Key government censorship hub officially shuts down
The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a key facilitator of government censorship within the State Department, officially shut down on Thursday.
What is the GEC?
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 created a web of think tanks, academic institutions, tech companies, and intelligence community members to suppress “disfavored” information. Billionaire Elon Musk called it the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation.” Former State Department official Mike Benz said it was “the first government censorship operation within the federal government.”
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 was created with an eight-year mandate scheduled to end on December 26, 2024. It was nearly renewed by Congress this month in the controversial continuing resolution (CR) bill originally proposed by congressional leaders. After public outcry, however, a leaner CR bill that did not include funding for the GEC’s renewal was passed last Saturday. The censorship office therefore expired on Thursday.
The GEC discussed its future in a recent court filing in a lawsuit where the GEC is being sued by the Daily Wire for trying to divert advertisers away from conservative news platforms. The center had partnered with NewsGuard, a government-backed organization that runs a news rating service. NewsGuard overwhelmingly rates conservative media as unreliable, driving away advertising dollars.
“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 dead, but government censorship is not
The GEC has suggested that if denied congressional funding it would not actually cease to exist but would be absorbed by other censorship subagencies, 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.”
Most taxpayers are unaware that the federal government has built an intricate censorship complex consisting of several offices across different departments. The nerve center of the government’s censorship operation is arguably 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 the Senate Armed Services Committee. Until then, the FMIC had not been mentioned publicly since it was quietly established in 2019. In her testimony, Haines said the FMIC doesn’t just deal with foreign-influenced election disinformation, but all disinformation. According to the legislation that created it, the FMIC’s job is to cleanse public opinion of “foreign influences.” It is also the primary organization for analyzing and integrating all government intelligence related to “foreign malign influence,” which means it acts as a central hub for all government censorship offices. These included the GEC, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force created in 2017, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force established in 2018.
The abundance of truth ministries within the federal government 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.
