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GEC Super Post: Everything You Need to Know About the Federal Government’s Global Engagement Center and How It Aims to Control Your Speech


TOPLINE

Here is an extensive deep dive into what the Global Engagement Center (GEC) is, including how it was established, how it’s run, and how it censors and propagandizes Americans. The GEC, first established with an executive order from President Obama, has a budget on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and undoubtedly functions domestically, per its own statements and expenditures.


On February 6 of this year Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Co. CEO and in-limbo “Chief Twit” Elon Musk said in a tweet that “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC.” Musk was responding to several tweet threads from independent reporters like Matt Taibbi and Kanekoa The Great who’ve been helping to expose the GEC—that is, the U.S. federal government’s Global Engagement Center—for its extraordinary censorship and propaganda practices.

Taibbi, for example, noted in a series of tweets from January of this year that “In February, 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center—a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms [sic] of the State Department—went to the media with a report called, ‘Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.'” Taibbi added that “The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’”

In a series of tweets from February of this year Kanekoa noted that the GEC is a part of the governmental facet that belongs to the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was founded in 2020 and is, according to its website, “a non-partisan coalition [empowering] the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, and others to defend our [America’s] elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment.”

In his tweet thread Kanekoa added that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “outsourced censorship to the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP)” and noted that it is comprised of four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a company that consists of “cartographers of the internet age.” (The EIP’s “core conveners” are the former two university organizations.)

Based on his “Twitter Files” findings Taibbi reported that “The GEC… led directly to news stories like the AFP’s headline, ‘Russia-linked disinformation campaign led to coronavirus alarm, US says,’ and a Politico story about how “Russian, Chinese, Iranian Disinformation Narratives Echo One Another.”

Taibbi went on to note that the “the State Department/GEC,” in 2020—during the Trump administrationwanted to publicize a list of 5,500 Twitter accounts that the government organization said would ‘amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation’ about COVID… .” He also noted that Twitter’s former “Head of Trust & Safety” Yoel Roth “saw GEC’s [censorship requests] as an attempt by the GEC to use intel from other agencies to ‘insert themselves’ into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others.”

Taibbi added in his thread that “Facebook, Google, and Twitter executives were united in opposition to GEC’s inclusion, with ostensible reasons including, ‘The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO [information operations] to promote American interests.’”

While Taibbi and Kanekoa’s threads certainly help to bring attention to the GEC’s censorship mission, what they don’t touch on nearly as much is the GEC’s origin story, as well as its apparent congressional mandate to advance “this administration [Biden’s] and Congress’s goal of countering foreign disinformation and propaganda that’s aimed at the United States and its allies and partners.”

As for its origin, the GEC is a rebranded version of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), which was established in 2011 (under Obama) and aimed to coordinate, orient, and inform government-wide foreign communications activities targeted against terrorism and violent extremism.

President Obama established the GEC with an executive order in March of 2016. In the order, Obama (and/or whoever actually wrote the order) says the GEC “shall lead the coordination, integration, and synchronization of Government-wide communications activities directed at foreign audiences abroad in order to counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), al Qa’ida, and other violent extremists abroad, with specific responsibilities as set forth in section 3 of this order.”

Link to EO in the Federal Register

The order goes on to outline numerous responsibilities for the GEC—which is an interagency organization, but housed in the State Department—including “coordinating, integrating, and synchronizing all public communications of the United States Government directed toward foreign audiences abroad in order to counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations and other violent extremists abroad” as well as “developing and promulgating throughout the executive branch, on the basis of rigorous research and modern data analysis, the U.S. strategic counterterrorism narratives, guidance, and associated communications strategies directed toward foreign audiences abroad in order to counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations and other violent extremists abroad[.]”

The order also notes the GEC has been established for “developing, supporting, and sustaining networks of governmental and non-governmental partners, to provide original content and disseminate messaging products to foreign audiences abroad and to create, develop, and sustain effective positive alternative narratives consistent with U.S. policy objectives.” Amongst the organization’s Steering committee, the order mandated it to include “one senior representative designated by the head of each of the following agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury, the Small Business Administration, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Counterterrorism Center of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Broadcast Board of Governors, and the United States Agency for International Development.”

Link to Act

In 2017, with H.R.5681, the Global Engagement Center Authorities Act of 2018, Congress “clarif[ied] certain responsibilities of the Global Engagement Center of the Department of State, and for other purposes.” In the Act Congress notes the GEC’s mission is, in part, to “Identify current and emerging trends in foreign propaganda and disinformation in order to coordinate and shape the development of tactics, techniques, and procedures to expose and refute foreign propaganda and disinformation, and pro-actively support the promotion of credible, fact-based narratives and policies to audiences outside the United States.”

The Act also gives the GEC the ability to “provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions.” Meaning Congress gives the GEC the ability to dole out cash to these organizations at will.

Link to Office of Inspector General Report

Specifically, the Act gives the GEC the capability to distribute grants “To support local entities and linkages among such entities, including independent media entities, that are best positioned to refute foreign propaganda and disinformation in affected communities” and to “analyze and report on tactics, techniques, and procedures of foreign information warfare and other efforts with respect to disinformation and propaganda.”

In practice, the GEC has used an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars or more—in 2020 GEC’s FY budget totaled $74.26 million—to execute on programs such as the now-defunct “Disinfo Cloud,” which “helped users identify relevant tools and technologies that can assist in their mission to counter disinformation and propaganda.” The userbase, a “community… [of] over 2000 users, representing government, private industry, academia, and civil society from across the globe,” apparently worked to do things like organize “international Tech Challenges” in Asia, Africa, and Europe, “convening over 300 diverse stakeholders to raise awareness of and help advance innovative counter-disinformation tech solutions.”

Link to Disinfo Cloud page

The Disinfo Cloud crew’s U.S.-Africa Tech Challenge, for example, “resulted in a collaborative effort to address vaccine hesitancy and mis/disinformation in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).” The grant’s awardees for the challenge did so by implementing “two messaging campaigns that increased positive sentiment surrounding COVID-19 vaccines and drove local conversations on vaccine safety, helping to educate audiences and combat mis/disinformation.”

For its “South African campaign,” the organization notes it “successfully utilized local influencers to reach over 5 million people, helping reduce negative vaccine sentiment from 12% to 9% among the audiences reached. For Disinfo Cloud, GEC members also developed “Harmony Suare,” which was an “online game that help[ed] build resilience against disinformation and propaganda in electoral contexts.”

Aside from providing grants to perpetuate the narrative that the COVID-19 “vaccines” are “safe and effect”—which they are most certainly not, in either category—the GEC also provides millions of dollars to embassies overseas “for locally managed federal assistance awards.” The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report that notes those expenditures, however, does not outline what they are for exactly.

Link to Harmony Square synopsis

The Washington Examiner also reported in February of this year that The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization that aims “to disrupt the business model of disinformation, breaking the perverse incentives that exist to create and disseminate disinformation online,” had also taken money from Disinfo Cloud. (The Examiner notes in its report that the Global Disinformation Index “is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged ‘disinformation… .'”)

In a Congressional Budget Justification report from 2022, it was also reported that the GEC used $2 million to support engagement with domestic audiences, as distinct from foreign audiences, to help combat malign disinformation campaigns.”

Link to Congressional Budget Justification report

Notably, the fact that GEC targets “domestic audiences” not only seems to diverge from its original mission—the GEC “shall lead the coordination, integration, and synchronization of Government-wide communications activities directed at foreign audiences abroad in order to counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations”—but is seemingly only possible because of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which, like the Global Engagement Center Authorities Act of 2018, was also passed under Obama.

Link to the Smith Mundt Modernization Act

For those unfamiliar, the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act served to “amend the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the domestic dissemination of information and material about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences, and for other purporses.” Previous to the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, of course, it was illegal for the U.S. goverment to participate in this kind of domestic dissemination of material meant for foreign audiences.

Thanks to the freedom to produce propaganda domestically from the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, the GEC is apparently allowed to craft a narrative for Americans that paints the U.S. government in the best light possible, and presents foreign countries—particularly China and Russia—as bogeymen.

Link to GEC press briefing

For example, Lea Gabrielle, the Special Envoy and Coordinator of the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. Department of State (i.e. the GEC’s director), frequently pegs China and Russia as spreaders of COVID “disinformation” and “propaganda.”

“Russia is playing a significant role in creating and spreading disinformation and propaganda around many topics,” Gabrielle said in an August 2020 press briefing. “For example, recently, you may have seen in the media that Russia is using proxy sites to disseminate disinformation specifically about COVID. The GEC has found this to be true,” the special envoy and coordinator added.

Gabrielle went on to say in the briefing that “The head of global research [in Russia] is Michel Chossudovsky, and he’s written many articles on COVID-19 containing disinformation.” Gabrielle notes that “One of them that was published back in March, you can just see from the headline, as it states in the report, the headline of this is ‘COVID-19 Coronavirus: A Fake Pandemic? Who’s Behind It? Global Economic, Social and Geopolitical Destabilization.'” She went on to say “from that headline, calling it a fake pandemic, I think we all recognize it’s not a fake pandemic; it’s real. But this article alone was republished or linked by at least 70 different websites and publications.”

Notably, many scientists and industry insiders—including Sasha Latypova, Michael Yeadon, and Poormina Wagh—do indeed believe that COVID-19 was a fake pandemic. In support of that thesis is the work of Canadian physicist Denis Rancourt whose studies have found no correlation between mortality spikes and COVID-19 in 2020, but rather spikes in mortality and so-called “lockdown” measures. The supposed SARS-CoV-2 virus was also never isolated for the PCR test used to diagnose people, and even former NIAID head Anthony Fauci and former CDC Director Robert Redfield pegged the case fatality ratio (CFR) of COVID-19 at .1%, which they noted was “akin to… a severe seasonal influenza… .” The acronym the WHO uses to refer to “pandemics” such as COVID-19 is also PHEIC (“Public Health Emergency of International Concern”), which is literally pronounced “fake.” (Read more about that via the post embedded immediately above.)

Gabrielle went on to further expound on Russian and Chinese propaganda, saying that:

[T]he motivations are the typical motivations that you see from the Russian Federation, which is undermining democratic institutions, undermining the U.S. and the West, looking to spread fear and confusion, and to essentially publish or push out narratives that create division among Western and democratic audiences. So really that’s what Russia typically is using disinformation and propaganda to do. We’ve seen false narratives around COVID also being pushed out by the Chinese Communist Party. We’ve seen the Chinese Communist Party look to try to reshape the global narrative around COVID-19 to try to portray the Chinese Communist Party, and rather, China, as the global leader in the response as opposed to the cause of the pandemic.

Of course, Gabrielle’s claims are shocking and absurd on their face, as nobody has worked harder during the time of COVID to spread fear and confusion more than the U.S. government—Fauci’s flip-flops alone were enough to send Americans (of all political stripes) into a stupor. There is also an ongoing attempt by the U.S. government to divide people based on their COVID “vaccination” status. Not to mention the U.S. supposedly emulated China’s (inefficacious and massively harmful) lockdown policies, which makes the claim that China was not the “global leader” in the pandemic response patently false.

Gabrielle also noted that Russia, China, and even Iran have “larger motivations” for using disinformation in general, and have now “adapted their disinformation narratives to the environment that we are all in around COVID right now.” The current GEC head added “We are monitoring the disinformation narratives around COVID, including the efforts to undermine faith in a vaccine. Notably, nobody has been more untrustworthy regarding COVID “vaccination” information than the U.S. government, including President Biden, the CDC, the FDA, etc. (One only has to review Biden’s claims regarding the COVID injections’ supposed efficacy—in the tweet immediately below—or Brook Jackson’s whistleblower claims, for evidence of that fact.)

In the exchange immediately below with Senator Chris Murphy from March 2020, Gabrielle gives a relatively in-depth (although still superficial) explanation of the GEC’s mission and why it justifies its budget. During the—very friendly exchange replete with softball questions from Murphy—Gabrielle highlights the fact that the GEC has “built very strong relationships with the DOD” in order to monitor “ecosystems where disinformation and propaganda [are] being pushed out across all platforms.”

“We have an NLO [non-labor organization?] from the GEC in Silicon Valley and we’re doing a lot of outreach with tech companies to understand some of the technologies that are being developed to counter propaganda and disinformation,” Gabrielle tells Murphy. The GEC head adds that the organization’s goal is to understand “How adversaries are using the social media landscape to push out false narratives,” and, in response, “sensitize audiences” to foreign propaganda by “getting out in front of the problem rather than reacting to it.”

Gabrielle also highlights the GEC’s analytics and research team as key for mission success. “This is where we can put a lot of resources to make sure that we’re staying up with the latest technology so that we can do those assessments of the information environment and apply those best practices,” Gabrielle says. “Our analytics and research team has around 25 data scientists who are experts in things like ad tech, semantic text analysis, natural language processing, [and] social media and traditional media monitoring.

Prior to COVID, as well as the Biden administration, the State Department, and specifically the GEC, had been allocated $120 million to fight “Russian meddling” in America’s national affairs. In an NPR article from March of 2018 Ahmed Younis, a former principal deputy coordinator and deputy special envoy at the GEC said the organization’s mission, in part, “has to do with messaging—getting the messaging out there, targeting the people who are disseminating terrorist propaganda, targeting the people who are recruiting and being recruited, and trying to off-ramp them into intervention programs that either allow them to decide on a life that does not involve terrorism or brings them to the attention of authorities.” Younis blamed the Trump administration’s “inability to manage the administrative process of moving vast amounts of money from one agency to the other” as part of the reason why the GEC had spent $0 of its $120 million allotment at the time.

In 2018 LaRouchePAC also reported that the Integrity Initiative, a propaganda network linked to Britain’s security services that reportedly aims to “counter ‘disinformation and malign influence’ [by] encouraging media literacy and media freedoms, through friendly journalists and key ‘influencers’ throughout Europe, using social media,” also had its head, Christopher Donnelly, spend “a lot of time” at the GEC during a visit to the U.S. In its article, LaRouchePAC describes Donnelly as “a very well placed British military intelligence officer with an impressive career in NATO.”

In a 2019 Gray Zone article the independent outlet reported that “Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal… [who] has been a staffer at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, boasting of ’20 years of countering disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends.’” Gray Zone, which referred to the Integrity Initiative as part of “a covert UK state military-intelligence psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting ‘Russian disinformation,'” highlighted the fact that the British organization had paid Leventhal more than $76,000 for a contract.

In its article, the Gray Zone also referenced a story from The National published in 2017, which noted that it wasn’t clear at the time “if the Global Engagement Center, with all of its new ‘authority, resources and mandate,’ [would] be used to target American audiences or pay American journalists.” Notably, The National article highlighted the fact that in 2013 Congress “repealed major sections of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which had previously instituted a ban on the State Department and related agencies from ‘propagandizing’ directly to Americans.”

The National article went on to note that “The consistent line from the government is that the Global Engagement Center is targeting foreign audiences (which, of course, is widely assumed), but it won’t say it’s not aiming its efforts at Americans.” The article also noted that “the Global Engagement Center’s ‘guerrilla marketing’ targeting Facebook users against joining ISIL” (targetted at unspecified audiences) was posted in English. The article also reported the GEC had been given $160 million for a “revamp” in 2017.

As for key GEC members (aside from Gabrielle), Musk and Kanekoa have highlighted GEC co-creator Richard Stengel as a critical source of propaganda. Kanekoa, for example, posted a video to Twitter (immediately above) in which Stengel says his colleagues used to joke that his “old job at the State Department” was as “chief propagandist.” Stengel goes on to note in the video—a panel discussion sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations—that he’s “not against propaganda.” He adds that “Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population [and he doesn’t] think it’s that awful.”

“Wow, Stengel is explicitly saying that GEC is deceiving the American public! That’s what ‘propaganda’ means,” Musk said in a tweet response to the Stengel video. “What he forgot to mention is that GEC was used to sway US elections… .”

Link to tweet

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that, according to his Twitter timeline, Stengel is happy to bash Americans on “the right” of the political spectrum, and openly support one party—and, of course, its narratives—over the other. “One good thing about the whole balloon episode [a popular story in the news as of February of this year] is that it taught people on the right that balloon has two Ls in it like folly and two Os like buffoon,” Stengel wrote in a tweet posted February 5, 2023. He also referred to former President Donald Trump as “an illegitimate candidate for 2024,” and, of course, has strongly praised Biden for what he’s done in Ukraine and domestically.

Regarding Musk’s comments on himself and the GEC, Stengel retweeted a thread from Senator Murphy that noted, in part, that “these claims about the Global Engagement Center are MADE UP OUT OF THIN AIR.” (Capitalization Murphy’s.) Murphy also said in his thread retweeted by Stengel that the GEC “does not work inside the United States,” although that is obviously patently false based on the evidence above.

More recently, America First Legal (AFL)—”a team of some of the nation’s best legal, political, and strategic thinkers” led by former Senior Advisor to former President Trump Stephen Miller and aimed at challenging the U.S. government’s “lawlessness” by “turning the legal tables on the radical activist left”—reported that it had obtained documents revealing the Biden Administration “used the National Security Council (NSC) to employ methods and tactics used by the Department of State abroad and imported them to domestic agencies as part of a campaign to censor free speech in the United States.”

“This latest set of documents reveals extensive involvement by White House officials in coordinating a whole-of-government approach to censoring online speech–including using the NSC’s [National Security Councils] classified systems to coordinate inter-agency meetings on how to proactively stop speech by American citizens that the Biden Administration disagreed with before it even occurred,” AFL wrote in an article published on January 26 of this year. The AFL specifically noted that “documents reveal that the Census Bureau began ‘combatting mis/disinformation’ during the 2020 Census” and that the Census Bureau did so by “relying on” the GEC.

AFL noted the emails it had obtained “show a direct line from foreign intelligence tactics being used at the State Department, to the Census Bureau, and… the CDC.” Miller’s organization specifically noted that “In mid-June [of 2021], the NSC put the State Department and the CDC directly on the same email chain.” Although the discussion was redacted, AFL noted that it’s clear “the Executive Office of the President affirmatively coordinated activity between CDC, USAID, and State on ‘Efforts to Counter COVID disinfo.'”

“The National Security Council took the tools and processes used by the State Department to push, and counter, propaganda abroad, and co-opted and used them against Americans to shape the domestic political narrative,” AFL reported in its article, putting a finer point on the collusion to propagandize the American public.

AFL also highlighted deposition testimony from FBI Agent Elvis Chan in which he said that, with regards to the State Department, he wouldn’t “have the same sorts of [First Amendment] concerns that [he] would working at the FBI.” In the video excerpt immediately above Taibbi tells podcaster Joe Rogan that Chan helped to set up a Signal messaging group amongst “all the top… censorship executives at all the big [tech] companies.” Taibbi adds in the interview that, for the group, Chan set up a Word document dubbed “secret phone numbers” that had all the phone numbers of all of these “important executives.”

Taibbi also noted in his tweet thread calling out the GEC for its involvement in censorship at Twitter that Chan brought “awareness” of the “State/GEC, NSA, and CIA” expressing “interest in being allowed in on listen mode only.” Chan also offered up the FBI to its “industry partners” (including Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as a “belly button for the USG.” Meaning the agency would serve as the sole channel (for information going from Twitter to the government) Roth would have with the U.S. federal government.

In general, the GEC also evidently cranks out an unending stream of propaganda—particularly focused on Russian “disinformation”—via reports, videos, statements, articles, and “counter disinformation dispatches.” In the panel discussion moderated by the GEC’s John Spykerman immediately below, for example, we see New York Times Technology reporter Davey Alba, international security expert Pasi Eronen, and founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat Eliot Higgins discuss Russian disinformation and how to counter it.

In the video, the panel discusses methods of combating disinformation in the ultra-vague terms used by the GEC, with Eronen noting, for example, the need to promote “media literacy” amongst social media users. He goes further, however, saying that “sanctioning [of accounts] based on evidence” has been necessary in the European Union before. Eronen also notes there are “opportunities for regulation” when it comes to combating a “virus of the mind.” (Chances are he is not talking about the horrendous Woke Mind Virus, but rather some other form of mental infection.)

Interestingly, as a panel member Alba, a NYT reporter, doesn’t challenge what’s said during the conversation with questions or potential moral quandaries, but rather simply contributes her thoughts on ways to combat so-called disinformation.

Alba—once again, a reporter from the New York Times—tells Spykerman that “to be clear state-sponsored disinformation is global in scope” and is “a product of the algorithmic structure” of social media websites. She notes that conspiracy theory groups “form around shared interests” and she and her colleagues must make “judgments” about what to “debunk” so as to not draw attention to an undesirable topic. The reporter specifically highlights the Plandemic movie featuring Dr. Judy Mikovitz as an example of disinformation. Note that Mikovitz has a BA in Chemistry from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from George Washington University, and worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) studying viruses. Mikovitz is also an American citizen living in America, not a foreigner living in a foreign country.

Alba says she and her colleagues “quickly tried to educate everyone that this [Plandemic] was not something that should go viral again” when the sequel came out.

As for the GEC’s official reports, they’re full of exactly what one would expect: discussions of how Russia ostensibly aims to propagandize the West using, for the majority of its effort, the internet and, in particular, social media platforms and news websites.

Link to GEC report

In its “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” report published in August of 2020, for example, the GEC highlights news website Strategic Culture Foundation as a source of disinformation. According to the GEC’s report, the Strategic Culture Foundation is “an online journal registered in Russia that is directed by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and closely affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The GEC notes one of the site’s “core tacts” is to “publish Western fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists, giving them a broader platform, while trying to obscure the Russian origins of the journal.”

Note that Strategic Culture Foundation only had 218 followers on Twitter before its account’s suspension (it’s unclear if that was done at the behest of the GEC), and a little more than 28,000 followers on Facebook. In September of 2020, Facebook also took down the website’s page from its platform.

For its part, the Strategic Culture Foundation website says that the claims that it is connected with Russian intelligence services are “unsubstantiated.”

The list of other reports on GEC’s website all sound vaguely similar (“The Goals and Tactics of Russia’s Disinformation,” “Ukraine and the Power of ‘We,'” “The Kremlin’s Chemical Weapons Disinformation Campaigns,” etc.) and presumably all tackle the same kind of “disinformation” as described in the Pillars of Russia report. But while it’s easy to imagine how ineffective the GEC is at garnering much attention with its videos (the one with NYT reporter Alba only has around 300 views as of this writing), or its video games (they’re now defunct), the fact that Musk has declared the GEC as “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation” should not be taken lightly. Certainly what Taibbi reported regarding the GEC’s relationship with Twitter is far more alarming than anything the government organization itself touts as a national security concern. And the U.S. government is too broke to afford a propaganda arm anyway.


Feature image: U.S. Depart of State

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