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Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the Global Engagement Center as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the “censorship-industrial complex.”“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, titled, “Rubio: To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.”Rubio wrote that, in 2016, the Obama administration changed the GEC’s focus on combatting international terrorism cover...

Major AI service providers continue to deploy content moderation algorithms designed to suppress and manipulate viewpoints, actively enforcing censorship under the guise of moderation. From Foreign PsyOps to Domestic Thought Control The censorship and content manipulation we see today did not emerge organically—it was the result of government-directed psychological operations (PsyOps) repurposed for domestic control. What was once used in foreign influence campaigns to destabilize adversarial regimes or control narratives abroad was turned inward—against the American people. The Twitter Files, exposed by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, provided irrefutable evidence that U.S. government agencies used taxpayer dollars to...

According to media reports, President Trump has removed the entire leadership structure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), previously run by Samantha Power.This is not necessarily a domestic issue. Those who walk the deepest political weeds well understand that USAID is the cover agency for the interventionist efforts of the CIA. USAID is the agency silo that coordinates the meddling in foreign elections, organizes the revolutions and political opposition of those deemed out of alignment with global democratic norms, funds the NGOs who do the ground operations, and generally seeks to replace foreign leaders.President Trump has just...

Today, America First Legal (AFL) released documents from litigation against the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), exposing the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s internal “Disinformation Primer.” Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), founded by Mike Benz, analyzed these documents and discovered that: The US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Center on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) created an internal “Disinformation Primer” that revealed the agency’s explicit praise for private sector censorship strategies and proposed additional censorship practices and techniques; USAID’s censorship proposals were aimed at influencing private-sector technology companies, media organizations, education ministries, national governments,...

"They found a cure for gluttony. Now do narcissism." — Peachy Keenan. Poor “Joe Biden” can’t help himself as the sun sets on his ignominious career. He ordered the American flag to fly at half-staff into January 20, inauguration day, to signal grief and distress at Donald Trump’s swearing-in — not realizing, apparently, that Mr. Trump’s first act in office will be to order the flag raised back up, signaling symbolically the end to America’s grief and distress under “Joe Biden.” You might wonder: what other sort of vicious mischief the Party of Chaos has in store in the final...

The State Department laid to rest the alleged "censorship nerve center" of the federal government last week after Congress refused to reauthorize the interagency Global Engagement Center, known for teaching youth to distrust populism and allegedly squelching American small businesses online. While it may have a peaceful afterlife – State plans to "realign" GEC staff with other entities that handle purported "foreign information manipulation and interference activities" – GEC also faces an unquenchable fire and undying worm on multiple fronts. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Monday against State, with nine exhibits, because it...

EXCLUSIVE — The State Department has crafted plans to distribute staffers from a shuttered office accused of censoring conservatives to a new internal “hub” that will coordinate its activities, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner. The Global Engagement Center, the office that Republicans accused of working with groups aiming to demonetize right-leaning media outlets in the United States, shut down in late 2024 upon lawmakers agreeing to no longer fund it. However, in a non-public letter to members of Congress on Dec. 6, the State Department outlined its plans to “realign” more than 50 GEC officials and tens...

Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes Bankrupt COMMENTARY By Gabe KaminskyDecember 30, 2024 Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes BankruptAP The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States. Here’s how. Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years,...

The State Department’s controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC) shut down this week after congressional lawmakers nixed reauthorizing the agency in spending legislation to keep the government open. “The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024,” read a message on the agency’s website. The GEC came under fire from House Republicans after journalist Matt Taibbi uncovered evidence that it pressured US social media platforms early in the COVID-19 pandemic to censor Americans online, purportedly to counter “disinformation,” such as theories that the virus leaked out of a laboratory in China. “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a...

A State Department agency – which has been chided by conservatives for its alleged blacklisting of Americans and news outlets – is set to be refunded in the continuing resolution (CR) bill currently being hammered out among lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The Global Engagement Center has been included in page 139 of the CR. Although it doesn’t specify its budget allocation, a previous Inspector General report shows the agency’s FY 2020 budget totaled $74.26 million, of which $60 million was appropriated by Congress. The provision in the CR can be found under "Foreign Affairs Section 301. Global Engagement Center Extension,"...

The State Department didn’t respond when pressed on whether it’s colluding with Big Tech to censor so-called ‘disinformation.’. he State Department is refusing to say whether it is communicating with Big Tech platforms to censor free speech online leading up to the 2024 election. The agency’s silence on the matter came after The Federalist asked about a new working group launched by the United States and Poland on Monday that seeks to counter Russian “disinformation” about Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Called the “Ukraine Communications Group (UCG),” the body will involve the two aforementioned countries and representatives from NATO states,...

A new “disinformation office” has been quietly established by the Biden administration. This office will have the authority to arrest and prosecute citizens of the United States who publish content online that is deemed to be “false” by so-called fact checkers.According to the announcement made by Director Avril Haines on Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has established a new office to oversee the efforts being made by the intelligence community to combat “disinformation” in the United States.Haines made the announcement during a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC)...

A year after its censorship programs were exposed, the Global Engagement Center still insists the public has no right to know how it's spending taxpayer money. “You can look, but don’t touch!”The State Department is so unhappy a newspaper published details about where it’s been spending your taxes, it’s threatened to only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a “better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.” Essentially, Tony Blinken is threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he’s sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the...

The rise of the administrative state and inverse totalitarianismThe State Department is censoring and limiting the circulation of disfavored press outlets.According to a new lawsuit filed in December on behalf of two media organizations, those being The Daily Wire and The Federalist, as well as the State of Texas and AG Ken Paxton versus the U.S. Department of State (the State Department) through its Global Engagement Center (GEC) and various US government officials, it is alleged that the defendants are actively intervening in the news-media market to both censor and limit the circulation of disfavored press outlets. These illegal activities...

How government tore my reputation apart piece by piece.Fellow Americans, the government will take care of you! They don’t want you to have to worry about information that they don’t approve in your social media accounts. They don’t want you to worry that the US government would directly interfere with your First Amendment rights, and certainly would never meddle in an election or with your medical freedoms. That said, the deep state will gladly “contract those jobs out to creepy left-wing “disinformation”-fighting firms”.A bombshell new report has been published, titled: “WEAPONIZATION OF “DISINFORMATION” PSEUDO-EXPERTS AND BUREAUCRATS: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT...

The new Foreign Malign Influence Center oversees efforts that span U.S. military, law enforcement, intelligence, and diplomatic agencies. WITHIN THE FEDERAL government, offices dedicated to fighting foreign disinformation are springing up like daisies, from the Pentagon’s new Influence and Perception Management Office to at least four organizations inside the Department of Homeland Security alone, as well as ones inside the FBI and State Department. To oversee the growing efforts — which arose in response to concerns about the impact of Russian meddling in the 2016 election but have now expanded — the director of national intelligence has created a new...

The biggest concern is what GEC paid Park Advisors to do: fund and coordinate the censorship of Americans’ speech and our supposedly free press. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center used a cutout corporation headed by a former intelligence officer to fund and promote the blacklisting of conservative media outlets and other censorship endeavors, research by The Federalist reveals. When Elon Musk gave a group of independent journalists access to internal Twitter communications, the resulting “Twitter Files” quickly revealed the existence of a Censorship-Industrial Complex that included an array of federal agencies colluding with social media companies to censor disfavored...

Unmasking the Disinformation Index: A pseudo-nonprofit that “blacklists” conservative news from online advertisers. Guest Post by Bob Bishop The Constitution’s First Amendment allows freedom of expression from government regulations or restrictions; in other words, no censorship. The “fourth estate” term describes the news media that is the watchdog over the government. The amendment extends free speech to the independent media that delivers news and investigative journalism to the general public. Only a free press, based on truth and transparency, can effectively criticize and expose the government’s potential or actual wrongdoings. The public is awakening to social media censorship (Twitter and...

The three-hour hearing showed that corporate-government collusion goes far deeper than the major platforms in Silicon Valley. The Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held its second hearing Thursday with a focus on the “Twitter Files” that exposed corporate-government collusion in Twitter’s censorship regime. But the three-hour hearing showed the public-private partnership goes far deeper than the major platforms operating out of Silicon Valley. Lawmakers heard testimony from independent Substack journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, two of the primary reporters who published the series after Elon Musk took over the platform. The pair shared how the...

Journalist and author Matt Taibbi noted the U.S. government’s role in creating a “new cottage industry” of “disinformation labs” ostensibly combatting fraudulent online propaganda in the interest of national security in his latest Twitter Files report published Thursday. The “Twitter Files #17” thread focuses on the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a subsidiary of the State Department, and its claimed objective 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.” The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab...