America’s Information War Self-Own

How paranoia about censorship undermined US strategy to combat authoritarian propaganda.

Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood in front of the press and declared victory. Not against any foreign adversary, but over the remnants of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a small office within the State Department tasked with tracking foreign propaganda. "Whatever name it goes by," Rubio said, "GEC is dead. It will not return."

In a rambling op-ed in The Federalist, Rubio laid out his reasoning for crushing the GEC. It was a body crafted by “our own governing ruling class,” including the “enemies of speech,” who “had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse”: defending “our democracy” (in scare quotes) by tracking “disinformation.” In Rubio’s telling, the Deep State had hijacked a government office and repurposed it to attack American citizens—namely conservatives—before it was finally put down by a righteous administration.

In reality, Rubio’s act is more accurately viewed as yet another step in a broader campaign to dismantle America’s capacity to detect and respond to foreign influence operations.

Ironically, Rubio can’t even really take credit for killing GEC. The office was effectively defunct as of December, defunded by the Senate, with an assist from Elon Musk. A lengthy propaganda campaign had framed the obscure institution as, per Musk, “the worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.” Despite efforts to save it, GEC lost its financial support, and its remaining employees were reassigned to the new Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Office. Yet even this was not enough for the most conspiratorial corners of the right-wing media ecosystem, who vowed not to rest until every last vestige of this supposed secret censorship agency was erased. And so, Rubio complied.

In just three months, the second Trump administration has dismantled many of the institutions that were launched during the first—many of which emerged as a result of Russia’s well-documented interference in the 2016 election.

The FBI disbanded its Foreign Influence Task Force. The Department of Homeland Security has placed cybersecurity and election integrity teams from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on leave. The most recent front in the dismantling effort has focused on the purse strings: in a related story The Free Press touted the elimination of federal funding for academic and civil society efforts to study and counter foreign influence across multiple agencies. Research grants were being revoked if they had words like “disinformation” in them. (The Free Press was phoning the agencies who funded the “Biden grants” to alert them to ones that were active).

Amid a widening information war, in which influence operations have become table stakes worldwide, the US is choosing to destroy its radar to placate domestic conspiracy theorists.

The Myth of Conservative Censorship

The justification for this rollback rests on a paranoid worldview: that government efforts to counter foreign propaganda, or academic efforts to study it, were actually all part of a covert censorship regime aimed at silencing Americans, especially conservatives. It’s a claim popularized through inaccurate fantasies in the Twitter Files and amplified by partisan media.

Most of the stories weren’t true, but they were useful—to Donald Trump, Jim Jordan, and other election deniers, who insisted that supposed “collusion” between researchers, civil servants, and tech companies was how the 2020 election was stolen. (In an alarming recent escalation, Trump issued a presidential memoranda targeting Chris Krebs, who ran DHS CISA during the 2020 election—under the first Trump administration—accusing Krebs of censorship and saying that he “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.”)

A few short years ago, the idea that we needed an infrastructure to counter foreign propaganda was not remarkable. The GEC began as a counterterrorism messaging initiative under President Barack Obama, tracking ISIS and Al-Qaeda propaganda. After the 2016 election, its mandate expanded to include foreign state actors like Russia and China. This wasn’t a partisan play—Congress passed the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act with support from both sides of the aisle. The US had been caught flat-footed by Russian trolls exploiting social media platforms to deepen domestic divisions. The GEC’s expanded mandate was to shine a light on those tactics, and help allies build resilience.

Like many things within the federal government, GEC was imperfect. It would have benefitted from streamlining and focus. It pursued some types of research, like trying to identify networks of inauthentic accounts, better suited to more quantitative or nongovernmental research institutions, resulting in it occasionally sending tech platforms sloppy lists of suspected foreign trolls that included misidentified real Americans.

The tech platforms responded appropriately: they did not treat the lists as a conclusive signal, and didn’t take action against accounts that they themselves did not independently find to be inauthentic or policy-violating. Nonetheless, that sloppiness undermined confidence in GECs work. The December restructuring of core employees into an office with a specific mandate seemed like a potential opportunity to refocus.

The criticism that the State Department can be clumsy, even naive, is fair. The idea that some cell within it was orchestrating a vast censorship conspiracy, however, is not.

Silencing Speech or Countering Propaganda

The allegation that GEC “censored conservatives” ironically didn’t hinge on its occasional sloppy lists; rather, it was based on a convoluted series of allegations related to flows of money. GEC had made grants to two organizations, Newsguard and GDI (a UK company), for work on foreign disinformation. Those two organizations also, in different lines of business, ranked the accuracy of US domestic media. The GEC grants didn’t fund that work. Nonetheless, critics alleged that GEC funded the “blacklisting” of conservative news outlets. GEC was also accused of having colluded with the Election Integrity Partnership (which I helped lead) to censor conservative speech; in reality they sent approximately 15 tips suggesting the center look at RT and Sputnik propaganda about the election, and the project censored nothing.

Rubio chose to mark GEC’s death not with a formal press conference or briefing, but with a softball interview granted to one of the “censorship complex” narrative’s originators: Mike Benz. For years, Benz was an entertainment lawyer and online anon who posted under the pseudonym “Frame Game,” sometimes espousing white identitarian views. He spent two months as a low-level Trump appointee at State in 2020, exaggerated his résumé into having “run cyber” there, and has spent the years since seemingly funded by dark-money to cosplay as someone with insider knowledge of the Deep State. And now, in the bizarro arc of recent American politics, he interviewed the secretary of state to celebrate the destruction of his own fiction.

Framing, it seems, is all that matters, not facts. The stories are complex; few people, or even journalists, actually go back to examine what the GEC or the Foreign Influence Task Force really did. As the focus turns to defunding, The Free Press chose to breathlessly cover “800 grants” that it prominently characterized as “curbing speech”—another example of storytelling crumbling upon a cursory glance at the actual data.

The grant database was assembled by Andrew Lowenthal, a former Twitter Files research assistant who scraped public records, aggregated specific grants containing disfavored words, and manually scored each entry with between one and five “red flags” based on how much it offended his personal ideological priors. Programs countering Russian disinformation in Eastern Europe, civic resilience efforts in Southeast Asia, even local media capacity building in Africa all made the list. A USAID grant to support information integrity in Georgia (the country) was flagged and mocked with “Color revolution anyone?” A $2 million Armenian journalism fellowship earned four red flags; a $15,500 grant for a panel on Russian war crimes in Ukraine earned three. In this framing, even countering Kremlin propaganda abroad somehow became “curbing speech” at home.

These grants are not signs of a government silencing its citizens, but of a government working—imperfectly, sometimes inefficiently—to counter hostile foreign actors like Russia and China. Yet when your aim is to reframe the banal as nefarious, a decontextualized database becomes perfect fodder for a rage-bait headline. Programs meant to build democratic resilience are quickly recast for deeply distrustful audiences as authoritarian overreach, both at home and abroad.

The Strategic Costs of Governing by Conspiracy

This isn’t just political posturing. It has real costs—even for Trump himself.

In 2024, operatives linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard targeted the Trump campaign in a likely hack-and-leak operation. Russia, China, and Iran continue to run influence operations aimed at dividing the American public, undermining trust in democratic institutions, and eroding support for US allies–particularly Ukraine. And now, both the government agencies that responded to them and grantmaking pipelines that supported academic and civil society efforts are being systematically dismantled. Technology companies have been chilled. In other words: neither the public nor the private sector is equipped to respond. This is strategic incoherence.

What’s happening here is not a principled defense of liberty. It’s the hollowing out of national security capacity in service to conspiracy. A fiction was spun to feed the base—and now we’re governing according to the delusion.

Rubio knows better. He chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). He read the briefings, he saw the data, and he made the right noises—until it stopped being politically convenient. In fact, in 2018, I briefed him and other senators in the SSCI SCIF. At the time, I’d been asked to analyze datasets turned over by the big tech companies, which documented activities of the euphemistically-named Russian Internet Research Agency on their platforms from 2015 to 2017. The Russian propagandists had targeted Rubio’s campaign during the Republican primary—posing as “fellow Americans,” they called him a loser, accused him of supporting open borders, spread rumors that he was closetedly gay, and encouraged voters to support Trump instead. Rubio later publicly confirmed that Russian actors had also attempted to hack his campaign.

But political survival in 2025 requires fealty to the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen not just by Dominion machines and Sharpie markers, but by a grand alliance of NGOs, tech companies, and State Department spooks colluding to censor MAGA. And Marco Rubio has decided to play along.

The people who built the programs and centers that sought to detect foreign interference—flawed as they occasionally were—sought to work in service to the American public. The fact is that digital influence can be weaponized. That authoritarian regimes use propaganda not just to sway opinion abroad, but to fracture democracies from within.

We’re gutting capacity not because it failed, and not for purposes of surgical reform or improvement, but to reward grievance and kowtow to a president’s whims. The consequences won’t come overnight. But they will come.

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Renée DiResta is an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy and author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.”