Secretary of State Marco Rubio is shuttering the State Department’s online speech censorship office after the Biden administration opted to rebrand the office amid Republican scrutiny last year.
Rubio announced the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, previously known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a unit that originated with a counterterrorism mission but quickly transformed into a tool for online speech suppression of Americans.
“Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions. That ends today,” Rubio said on X. He was responding to a celebratory post from conservative activist Mike Benz, a prominent crusader against social media censorship.
“I am announcing the closure of the @StateDept‘s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, formerly the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year and actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”
The move is part of the State Department’s effort to trim down its workforce, meaning the 50 full-time staff positions at the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office will be eliminated, Benz said.
Rubio expanded on his decision in an op-ed for the Federalist and live remarks with Benz, a former State Department employee. The Federalist was one of several conservative news organizations targeted by the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization funded by the Global Engagement Center that attempted to pressure advertisers into defunding right-wing websites.
Along with the state of Texas and the Daily Wire, the Federalist pursued legal action against the Global Engagement Center for funding the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, a nonpartisan group that ranks the reliability of news outlets and has been accused of favoring left-wing sites.
“We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,” Rubio told Benz. He explained the Global Engagement Center’s mission creep from an office devoted to countering Al-Qaeda’s online messaging to a bureau that went after American citizens for voicing political opinions.
The non-governmental organizations funded by the GEC flagged certain posts from Americans to reduce their reach under the guise of protecting “disinformation,” a left-wing ideological project to define the boundaries of free expression online.
The GEC was part of the Election Integrity Partnership, a group of nonprofits, social media platforms, and government agencies established in 2020 to monitor election-related speech. The EIP functioned as a backdoor tool for government agencies, through closely intertwined nonprofits, to have social media platforms take down certain speech, according to a report from the House Judiciary Committee crafted in 2023.
“American taxpayers, through the State Department, were paying groups to attack Americans and to try to silence the voice of Americans. And there were consequences. These weren’t just a label they put on people, some of these people got de-platformed. They got taken down, they couldn’t communicate. So it was outrageous,” Rubio added.
The State Department renamed the Global Engagement Center in late 2024 after congressional Republicans defunded the office because of its censorship activities. Rubio clarified that the State Department will still have a messaging apparatus, but it will be pro-American messaging and support free speech worldwide.
“The best way to counter disinformation is free speech, is to make sure what’s true has an equal or greater opportunity to communicate as what’s not true. We’ve learned that the heard way,” Rubio elaborated.
He described how free speech is a valuable tool for countering the mainstream media’s routine peddling of disinformation in its coverage of the Trump administration. He also voiced concerns about European nations clamping down on free expression online, to the point where some people have been arrested over internet posts.