Agency overview | |
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Formed | 2016 |
Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
Agency executive |
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Parent department | U.S. Department of State |
Parent agency | Bureau of Global Public Affairs |
Website | www |
The Global Engagement Center (GEC) is an agency within the Bureau of Global Public Affairs at the United States Department of State. Established in 2016, its mission is to lead U.S. government efforts to "recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations" around the world. [1] [2] [3]
Executive Order 13584 of 2011 established the State Department's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) to support "agencies in Government-wide public communications activities targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” [4] Five years later on March 14, 2016, Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13721 [5] which renamed CSCC as the Global Engagement Center while retaining its counterterrorism mission. [6] [7]
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 expanded GEC's mission by giving it the authority to address other foreign propaganda and disinformation operations, [8] following some Members of Congress' call for a stronger response to Russian propaganda. [9] [10] The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further expanded GEC's scope of work, including endowing it with a mandate, as reflected in its current mission statement. [11]
In September 2022, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) activated the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC). [12] [13] [14] In May 2023, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the FMIC would support GEC and other entities within the U.S. government to help them understand "the plans and intentions of the key actors in this space: China, Russia, Iran, etc." [12]
Michael D. Lumpkin led GEC from January 2016 to January 2017. [15] [16] According to a 2018 report prepared for the French government, the GEC was predominantly staffed by Pentagon employees. [17] Lea Gabrielle served as GEC director from February 11, 2019, to February 19, 2021. [18]
In December 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the appointment of James P. Rubin as GEC Special Envoy and Coordinator, reporting to the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. [19]
GEC's core work is divided into five interconnected areas, as summarized below:
In March 2020, then-GEC coordinator Lea Gabrielle testified [21] at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing titled "The Global Engagement Center: Leading the United States Government's Fight Against Global Disinformation Threat." [22] In October 2023, GEC Principal Deputy Coordinator Daniel Kimmage testified at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing titled "The Global Engagement Center: Helping or Hurting U.S. Foreign Policy." [23]
GEC also issues grants to support research identifying foreign disinformation campaigns. [24] It offered graduate students of Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs multiple opportunities to collaborate, including on a study examining "Russian active measures on Twitter targeting American audiences with content regarding the Syrian conflict" in Spring 2019, [25] and on a study analyzing seven aspects of China's global influence operations in Spring 2022. [26]
In September 2023, the U.S. State Department published Global Engagement Center Special Report: How the People’s Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment. [27] [28] In what the Associated Press called "a first-of-its-kind-report", [29] the State Department accused the Chinese government of using "deceptive and coercive methods" to influence public opinion. [30] The methods discussed included buying content and acquiring stakes in newspapers and television networks outside China; coercing international organizations and media outlets to silence its critics; creating fake personas to spread disinformation; and using repression to shut down social media accounts. [30] [29] The New York Times wrote that the accusations "reflect worry in Washington that China’s information operations pose a growing security challenge to the United States and to democratic principles around the world by promoting 'digital authoritarianism.'" [30]
In October 2023, GEC took the unusual step of exposing a nascent disinformation campaign as it had barely gotten off the ground, publicly linking a Pressenza article recycling disinformation about a Russian Orthodox monastery in Kyiv, Ukraine, to a covert operation to spread Russian propaganda in Central and South America. [31]
Early critics of GEC, including Russia's state-run English-language news agency Sputnik, compared it to the "Ministry of Truth" in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. [32] [33] [34] One critic complained that it positioned the federal government as an "arbiter of truth" that could result in suppressing narratives that the White House did not agree with. [32] A 2018 article in the Air Force Law Review examined several issues raised by GEC, including possible abridgment of freedom of the press, pointing out that "Under the First Amendment, arguably the very existence of a state-controlled entity that pronounces who is and is not 'fake' functions like an unconstitutional license on the press." [32]
In 2017, some members of Congress, including Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Chris Murphy, co-sponsors of the FY2017 NDAA, criticized the lack of funding for GEC. [2] [35] Portman and others suggested that the agency had turned a corner in 2019 when it hired Lea Gabrielle, a former Navy pilot and intelligence officer who worked for Fox News , as head of the organization. [33] As of May 2020, GEC had a staff of only 120. [33] In April 2020, the inspector general for the State Department concluded that the GEC lacked safeguards to ensure that independent organizations it was working with were acting appropriately, such as when it funded a project called "Iran Disinfo" which aggressively targeted groups including the National Iranian American Council. [33] Critics of the Trump administration also cited Trump's "lack of credibility on misinformation" as an impediment to advancing the agency's efforts to combat fake news. [33]
In its analysis of GEC's response to the COVID-19 infodemic, The Cyber Defense Review noted that the agency had chosen to fund partner organizations rather than taking a direct role in fighting disinformation, and that it lacked a social media presence of its own. [36] Explaining that GEC's predecessor agencies – the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, the Global Strategic Center, and the Counterterrorism Communication Center – had relied on partner entities to combat ISIS propaganda, Major Neill Perry argued that the approach was less effective in countering disinformation targeting American domestic audiences. [36] In addition, Perry expressed concern that Congress had directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to create yet another agency, the Foreign Malign Influence Response Center (FMIRC), without specifying how it would collaborate and avoid duplication with GEC. [36]
In February 2023, Elon Musk called the GEC "an obscure agency" and described it as "the worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation" and "a threat to our democracy." [37] [38] [39]
In May 2023, Republicans Michael McCaul, Brian Mast, Chris Smith, Darrell Issa, Maria Elvira Salazar, Keith Self, Cory Mills, and Ken Buck co-authored an oversight letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which they alleged that GEC had strayed from its founding mission by facilitating censorship of conservative opinions in the U.S., among other things. [40] [41]
In a December 2023 Asia Society report titled "The New Domestic Politics of U.S.-China Relations," Evan S. Medeiros described the establishment of GEC as a dimension of the "new bureaucratic politics" of U.S. China policy. He wrote: "Although not focused specifically on China, Beijing’s propaganda efforts have been a central focus of its work, including by calling out various disinformation campaigns run by China. The GEC, for example, has been at the forefront of documenting parallel disinformation campaigns by Russia and China about U.S. activities in Ukraine meant to advance the Russian narrative to justify its 2022 invasion.” [42]
China Central Television is the national television broadcaster of China, established in 1958 as a propaganda outlet. Its 50 channels broadcast a variety of programming to more than one billion viewers in six languages. CCTV is operated by the National Radio and Television Administration which reports directly to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s Central Propaganda Department.
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through attacks that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."
Xinhua News Agency, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. A State Council's ministry-level institution founded in 1931, Xinhua is the largest media organ in China.
China News Service is the second largest state news agency in China, after Xinhua News Agency. China News Service was formerly run by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, which was absorbed into the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2018. Its operations have traditionally been directed at overseas Chinese worldwide and residents of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
China Daily is an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party.
Michel Chossudovsky is a Canadian economist and author. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Ottawa and the president and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which runs the website globalresearch.ca, founded in 2001, which publishes falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Chossudovsky has promoted conspiracy theories about 9/11.
The Jamestown Foundation is a Washington, D.C.-based conservative defense policy think tank. Founded in 1984 as a platform to support Soviet defectors, its stated mission today is to inform and educate policy makers about events and trends, which it regards as being of current strategic importance to the United States. Jamestown publications focus on China, Russia, Eurasia, and global terrorism.
Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist and geopolitical analyst. His column "The Roving Eye" for Asia Times regularly discusses the multi-national "competition for dominance over the Middle East and Central Asia." He has reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, writing about Osama bin Laden before 9/11 and interviewing Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.
The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, formerly Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, is a Russian research institution for the study of the countries and cultures of Asia and North Africa. The institute is located in Moscow, and formerly in Saint Petersburg, but in 2007 the Saint Petersburg branch was reorganized into a separate Institute of Oriental Manuscripts.
The Interagency Active Measures Working Group was a group led by the United States Department of State and later by the United States Information Agency (USIA). The group was formed early during the Reagan administration, in 1981, purportedly as an effort to counter Soviet disinformation.
Sputnik is a Russian state-owned news agency and radio broadcast service. It was established by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya on 10 November 2014. With headquarters in Moscow, Sputnik maintains regional editorial offices in Washington, D.C., Cairo, Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. Sputnik describes itself as being focused on global politics and economics and aims for an international audience.
New Eastern Outlook (NEO) is an internet journal published by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. According to its website, this journal looks at world events "as they relate to the Orient." According to a 2020 report from the US State Department, NEO is "a pseudo-academic publication ... that promotes disinformation and propaganda focused primarily on the Middle East, Asia, and Africa." According to the United States Department of the Treasury, NEO is run by SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence agency. NEO is included in the EUvsDisinfo project, which tracks online disinformation.
The propaganda of the Russian Federation promotes views, perceptions or agendas of the government. The media include state-run outlets and online technologies, and may involve using "Soviet-style 'active measures' as an element of modern Russian 'political warfare'". Notably, contemporary Russian propaganda promotes the cult of personality of Vladimir Putin and positive views of Soviet history. Russia has established a number of organizations, such as the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests, the Russian web brigades, and others that engage in political propaganda to promote the views of the Russian government.
The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) was an American government enterprise established in 2011 at the direction of the President and the Secretary of State to coordinate,
Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act is a bipartisan bill that was introduced by the United States Congress on 10 May 2016. The bill was initially called the Countering Information Warfare Act.
China Global Television Network (CGTN) is one of three branches of state-run China Media Group and the international division of China Central Television (CCTV). Headquartered in Beijing, CGTN broadcasts news in multiple languages. CGTN is under the control of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party.
Russian disinformation campaigns have occurred in many countries. For example, disinformation campaigns led by Yevgeny Prigozhin have been reported in several African countries. Russia, however, denies that it uses disinformation to influence public opinion.
NewsFront is a website based in Russian occupied Crimea. It describes itself as "a news agency that runs news in ten languages including Russian, German, English, Bulgarian, Georgian, French, and Spanish." In 2021, the United States Department of the Treasury described it as "a Crimea-based disinformation and propaganda outlet...particularly focused on supporting Russia-backed forces in Ukraine." According to owner Konstantin Knyrik, however, NewsFront is fighting an "information war" against unfair attacks on Russia.
The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) was an advisory board of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced on April 27, 2022. The board's stated function was to protect national security by disseminating guidance to DHS agencies on combating misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation that threatens the security of the homeland. Specific problem areas mentioned by the DHS included false information propagated by human smugglers encouraging migrants to surge to the Mexico–United States border, as well as Russian-state disinformation on election interference and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Debunk.org is an independent technology think tank and non-governmental organisation based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Founded in 2018, the organisation was developed to counter online disinformation and state-sponsored internet propaganda. It researches and analyses disinformation within the Baltic states, Poland, Georgia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and the United States. It also aims to improve societal resilience to disinformation through educational courses and media literacy campaigns.