State Department’s Global Engagement Center — accused of pushing censorship to combat online ‘disinformation’ — shuts down 

The State Department’s controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC) shut down this week after congressional lawmakers nixed reauthorizing the agency in spending legislation to keep the government open. 

“The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024,” read a message on the agency’s website. 

The GEC came under fire from House Republicans after journalist Matt Taibbi uncovered evidence that it leaked out of a laboratory in China. 

“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,” Taibbi testified to Congress in March 2023, shortly after his “Twitter Files” expose on the GEC.

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The Washington Examiner later purveyors of “disinformation.” 

argued that the GEC went well beyond its stated mission of “proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine US interests using disinformation and propaganda” by attempting to censor Americans. 

“This is an entity that is funded to censor conservatives,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said of the GEC during last week’s spending bill debate. “We should not be doing any of this stuff.” 

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Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 over free speech concerns, has described the GEC as the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”

The GEC, established in 2016, had a budget of about $61 million and 120 people on staff.