State Department’s fight against disinformation comes under attack
A Republican-led campaign against researchers who study disinformation online has zeroed in on the most prominent American government agency dedicated to countering propaganda and other information operations from terrorists and hostile nations.
The agency, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, is facing a torrent of accusations in court and in Congress that it has helped the social media giants — including Facebook, YouTube, and X — to censor Americans in violation of the First Amendment.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and two conservative digital news outlets last week became the latest plaintiffs to sue the department and its top officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The lawsuit said the center’s work was “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.”
The center faces a more existential threat in Congress. House Republicans blocked a proposal this month to reauthorize the center, which began in 2011, to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. A small agency, with a regular staff of 125 people, many of them contractors, and a budget of $61 million, the center coordinates efforts across the government to track and expose propaganda and disinformation from Russia, China, and other adversaries. With its mandate set to expire at the end of next year, the center is now operating under a shroud of uncertainty, even though its supporters say there is no evidence to back the charges against it.
If the Republicans hold firm, as a core bloc in the House appear determined to do, the center would disband amid two major regional wars and a wave of elections in 2024, including the US presidential campaign.
James P. Rubin, the center’s coordinator since early this year, disputed the allegations that his organization censored Americans’ comments online. The center’s legal mandate, he said, was to “focus on how foreign adversaries, primarily China and Russia, use information operations and malign interference to manipulate world opinion.”
“What we do not do is examine or analyze the US information space,” he said.
The center’s fate has become enmeshed in a much broader political and legal campaign over free speech and disinformation that has gained enough traction to reach the Supreme Court.
A lawsuit filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana accused numerous government agencies of cajoling or coercing social media platforms into removing content that spread what officials called false or misleading information about the COVID-19 pandemic, the presidential election of 2020, and other issues.
A federal court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in July, temporarily barring government officials from contacting officials with the companies except in matters of law enforcement or national security. An appeals court largely upheld the ruling in September but limited its reach, excluding several agencies from the lower court’s injunction against contacts, the Global Engagement Center among them.
“There is no indication that State Department officials flagged specific content for censorship, suggested policy changes to the platforms, or engaged in any similar actions that would reasonably bring their conduct within the scope of the First Amendment’s prohibitions,” wrote a three-judge panel for the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans.
The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in next spring on the Missouri case, a decision that could have big ramifications for the government and free speech in the internet era. The campaign against researchers who study the spread of disinformation has already had a chilling effect on universities, think tanks, and private companies, which have found themselves smothered by subpoenas and legal costs.
The efforts have been fueled by disclosures of communications between government officials and social media companies. Elon Musk who released a selection of messages after he purchased Twitter, since rebranded as X, called the Global Engagement Center “the worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
“They are a threat to democracy,” wrote Musk, who has restored numerous accounts that Twitter had suspended for violating the platform’s guidelines for disinformation, hate speech, and other content. (Over the weekend, he allowed the return of Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist who spent years falsely claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 was a hoax.)
The Global Engagement Center has faced criticism before — not over censorship, but for having little effect at a time when global propaganda and disinformation has become more pernicious than ever with the rise of social media.
A report by the State Department’s inspector general last year said the center suffered from a sclerotic bureaucracy that limited its ability to manage contractors and failed to create a strategic planning process that could measure its effectiveness. The department accepted the findings and promised to address them, the report said.
Rubin, who was appointed at the end of last year, has sought to bolster the center’s core mission: challenging disinformation from foreign adversaries intent on undermining American democracy and influence around the world.
“We are not in the business of deciding what is true or not true,” Rubin said, adding that the center’s role was to identify “the hidden hand” of foreign propaganda.
Since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January, however, the Global Engagement Center has faced numerous subpoenas from a subcommittee investigating the “weaponization of government,” as well as depositions in lawsuits and requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.