Why Was the U.S. Government Suppressing Speech and Press?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns suppression of speech and press by the U.S. government. According to an article by Gabe Kaminsky published in The Daily Signal, the Global Engagement Center (GEC) lost its congressional funding. The office was once housed within the State Department to “thwart disinformation and misinformation.” 

The GEC was founded in 2016 as a “product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism,” but it “violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States,” according to Kaminsky. Here is his explanation of how it happened.

Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation – including RealClear Politics.

My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push adversarial narratives’ and the pressured advertisers to shut them down (think the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis).

The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a “misinformation” tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” that suppressed voices on the right.

Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer, demonstrated that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023, “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.”

In turn, these revelations and others culminated in a high-level pressure campaign in December that resulted in the GEC losing out on a one-year lifeline through a congressional spending package.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy joined President-elect Donald Trump in demanding that House Speaker Mike Johnson – who had initially brokered a controversial deal to allow the GEC to continue to receive more of your tax dollars – remove the pro-GEC provision. Once this powerful trio came out against more GEC funding, the nail was squarely in the coffin. It didn’t help Johnson that conservative lawmakers with clout in Trump World such as Dan Bishop, Trump’s pick for a high-ranking role at the Office of Management and Budget, fervently opposed the bill.

Soon, the bill was dead. And the GEC with it….

While the GEC is no more, the employees who helped lead the office over the years are being reassigned elsewhere in the U.S. government, likely within the State Department, the agency said in a recent court filing.

The GEC’s failure to win reauthorization is a further vindication of our reporting on its seemingly unlawful activities.

But make no mistake: We will be watching to see where the federal officials accused in court of facilitating “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation” end up next on the taxpayers’ dime. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.