The Global Engagement Center will be shutting down and that feels like an early Christmas! This is a State Department hired gun that censors speech and funds full-on propaganda. Good riddance!
Where do you know this group? From the Twitter Files. Journalist Matt Taibbi showed that the State Department used the GEC to flag accounts posting about information that they didn’t like. They say that they were only tracking and flagging foreign citizens but that wasn’t true. Many people they targeted were Americans.
Taibbi said that they “funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious – and idiotic – new form of blacklisting.”
Former State Department official Mike Benz tells more about the nefarious workings of the GEC here. Their reports are always heavy on bull-honkey Russia/China misinformation warnings.
Why are they closing? They’re being sued left and right that’s why. The State Department says that it will move the GEC staff and funding to other bureaus “aimed at fighting foreign disinformation.”
