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 formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” Taibbi testified to Congress in March 2023, shortly after his “Twitter Files” expose on the GEC.
The Washington Examiner later uncovered a $100,000 grant GEC made to the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) in 2021 and 2022 — a media monitoring nonprofit that would go on to deem 10 outlets, including The Post, as purveyors of “disinformation.”
Several Republican lawmakers have argued that the GEC went well beyond its stated mission of “proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine US interests using disinformation and propaganda” by attempting to censor Americans.
“This is an entity that is funded to censor conservatives,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said of the GEC during last week’s spending bill debate. “We should not be doing any of this stuff.”
Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 over free speech concerns, has described the GEC as the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
The GEC, established in 2016, had a budget of about $61 million and 120 people on staff.
