Hudson Crozier
The Trump administration announced it is closing an agency that funded and participated in “censorship” of disfavored viewpoints online.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) is shutting down almost a decade after its creation due to “free speech” concerns, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a Wednesday press release. The GEC faced criticism from Republicans in Congress as well as a lawsuit for funding groups that allegedly created “blacklists” for right-leaning media outlets to stave off their profits.
“Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” Rubio said. “This is antithetical to the very [principles] we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Former President Barack Obama first established the GEC via executive order in 2016 supposedly to counter foreign terrorist propaganda. The agency later moved toward funding entities such as the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a Europe-based group that creates “exclusion” lists describing conservative websites as spreaders of false information and pressuring online platforms to avoid doing business with them, according to the Washington Examiner.
The GEC also reportedly helped the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and private groups track social media posts with supposedly false information and report them to platforms to be taken down.
“By 2020, it had grown into this movement of like actually going after individual American voices,” Rubio said in a Wednesday broadcast interview about the GEC.
The Daily Wire and The Federalist also sued the State Department in 2023 for funding the GDI, alleging the government violated the First Amendment and federal law at their expense.
Congress effectively defunded the GEC in December by excluding it from a spending bill after some Republicans opposed its activities and use of public funds, the Washington Examiner reported.
“To the extent we’re spending money now, we are going to spend money on messaging,” Rubio said. “It’s going to be pro-American messaging and it’s going to be incentivizing and protecting free speech, which is threatened all over the world.”
“The best way to counter disinformation is free speech,” Rubio said.
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