‘The best way to counter disinformation is free speech,’ says the secretary of state.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on April 16 announced the closure of an office in the State Department that tracked foreign disinformation, saying it had censored Americans.
Rubio, writing in an
op-ed in The Federalist, accused the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, previously known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), and its staff of using taxpayer dollars to enforce censorship, particularly of conservative voices online.
He also addressed the news during an
interview live-streamed on the department’s website, saying, “We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department.”
Originally founded as the Counterterrorism Communication Center in 2007 to root out narratives from Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, it became the GEC in 2016 under the Obama administration with an expanded mission to broaden efforts countering foreign disinformation.
According to its webpage, which has been
archived on the State Department’s website, the center’s mission was “to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to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.”
“We do not target American audiences,” Daniel Kimmage, a center employee,
said during a previous deposition. “The GEC’s concern is with the actions of foreign propaganda actors. The GEC’s concern stops there. It doesn’t extend to the speech of Americans.”
The Epoch Times reported that the
center was set to close in the final days of the Biden administration in December 2024. It was at the center of several legal cases for its involvement in an initiative called the
Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which sought to flag election disinformation on social media.
Rubio said in his op-ed that “GEC was supposed to be dead already” and that his predecessors under the Biden administration changed the center’s name to the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office in the hopes of keeping it alive through the transition with the same employee roster.
He referred to GEC’s work with the EIP and noted that the head of the center, Richard Stengel, in the
introduction of his book “Information Wars,” likened the way President Donald Trump talks to the speech of terrorists or Russian disinformation campaigns.
In his op-ed, Rubio also accused the GEC of working during the COVID-19 pandemic to label any speculation that the virus that causes COVID-19 was an engineered bioweapon or came from research conducted in a lab in Wuhan as being Russian disinformation and foreign propaganda.
Rather than restaff the office, Rubio took a stand against what he called the entire disinformation industry and the idea that the American people needed to be protected from lies online.
At the same time, he said he was confident that his department could remain vigilant against communist China and other nations with increasing authoritarian censorship without this office.
“The best way to counter disinformation is free speech, is to make sure that what’s true has as equal or greater opportunity to communicate as what’s not true,” Rubio said during the interview. “We’ve learned that the hard way.”
