GEC has created a web of think tanks, academic institutions, tech companies, and members of the intelligence community that it uses to suppress “disfavored” information.
Some of the GEC’s projects include working with groups funded by billionaire George Soros and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to track “disinformation spreaders” on social media. GEC officials have frequently met with executives at Twitter, Facebook, and Google to advise them on what to censor and they sent lists of dissenters to social media platforms for suspension or removal. The organization worked with Stanford University to censor scientific findings that didn't support government policy during the COVID-19 pandemic and to suppress challenges to the 2020 election results.
The GEC is currently being sued by the Daily Wire for its efforts to divert advertisers away from conservative news platforms. The center has partnered with NewsGuard, a government-backed organization that runs a news rating service. NewsGuard overwhelmingly rates conservative media as unreliable, driving away advertising dollars.
Last week the GEC filed a “notice of case development” in the lawsuit, saying it is “substantially likely” that the center will soon cease to exist. The GEC’s eight-year mandate is set to expire on December 23rd and requires intervention by Congress to be renewed.
“Congress has not extended the termination of the GEC thus far, and it is Defendants’ understanding that reauthorization is unlikely to occur,” the GEC said in the filing.
GEC is dying, but government censorship is not
The organization also suggested it will live on through other governmental bodies, explaining that 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.”
The GEC is likely to be absorbed by the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), a mysterious ministry of truth that has been operating out of the public eye.
Director of National Intelligence (DCI) Avril Haines first mentioned the FMIC on May 4, 2023, during her testimony before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Although the FMIC was established in 2019, it had not been spoken of publicly until Haines’ hearing.
The intelligence chief noted that the FMIC doesn’t just deal with foreign-influenced election disinformation, but all disinformation.
“Congress put into law that we should establish a Foreign Malign Influence Center in the intelligence community; we have stood that up,” Haines told the committee. “It encompasses our election threat work, essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally.”
Haines was referring to a provision of the law that charges the FMIC with countering foreign influence on “public opinion.”
However, not only is the office responsible for truth in public opinion, it must also “serve as the primary organization in the United States Government for analyzing and integrating all intelligence possessed or acquired by the United States Government pertaining to foreign malign influence.”
This means the FMIC oversees other offices that are “countering disinformation,” such as the GEC.
Other agencies have their own “disinformation” offices. In 2017, the FBI created the Foreign Influence Task Force. The next year, the Department of Homeland Security established the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.
The abundance within the federal government of truth ministries, prompted Inspector General Joseph Cuffari in 2022 to call for a “unified strategy to counter disinformation campaigns.” Even Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who has demanded the censorship of his political opponents, questioned the need for the FMIC.
