The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) was originally authorized and funded for eight years, and that time has ended. The current Defense funding bill provides no joy or taxpayer dollars to finance its purpose: to identify and censor (or suppress) global terrorism online, which pivoted to silencing center-right political populism beginning in 2016 (meaning you, most likely, if you are reading this).
The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department, was launched in 2016 and was intended to be reauthorized after eight years. But following reports from the Washington Examiner and journalist Matt Taibbi in connection to the “Twitter Files,” House Republicans grew increasingly frustrated with the GEC and its ties to apparent efforts to censor speech.
In part, their discontentment grew from the fact that the Global Disinformation Index, which received $100,000 from the GEC, crafted a blacklist of conservative media outlets and fed it to advertising companies to strip right-leaning websites of revenue.
The GEC is a project that began during Barry Obama’s weaponization of the federal government, but that didn’t find actual purposes until it used ISIS as an excuse to create a censorship regime. Mike Benz explains it all below, and it is worth the journey. The State Department created the GEC in response to online pro-ISIS videos bought and paid for by the Pentagon.
Just when you think you’ve heard it all.
NewsGuard also gets funding for the GEC but it won’t go away, nor will the mission of the GEC. Its staff is being repurposed, probably to other censorship assets in the US government and global community who do the work of partisan spying on US citizens as if they are the terrorists. Budget line items for DOGE to unearth and recommend for defuning as well.
Here’s Mike Benz.
From one of our JRE annotation streams this week, a deeper dive into the State Dept censorship center that just announced it is “substantially likely” to shut down https://t.co/eHlZlpmzlg
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) December 13, 2024
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