(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The State Department is finally closing its “Global Engagement Center,” which in recent years was revealed to have colluded with corporate media outlets and tech companies to censor dissident political voices.
“It is the responsibility of every government official to continuously work to preserve and protect the freedom for Americans to exercise their free speech,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday, charging that the office worked “to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”
Rubio said that is “antithetical” to the principles that “we should be upholding.”
Rubio’s remarks come some two years after billionaire Elon Musk called the GEC the “worst offender in U.S. government” when it comes to censorship and media manipulation.
Indeed, the GEC morphed over the years from a network designed to combat foreign propaganda, to one pushing for domestic censorship of dissident views—as reported by journalist Matt Taibi in 2023.
1. TWITTER FILES #17
New Knowledge, the Global Engagement Center, and State-Sponsored Blacklists pic.twitter.com/8LuoKY9zzA— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023
According to Taibbi, the GEC funded groups such as the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which in turn compiled blacklists of Twitter accounts that were supposedly tied to foreign disinformation campaigns. The Digital Forensic Research Lab sent those blacklists to Twitter so that the company could deactivate the accounts listed.
The problem was, the lists were extremely inaccurate, Taibbi wrote earlier this month in his latest report on the Twitter Files—the trove of internal company documents that reveal the company’s censorship decisions over the last several years.
For instance, the Digital Forencic Research Lab sent Twitter a list of 40,000 accounts of being “paid employees or possibly volunteers” of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party. “But the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics,” Taibbi said.
Taibbi also pointed out how the GEC blacklists included accounts that weren’t directly linked to foreign governments—but they were listed anyway because they retweeted or shared news from foreign sources.
“As one Twitter exec put it: ‘If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked,’ does not exactly resonate as a sound research approach,’” Taibbi said.
The GEC also reportedly worked with infamous FBI Agent Elvis Chan, who was one of the agents responsible for social media companies censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story leading up to the 2020 election, on the grounds that the story may have been Russian disinformation. Hunter’s laptop has since been confirmed as authentic.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
