by Cindy Harper, Reclaim The Net:
Government-backed censorship tools extended far beyond foreign disinformation, shaping domestic narratives with the help of private media enforcers.
America First Legal (AFL) has unveiled a trove of revealing documents obtained through litigation against the US Department of State’s now-defunct Global Engagement Center (GEC).
These documents expose a sweeping censorship network orchestrated by government agencies under the guise of combating “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The findings implicate not only the GEC but also the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), and various media monitoring organizations in a coordinated effort to control public discourse and suppress speech.
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The GEC was initially established to counteract foreign disinformation, yet recently released documents demonstrate that it became a vehicle for state-sponsored propaganda. AFL’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have uncovered evidence of the GEC’s collaboration with private media firms, leveraging their influence to censor narratives deemed unfavorable. The lawsuit against the GEC further revealed that USAID developed an internal “Disinformation Primer,” endorsing censorship strategies employed by private companies and advocating for their expansion.
Government Coordination in Censorship Efforts
One of the most alarming discoveries in AFL’s findings is the coordinated campaign between the GEC and USAID to police “COVID-19 misinformation.” Internal emails show that the GEC sought to maintain “dialogue and connectivity” with USAID to counter perceived falsehoods about the pandemic. Despite USAID’s mission being humanitarian aid and democratic reform, the agency was deeply engaged in efforts to curb discussions on COVID-19 narratives.
GEC’s communications with various USAID divisions—including TF 2020-COVID-19, Digital Development, and the Conflict Prevention and Stabilization bureaus — demonstrate the scope of this initiative. The documents reveal that USAID and the GEC collaborated on multiple counter-propaganda efforts, including “Disinformation and COVID-19 related products” and the use of risk analysis programs like “KHARON” to monitor election-related narratives abroad.
Partnerships with Private Sector Censorship Enforcers
The documents also expose GEC’s entanglement with private organizations such as NewsGuard and Poynter, two media rating firms engaged in digital censorship. Shortly after the 2020 US Presidential election, NewsGuard’s General Manager, Matt Skibinski, reached out to government officials, offering their services in identifying and combating online “misinformation.”
At the same time, Park Advisors, led by a former Obama-era State Department official, was administering multi-million-dollar public-private initiatives to shape the information landscape. This firm received over $6 million in GEC funding and subsequently funneled money to NewsGuard, the Atlantic Council, and the Global Disinformation Index—an organization known for blacklisting conservative news sites and pressuring advertisers to sever ties with them.
These organizations helped develop the “Disinfo Cloud,” a censorship apparatus used by the US and multiple foreign governments to counter so-called adversarial narratives. The House Small Business Committee found that federal agencies lacked safeguards to prevent these censorship tools from impacting domestic speech, raising concerns about their potential to infringe upon First Amendment rights.
Further collaboration was revealed between GEC and Poynter, an organization overseeing a global network of “fact-checkers.” Internal emails indicate that Poynter worked closely with GEC’s Monitoring and Evaluation division, illustrating the government’s direct involvement in shaping the information landscape under the pretense of impartial verification.
