Marco Rubio Kills State Department Anti-Propaganda Shop, Promises ‘Twitter Files' Sequel
The Global Engagement Center, a State Department unit that called out Russian and Chinese propaganda campaigns and became a MAGA boogeyman, has been shut down. Team Trump is promising that it's just the start of an examination of alleged censorship during the Biden administration—and the first Trump administration, too.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move 'a crucial step toward keeping the president's promise to liberate American speech' in an op-ed for the right-wing site The Federalist. Critics say it's part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to withdraw from a decades-long contest of ideas and information with America's adversaries.
In early February, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the Justice Department task force on covert foreign influence and radically narrowed enforcement of the law that outlawed secretive propaganda for overseas regimes. The Trump administration gutted the parent organization of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which aimed to provide news and demonstrate the value of a free press in regions of the world where both were often in short supply. Together, according to the Washington Post, they reached a weekly audience of 420 million people in 63 languages. 'Most shameful moment at the Department since the purges of the 1950s,' one State Department official, who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the press, tells WIRED.
To Trumpists, the push to publish American-style news around the world was an outdated waste of taxpayer money, and attempts to combat disinformation abroad, even if their origins were benign, were really attempts to silence right-wing Americans. The Global Engagement Center, or GEC, became a particular fixation. 'The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,' Elon Musk posted in 2023. (MIT Technology Review first reported the news of its closure.)
('The allegations of 'censorship' against the GEC are as fictitious as the conspiracy theories spun by various bad-faith actors around international broadcasting and other long-standing institutions of American soft power now under attack,' said the State Department official.)
First established during the war on terror to counter and keep tabs on militant messaging overseas, the GEC expanded over the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations into a $60-million, 120-person shop which also tracked and exposed rival nation-state campaigns to spread propaganda and pollute the information environment. It mapped a multi-billion dollar Chinese influence program that stretched from Pakistan to Latin America. It looked into the social media accounts boosting Germany's far-right AfD party and spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. It revealed a covert Russian effort to undermine public health in Africa. And the Center called out the Kremlin's claims that the 'United States worked with Ukraine to train an army of migratory birds, mosquitos and even bats to carry biological weapons into Russia.'
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