NEW: Government’s ‘Censorship Center’ Is Officially Shut Down

A subagency within the U.S. State Department accused of censoring Americans online will be taken offline this week after being starved of funding by Congress.

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), whose stated mission is to analyze foreign disinformation, “will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024,” a spokesperson told Fox News in a statement. “The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps.” The closure comes shortly after Elon Musk cited the GEC, established in 2016, as the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation” and cheered its stripped funding as part of an annual renewal of the Pentagon’s budget.

YOURS FREE: Claim Your ‘Trump Victory’ Coin NOW!

Conservatives revolted against the GEC during last week’s fight over preventing a government shutdown. Originally funded as part of a bipartisan deal struck by U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the GEC’s $61 million annual budget was zeroed out in a bargain to garner more Republican support for the measure. It remains unclear what will happen to the department’s 120 staff members.

During congressional debate, Republicans argued that the GEC’s efforts to untangle disinformation sown by Iran, Russia, and other foreign adversaries were largely unnecessary and already adequately performed by the private sector. Matt Taibbi, the journalist best known for exposing the Twitter Files, wrote online that the GEC “funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious — and idiotic — new form of blacklisting” during the pandemic. During his weeks-long release of documents provided by Elon Musk after his takeover of Twitter, Taibbi uncovered 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.’”

After conservative news website ZeroHedge produced a report suggesting that the Covid-19 virus may have originated in a Chinese lab, the GEC flagged the site’s social media accounts as disinformation. “State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. website ZeroHedge, claiming that it ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives,'” Taibbi wrote.

The GEC regularly partners with other federal agencies as part of its work, according to Fox. Those include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Special Operations Command and the Department of Homeland Security. The GEC also funds the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). Some of these agencies were involved in a 2021 campaign to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to silence conservative dissenters who argued for alternative homeopathic Covid-19 therapies like ivermectin or furthered the lab leak narrative. In 2023 a federal judge admonished the Biden administration for trampling First Amendment protections as part of an anti-disinformation campaign.

A 2024 report by the Republican-led House Small Business Committee found that the GEC awarded grant funding to media monitors who tracked information produced by domestic as well as international organizations. Graham Brookie, director of the DFRLab, previously denied allegations of domestic monitoring and said his subagency has “an exclusively international focus.”

Earlier this month a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist accused the State Department and Secretary Anthony Blinken of “engaging in a conspiracy to censor, deplatform and demonetize American media outlets disfavored by the federal government.” The suit singles out the GEC as an arm used by the State Department to silence online dissenters. ​​”Congress authorized the creation of the Global Engagement Center expressly to counter foreign propaganda and misinformation,” the Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a press release. “Instead, the agency weaponized this authority to violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech.”

(FREE GUIDE: Trump’s Secret New “IRS Loophole” Has Democrats Panicking)