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The State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy will officially dismantle the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference framework today, Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren Beattie shared with The Daily Wire in a Tuesday interview.
The framework, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was created to supposedly counter messaging spread by foreign actors, like violent terrorists abroad.
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The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden State Department in February 2024 over GEC’s relationship with “anti-misinformation” outfits like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), alleging that those groups were focused on suppressing American conservative media.
Beattie’s seat was formerly occupied by the architect of the Global Engagement Center, Richard Stengel, known for his views on moderating the First Amendment. Beattie told The Daily Wire that he finds it satisfying and appropriate that all the tools used in the context of his office are being dismantled within the same office, with a view toward both advancing free speech and centering on free speech once again.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 21: Rick Stengel (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for CARE)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had directed the closure of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office in April, but as of Tuesday, the State Department stopped all frameworks and tools related to the framework used by the Biden administration, a final step in the office’s demise.
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Beattie shared on Tuesday that there were some “loose ends” to tie up after Rubio’s April closure of the former GEC. One such loose end was that the GEC undertook a number of agreements with varying degrees of formality with other countries to “facilitate and provide a framework for cooperation on mutual objectives, including principally combating so-called ‘disinformation.’” That was particularly problematic since the GEC was often directly appealing to tech companies to censor such disinformation — “and famously a lot of the names that they submitted to tech companies weren’t even foreign,” he explained.
In fact, Beattie argued, many times when officials would submit names to Twitter, now known as X, they would encourage censorship of an individual and then be told by Twitter, “Hey, this isn’t some, Chinese group, this isn’t some Russian group. This was Bob from Minnesota. What are you talking about?”
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Beattie also told The Daily Wire that his office is conducting “an extremely laborious, comprehensive, meticulous transparency review.” The results of that review, or at least, the “very first tranche” of it, will come out within the next few weeks.
That review will “reflect the extensive review of hundreds of thousands of emails that will more specifically and systematically document exactly the kinds of nefarious activities that the GEC was involved in in this unfortunate chapter of America’s history,” he shared.
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“I think we’re very well aware of how the first kind of tranche came out with the Twitter files, and I think you’ll find our approach to the release of these materials to be entirely appropriate and very satisfying as well,” he shared.
* Original Article:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-state-department-puts-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-biden-era-censorship-framework