GEC shutdown strikes a blow to government censorship

Congress appears to have struck a blow against a key cog in the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Will it foreshadow a concerted effort to deprive that complex of federal coordination and funding under GOP trifecta control?

The blow to the fed-led censorship regime was revealed in a December 6 court filing from the State Department indicating its Global Engagement Center had informed Congress of its plan to shutter and “realign the Center’s staff and funding to other Department offices and bureaus for foreign information manipulation and interference activities.”

The filing came in a case the conservative publications the Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the state of Texas had brought against State alleging that despite claims of its focus on foreign foes, the GEC was also targeting disfavored domestic speech – violating our First Amendment.

As I testified to before the House Small Business Committee back in June, one way in which the GEC did so was through providing grants to and supporting the likes of NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.

These entities aim to purge purported misinformation and disinformation by destroying the business models of outlets who produce content they deem illegitimate. They do so by creating de facto blacklists for brands to provide ad agencies and ad-tech partners for use in determining where not to advertise – ostensibly providing “brand safety” by preventing their ads from surfacing on toxic outlets. Targeted outlets are therefore deprived of critical ad revenue.

Invariably, conservative and independent media outlets end up smeared and blacklisted as mis- and dis-information purveyors thanks to the biases of the media “risk raters.”

Now the GEC’s stated mission is to counter “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”

So, as I testified, by funding entities like these, this foreign-facing agency was perversely aiming to put American media companies out of business.

GEC stymied Congress in its oversight efforts, forcing committees to issue subpoenas compelling it for information about its censorship-by-proxy work.

The House Small Business Committee would later produce a report concluding that the GEC not only “funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech,” but also funded “develop[ed], then promot[ed] tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.”

The GEC was also an “external stakeholder” in the federal government-coordinated and effectively -originated Election Integrity Partnership. The EIP, representing a sort of outsourced, putatively non-governmental surveillance and censorship organization, scoured hundreds of millions of social media posts during the 2020 election for content disfavored by the government about election processes and outcomes, and collected it from its governmental and non-governmental partners to flag the offending speech for social platforms to remove.

It existed to skirt First Amendment concerns by working with the government but not being housed in the government.

The GEC partnered with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, one of the four partners comprising the EIP.

And it even contributed some of the de facto censorship requests ultimately conveyed to the social media companies via the EIP.

The State Department would later apparently go out of its way to smear those who criticized the GEC’s efforts, including casting Senator-Elect Jim Banks as a Russian stooge.

So some congressional Republicans sought to kill the interagency entity.

The State Department mounted a PR offensive, supported by the political establishment, to defend it.

With the interagency body’s authorization set to terminate on December 23, it was not clear if Congress would extend its life.

But subsequent to the court filing, the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky, who had revealed much of the GEC’s censorship work, reported that it would not be extended in the upcoming NDAA – the annual defense bill under which it was initially authorized.

A State Department spokesperson told me that it was “disappointed” but that “the Department remains hopeful that Congress extends this important mandate through other means before the December 24th termination date.”

The potential death of the GEC – assuming it doesn’t just go underground and decentralize – may presage broader GOP efforts to dismantle the censorship regime in coordination with the Trump administration.

The president-elect released a plan two years ago known as his “Free Speech Policy Initiative.”

Under that initiative, Trump said he would, among other things: 

“ban federal agencies…from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens” 

“ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’.” 

Work to “identify[] and fir[e] every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship—directly or indirectly”

Have the DOJ investigate censorship regime participants for possible violations of myriad laws

Work with Congress to cut funding to third-party censorship regime partners, including NGOs and universities, and create criminal penalties for those who collude with them

And pass a digital bill of rights including a provision ensuring digital due process 

“The fight for Free Speech is a matter of victory or death for America—and for the survival of Western Civilization itself,” the president said, in defending these efforts.

Hopefully the seeming victory over GEC is just the start.