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Posted on 08/25/2026 12:53:55 PM PDT by Red Badger
If you spent any time online over the weekend, you may have seen a bizarre dustup involving researcher Data Republican and the attorney Sarah Rogers.
The short version is that Data Republican was handed some government documents that were supposed to become the basis for new reporting. She saw markings on the material, became worried she was being set up to publish something she legally couldn’t, and the whole thing exploded publicly.
The temperature eventually came down.
And somebody else finally sat down and went through the info.
What was revealed is a fascinating look back at the government’s sprawling “disinformation” apparatus during the 2020 election and, more important, how a State Department operation created to deal with “foreign propaganda” wound up plugged into a system monitoring American political speech.
No big shock there, right? Barry, the Spy in Chief, was behind that.
That office was called the Global Engagement Center, or GEC.
Barack Obama created it in 2016 with his eyes overseas, supposedly. Its original job was to identify and counter propaganda from foreign adversaries and extremist groups trying to influence America and its allies.
Fair enough, but we all know that sort of power never stays contained.
And right on cue, newly surfaced internal State Department records show that by the final days of the 2020 election, at least one GEC employee was working closely with the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, a private coalition involving Stanford researchers and other organizations that monitored election-related speech online.
The employee said they planned to work on it “nearly full time” through Election Day.
The operation included a Slack channel and a ticketing system that fed content into the process, with internal emails later celebrating when Twitter and TikTok took “quick action.”
All of a sudden, an office designed to deal with foreign influence was very interested in what Americans were saying to other Americans during a presidential election.
An X user named Kaiser von Lohengramm went through the documents and laid out the story in a very detailed thread that’s worth reading in full.
The documents confirm that GEC was working with EIP.
Government officials and outside groups would flag material for EIP to look at, and EIP would then pass concerns along to Big Tech, so they could censor all of us.
Just to make it as clear as day: government officials had a direct pipeline into Big Tech, who was monitoring election speech online.
And now, thanks to these docs, we can see what was moving through that pipeline.
Kaiser points out that GEC had wandered very far away from the foreign-facing mission Americans were originally sold.
How did an office created to deal with America’s foreign adversaries wind up this knee-deep in an election-monitoring operation to spy on Americans?
Kaiser von Lohengramm:
The Global Engagement Center was an office created by Executive Order 13721 issued by Obama in 2016. On paper it was meant to counter propaganda aimed at foreign audiences but by 2020 it had abandoned that and in actual practice was aimed at silencing domestic opposition. They lied before Congress on this. They literally had an entire email thread on GEC/Election Integrity Partnership where the GEC worked in conjunction with the “Election Integrity Project.” But what was this “Election Integrity Project?”
One internal email chain shows a State Department employee saying election-related work would occupy nearly all of their time through the election. Busy little bees.
Later, a Stanford researcher invited that government worker into EIP’s Slack channel, and the employee accepted.
EIP brought together researchers and outside organizations to track what it claimed was “election misinformation.”
Kaiser says this arrangement created a handy-dandy little middleman between government and Big Tech.
Instead of Washington dealing directly with platforms over controversial political speech, concerns could travel through outside organizations. That’s how they covered it up.
Kaiser:
EIP was a coalition directed by Alex Stamos, all of which was a well oiled censorship machine. The government couldn’t directly pressure companies to take down political content, that would be an obvious 1A issue. Instead, they laundered their hits, they gave targets to NGOs who then gave the pressure. But what kind of content were they targeting, and who was targeted?
One page from the EIP report ranks “repeat spreaders” of election misinformation. The portion Kaiser posted includes President Trump, Don Jr., Charlie Kirk, Gateway Pundit, and other major conservative accounts.
Every single account visible on that page is on the right.
Another example involved the so-called Sunrise Zoom Calls, where left-wing radicals were talking about plans for what might happen around the election. EIP said the videos circulating online were misleadingly edited.
But the part that matters here is that a Biden State Department employee flagged the material because foreign actors might pick it up and spread it. The issue was then pushed into EIP’s system, the social media companies were alerted, and an internal email said Twitter and TikTok had already taken action.
Apparently, domestic political content could enter the process because somebody feared foreigners might pick it up and spread it later.
And this is where our past reporting comes into play.
Five years ago, Revolver argued that people were looking at the censorship fight too narrowly.
Big Tech was usually treated like one problem, and government censorship was another. We warned that the relationship between private tech power and government power was nowhere near that clean.
And we were right.
Because now we have internal government emails that show the whole plot.
Revolver:
Many American conservative commentators have incorrectly interpreted Big Tech’s exercise of power as an unhealthy usurpation of corporate power over the power of the state. Accordingly, some have called for the government to “reign in” the power of Big Tech. While there is some validity to it, this perspective largely makes the same mistake as the libertarian who assumes a sharp distinction between state power and private corporate power, defending the latter while working to limit the former. The truth of the matter is that at the highest levels, the state and the private sector are intimately intertwined and this is especially so when it comes to the Big Tech companies.
Five years ago we were warning about how easily those lines could blur, and they did.
Now we can look at internal records showing a State Department employee feeding material into an election-monitoring network that interacted with the biggest social media platforms in America.
The GEC eventually closed, but the documents it left behind deserve more attention than an online squabble over how they surfaced.
There’s another twist here that hits close to home. After the original GEC lost its congressional authorization in late 2024, it lived on under a new name. Months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio credited Revolver founder Darren Beattie with leading the effort to shut that successor operation down for good.
In the end, this entire operation was supposed to be about dealing with foreign propaganda, but instead, it was used to censor rightwing American election speech.
That’s one helluva jump.
Kaiser went much deeper into the documents than we have here, including the Sunrise material, the later fight over the Disinformation Governance Board, and what he believes the whole operation tells us about the censorship machinery built at that time.
We’ve given you the overview. You can read the entire thread here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2091947905959460941.html
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No one is going to jail.
The United States is NOT some friggin totalitarian state where we jail people based on early evidence of wrong doing. If you want ‘instant action’ move to a totalitarian hellhole like Cuba or North Korea. In those places evidence can appear in the morning and the perps are dead before dinner.
Seems Ron Klaine was in charge for many years as chief of staff for both fools.
thanx red.
iirc, hussein was also responsible for the Modernization Act of 2012 which allowed the US gummit to use propaganda towards us citizens
WE NEED MORE PRISONS.
I didn’t say that it is…….
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