It didn’t take too long for federal agencies, initially established to control certain foreign narratives about terrorism, to shift gears and focus on Americans. Back in 2011, President Barack Obama issued an executive order to create the Strategic Counterterrorism Communications Center within the State Department. Its job? To use communication tools aimed at tackling terrorist radicalization and violence—essentially to safeguard U.S. national interests.
Eventually, Obama expanded the agency’s role, renaming it the Global Engagement Center just months ahead of Donald Trump’s 2016 election win. “The risk of disinformation is at its highest level,” he noted. This center, overseen by a committee of officials from what some call the “Deep State,” was articulated in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, giving it the power to award grants and tap into expertise outside the government. Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi called it a catalyst for a domestic disinformation network.
In the closing days of Trump’s first term, the deep state and its censorship contractors appeared to exert influence on narratives surrounding the 2020 Presidential Election and COVID-19. An investigation suggested that this so-called disinformation structure specifically targeted Blaze Media to test its effectiveness.
Evidence uncovered in a settled case against the government revealed that the Global Engagement Center had backed claims against Blaze Media, a platform promoting free speech. This raised serious concerns about potentially infringing on American companies with American audiences when its primary mission was supposedly foreign-focused.
According to findings, the Global Engagement Center was identified by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as an organization that had “actively silenced and censored” the very voices it was supposed to support. It was nominally shut down in January 2025 and dismantled by the Trump administration last April, under the new name of Foreign Information Operations and Counter-Interference Hub.
Interestingly, two years prior to this shutdown, the Federalist and other parties filed a lawsuit against the Global Engagement Center and the State Department. The lawsuit accused the agency of manipulating the news media landscape to undermine smaller news organizations while funneling funds into censorship technologies that suppressed certain voices.
Last week, prior to settling the case, the Federalist uncovered information indicating that the Global Engagement Center routinely backed censorship tools such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index. Reports suggested these groups were working to create blacklists of outlets deemed misleading, effectively cutting off their revenue while directing funds to those that align with pro-establishment views.
Strikingly, the Global Disinformation Index’s late 2022 report labeled outlets like NPR and The Washington Post as “least risky,” while flagging Blaze Media and several other conservative entities as “high-risk” sources of misinformation.
Additionally, in August 2020, NewsGuard, alongside PeakMetrics and Omelas, secured a contract to develop solutions for the State Department and the Department of Defense aimed at identifying sources spreading COVID-related misinformation.
Recent evidence suggests these companies, funded by the Global Engagement Center, ran tests targeting Blaze Media as a prominent example. Initial findings suggested the test would pinpoint popular narratives related to the U.S. election while attributing them to state-sponsored disinformation.
Some internal emails revealed concerns among State Department officials regarding the clarity of the proposed tests, emphasizing how tricky it would be to keep the focus off domestic audiences. A report prepared by PeakMetrics controversially claimed the two companies collaborated on a unified dashboard that provided insights into various disinformation networks.
Among these supposed “disinformation purveyors” were both Blaze Media and Russian state news agency Sputnik. The State Department had allocated over $2 million to fund tests by these technology firms, pointing to a troubling trend of government-subsidized suppression of certain media.
NewsGuard’s operations director stated that their small contract was primarily focused on monitoring rhetoric from foreign media, attempting to clarify that Blaze Media was not the target of this initiative. They also indicated that Blaze was already on their radar before this relatively small contract emerged.
What stands out here is the broader implication: the government had channeled resources toward private companies aimed at monitoring and arguably suppressing speech, raising serious questions about free expression and independent media’s survival.
