Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of a small arm within the State Department aimed at countering foreign disinformation campaigns, which Republicans increasingly criticized as silencing conservative voices online.
Rubio announced the shuttering of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), accusing it of using taxpayer dollars “to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”
But some lawsuits targeting the GEC for alleged censorship failed to succeed, with a federal appeals court ruling that there was no evidence that its officials coerced or influenced social media platforms to moderate content on their sites.
The GEC’s mandate was to track and root out malign foreign influence campaigns, and over the last few years it published reports on Chinese and Russian efforts to manipulate global opinion.
Still, the agency was also in the crosshairs of tech billionaire Elon Musk, head adviser of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has taken a sledgehammer to parts of the federal government, including in its dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
