Congress, under pressure from President-elect Donald Trump and the DOGE’s Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has shut down the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a censorship office that was created in an Obama-era executive order.

The GEC, housed within the State Department, was supposedly created to thwart disinformation and misinformation, but “violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States,” Gabe Kaminsky wrote for RealClearPolitics on Dec. 30.

Taibbi reported that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the Covid pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023: “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”