The State Department has officially canceled the Global Engagement Center (GEC) as part of President Donald Trump’s mission to shut down the “censorship industrial complex,” according to a report.
Paul Sperry, a senior investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations, wrote that the State Department officially closed the Global Engagement Center.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in April that the State Department would close the GEC.
“Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, stating that to protect free speech the “censorship industrial complex must be dismantled.”
Rubio contended in the op-ed that then-President Barack Obama transformed the GEC, which was meant to target international terrorism, to cover any and all “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
He wrote at the time:
This pivot was no accident. Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel, touted his efforts to protect “democracy” while redefining it so that “democracy” came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn’t like.
In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, “Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.” That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about, “why America needs a hate speech law.”
The secretary of state said the GEC was an “enthusiastic partner” in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which monitored alleged disinformation during the 2020 election.
“The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump’s tweets, along with his family members and friends of the administration,” Rubio noted.
“With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting ‘disinformation,’” Rubio continued.
Rubio stated that one recipient of American taxpayer dollars was the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which ranked outlets based on the likeliness that they would spread disinformation.
Breitbart News reported that GDI claimed that the top ten outlets at most risk of spreading disinformation included center-right outlets such as the Federalist and the New York Post, while those labeled as the least likely to spread disinformation included HuffPost and ProPublica.
An April poll found that Americans are losing their appetite for censorship of alleged “false” information. Breitbart News reported at the time:
Support for curbing false information had reached its zenith in 2023, with 55 percent of American adults saying that the U.S. government should limit false information, and 65 percent said that tech companies should do the same.
Conversely, only 42 percent of Americans said in 2023 that freedom of information should be protected even if it meant false information could be published, and 32 percent said the same about tech companies protecting free expression online.
“The entire ‘disinformation’ industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans,” Rubio wrote in his op-ed. “Everything it does is the fruit of the poisoned tree: the hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and ‘meddling’ is what caused President Trump’s victory in 2016, rather than a winning political message that only he was offering.”
