‘The best way to counter disinformation is free speech,’ says the state secretary.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on April 16 announced the closure of an office in the State Department that tracked foreign disinformation, saying it had censored Americans.
Rubio, writing in an op-ed in The Federalist, accused the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, previously known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), and its staff of using taxpayers’ dollars to enforce censorship, particularly on online conservative voices.
He also addressed the news during an interview live-streamed on the Department’s website, saying, “We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department.”
Originally founded as the Counterterrorism Communication Center in 2007 to root out narratives from Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, it became the GEC in 2016 under the Obama administration with an expanded mission to broaden efforts countering foreign disinformation.
According to its webpage, which has been archived on the State Department’s website, the center’s mission was “to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”
“We do not target American audiences,” Daniel Kimmage, a center employee, said during a previous deposition. “The GEC’s concern is with the actions of foreign propaganda actors. The GEC’s concern stops there. It doesn’t extend to the speech of Americans.”
The Epoch Times reported that the center was set to close in the final days of the Biden administration in December 2024. It was at the center of several legal cases for its involvement in an initiative called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which sought to flag election disinformation on social media.
Rubio said in his op-ed that “GEC was supposed to be dead already,” and that his predecessors under the Biden administration changed the center’s name to the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office in the hopes of it surviving the transition while retaining the same employee roster.
By T.J. Muscaro
