The Long Tail Wags the Dog: Being a Ghost Story of Continuing Resolution
While the Global Engagement Center’s budget allocation amounted to peanuts, it extracted a price many Americans were unwilling to pay: their freedom of expression.
2024’s naughty list included a little-known US State Department effort tasked with countering foreign information warfare and accused of conspiring to censor U.S. residents’ constitutional speech. Following a social media insurgency fulminating on Elon Musk’s X (née Twitter) platform, funding for the Global Engagement Center (GEC) was stripped from the revised spending bill that passed Congress on December 21st to keep the U.S. government operating through mid-March 2025.
The GEC closed on December 23rd [archive link]—but we should not mistake the Center’s diminished present as proof that state-sponsored censorship is in our past, and librarians should consider anew our role in a future of reality politik.
Musk’s X: Marley’s Ghost
Citing Musk’s 100+ X posts decrying the 1500+ page continuing resolution (CR), media outlets lamented that “America is already being governed by tweet” as their information gatekeeping role ceded policy influence to popular dissent. Indeed, it was not X posts but “angry constituents [that] called their representatives”—in other words, small-r republican representative democracy—which led to the revised omnibus spending bill that axed the GEC line item.
Among other objections, Americans declined to pay for their own censorship.
The spending bill saga serves as a warning—and a revelation—that the political realignment of the participatory web has real policy consequences.
While Musk is credited with bringing attention to the Global Engagement Center and its alleged role in censoring Americans in the context of the CR, his was not my first introduction to the GEC.
That came courtesy of Q.
QAnon’s Last Laugh: The Ghost of GEC Past
From January through June 2018, I conducted an ethnographic study of the deep web QAnon conspiracy community. The resulting chapter, “TRUTH Always Wins: Dispatches from the Information War” published in Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization (ARCL, 2019, open access), chronicles my descent into the stranger-than-fiction modern history of domestic information warfare campaigns beginning with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and culminating with the then-recently expanded Global Engagement Center.
Born of the March 2016 Obama-era Executive Order 13721, a nascent Global Engagement Center was imbued with responsibility for coordinating “whole-of-government” anti-terrorism communications directed at foreign audiences. This early iteration assumed a data-driven posture empowered by the dragnet global surveillance grid that ensnared the post-9/11 world revealed by Edward Snowden merely three years prior, and established a network of governmental and non-governmental collaborators, including academia, to conduct its work.
The GEC Steering Committee comprised members from a range of three-letter agencies including
“the Department of Defense,
the Department of Justice,
the Department of Homeland Security,..
the National Counterterrorism Center,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the Counterterrorism Center of the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA],
the Broadcast Board of Governors [now the U.S. Agency for Global Media], and
the United States Agency for International Development [USAID],” along with
other agencies “invited… at the discretion of the Chair.”
Among the functions of the GEC were to award contracts and grants to non-governmental entities to perform work “in support of the Center’s mission,” portending the outsourcing of surveillance and censorship that is unconstitutional for the government to conduct.
In December of 2016, Congress saw fit to expand the Global Engagement Center’s sphere of activity from “whole-of-government” to “whole-of-society” in order to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests” as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2017. While the GEC is heralded as a defense against foreign disinformation, this overlooks its role in “countering… non-state propaganda and disinformation targeting the United States and U.S. interests.” ‘Non-state propaganda’ is an astoundingly broad category that logically includes the utterances of everyday individuals alongside the manifestos of foreign terrorist networks. As Dr. Alina Polyakova, then president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis (a sub-grantee of the GEC), chillingly testified in a 2020 Senate committee hearing,
“The line between authentic domestic voices, which are protected in most democracies by free speech rights and certainly by the First Amendment here, and inauthentic behavior, foreign disinformation that we have been talking about here, that line has essentially disappeared.”
In the same March 2020 Senate committee hearing, then Special Envoy and Coordinator of the Global Engagement Center Lea Gabrielle testified to establishing
“an LNO [liaison officer] from the GEC now in Silicon Valley, and we are doing a lot of outreach with tech companies to understand some of the technologies that are being developed to counter propaganda and disinformation, but also to be able to have those open lines of communications.”
The LNO is described on the State Department’s website [archive link] as “a Silicon Valley location to facilitate public-private coordination and broker constructive engagements between the U.S. government and the tech sector, academia, and research.” Gabrielle goes on to explain that the GEC has developed a “first of its kind” “tradecraft” “information-sharing platform” to act as a “force multiplier” by providing real-time access to surveillance and analysis tools to GEC partners worldwide.
Having witnessed a domestic social media campaign immediately smeared as Russian bot propaganda by (aptly dubbed) information warfare experts in real-time, you’ll forgive my well-earned paranoia that legitimate speech can be transformed into foreign disinformation with a few keystrokes (not to mention a dash of AI). Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security’s 2022 Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland cited “domestic threat actors” whose online speech could “undermine public trust in government institutions” (including, for example, criticizing “COVID-19 restrictions,” which I did here, here, and here).
It was this provision to fund the GEC found in Section 1287 of the NDAA 2017 which expired in December of 2024 – giving QAnon the last laugh.
You Shall Not Pass: The Ghost of GEC Present
Under Title III–Foreign Affairs, Section 301 of the failed omnibus spending bill sought to amend NDAA 2017 to extend GEC funding for another year. In his rapid-fire X posts, Musk characterized the GEC as “the worst illegal censorship operation in the entire government,” asserting: “This bill should not pass.”
The GEC was one of three governmental “trusted external stakeholders” for the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) [archive link], which was criticized for working with online platforms to suppress primarily conservative and right-leaning political speech online, according to May 2023 Congressional testimony from RealClearInvestigations Editor at Large and Claremont Institute fellow Benjamin Weingarten.
Writing for Reason, Robby Soave alerted readers to GEC’s U.S. taxpayer-funded financial support for the “Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British nonprofit that pressured advertisers to stop working with certain news sites” including Reason and the New York Post. Gabe Kaminsky, who has been on the GEC beat for the Washington Examiner, reports [archive link] that two of these publications along with the state of Texas are suing the GEC for unconstitutionally laundering censorship operations through GDI and NewsGuard. The Daily Wire, The Federalist, Texas v. State Department, et al. is in expedited discovery until mid-February and may shed additional light on jawboning, or state censorship laundering in violation of the First Amendment, where Murthy v. Missouri fell short for lack of standing.
While the GEC’s modest allocation amounted to peanuts in the context of the federal budget, it extracted a price many Americans were unwilling to pay: their freedom of expression.
Vox Populi: The Ghost of GEC Future
When news of the GEC’s central role in jawboning broke, it was no surprise to me—thanks to my foray into a so-called conspiracy community, I had already glimpsed down the rabbit hole of domestic information warfare, and the Center was on my radar as early as 2018 at a time when the library world was too enamored with our role in fighting fake news that we never paused to critically evaluate the useful idiots in the mirror.
The GEC was but one limb of an immortal information warfare Leviathan; indeed, in the wake of critical memoranda from Republican lawmakers, the State Department anticipated the failed CR with plans [archive link] to reincarnate the Center as a new hub that will continue fighting so-called foreign interference.
And while the people’s voice orchestrated on platforms like X was no doubt crucial to this legislative upset, vox populi can readily degrade into tyranny of the mob. When the long tail wags the dog, librarians should work to ensure the public has access to the information and analysis it needs, is capable of seeking, interpreting, and applying it, and fosters the dispositions to do so with due consideration. This necessitates rethinking our sycophantic allegiance to legacy media at a time when it is being eschewed by the public.
A culture of free expression will always be haunted by the specters of surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. But the purpose of free expression is not merely good democratic governance: free expression is a manifestation of human plurality and individual particularity, without which we are diminished versions of ourselves. By fostering epistemic agency and epistemic community [open access], libraries nourish intellectual freedom for both personal flourishing and pax notitia.
Sarah Hartman-Caverly is co-moderator of HxLibraries and an associate librarian with Penn State University Libraries at Penn State Berks who examines the compatibility of human and machine autonomy from the perspective of intellectual freedom.
To promote viewpoint diversity, Heterodoxy in the Stacks invites constructive dissent and disagreement in the form of guest posts. While articles published on Heterodoxy in the Stacks are not peer- or editorially-reviewed, all posts and comments must model the HxA Way. Content is attributed to the individual contributor(s).
To submit an article for Heterodoxy in the Stacks, submit the Heterodoxy in the Stacks Guest Submission form in the format of a Microsoft Word document, PDF, or a Google Doc. Unless otherwise requested, posts will include the author’s name and the commenting feature will be on. We understand that sharing diverse viewpoints can be risky, both professionally and personally, so anonymous and pseudonymous posts are allowed.
Thank you for joining the conversation!
Nice overview, Sarah. There should be more in the library literature on this issue.
Thanks for this very good article. Sarah. I learned some details I didn't know before.
In the interest of viewpoint diversity, I'm offering these other perspectives:
Statement of Walter Kimmage, former official from the GEC (Global Engagement Center), before Congress, October 23, detailing some of the threats from foreign intelligence services and other actors from Russia, China, and Iran, and the mission of the Global Engagement Center. Despite the actions of a Republican Congress against this Center, and many other actions against offices at universities such as Stanford, studying what we'd broadly call "disinformation", this doesn't look like "censorship" to me. I always recognize there's a danger of government overreach, but liberal democracies and open societies are vulnerable to the laundered falsehoods and manipulations of bad actors in authoritarian regimes. It looks to me like this is a "wicked problem" that liberal democracies need to solve together, if that's possible.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA17/20231025/116506/HMTG-118-FA17-Wstate-KimmageD-20231025.pdf
In addition, Anne Applebaum's scholarship and perspective in this area matter since she knows the politics, the players, many of the diplomats, and the cultures of countries like Russia, and Russia's allies of convenience, in sowing cynicism and nihilism in western Europe and the U.S. and elsewhere. Her recent book Autocracy Inc. describes how much of this network of autocracies works. Her recent Atlantic article gives a briefer account of how this particular kind of propaganda from Russia and elsewhere seeks to demoralize. It isn't necessary to get the citizens of western countries to believe outright lies but to increase distrust in their own systems of government and their own civic institutions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/
As for the 2024 election in the U.S., there were of course the expected attempts to manipulate the outcome with falsehoods spread about both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The outcome itself, according to media analysists and scholars at this point, probably was affected not much by those attempts, but the longer term strategies from the autocracies is to continue to increase distrust in elections and democratic politics. The German publication DW gives a really helpful summary of attempts at disinformation and the U.S. Presidential election:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-what-role-did-disinformation-play-in-the-us-election/a-70729575
As for distrust in the "mainstream media" (Helen Lewis has suggested the term is no longer even appropriate since alternative media draws more viewers and readers), I'll continue to be the dissenter or "heterodox" one in this space. When we've reached the point where Joe Rogan's podcasts draw more listeners than anything like a reasonable news outlet, liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian, or something else, I think we're in what Renee DiResta calls the "choose your own adventure epistemology" and everyone just finds what they want to believe anyway, to reinforce and amplify their existing beliefs. Recently, I came across an interview with journalist Matt Pearce in which he describes the enormous challenges facing journalism as a profession and media enterprises in general. He aptly calls what we're moving into as a kind of reversion to a "folk story society" ripe for subversion by demagogues, where actual sources of reliable information don't matter. I find his perspective quite in alignment with what Hannah Arendt described as the "annihilation of truth."
https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/journalisms-fight-for-survival-in?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
As for getting any accurate perspective on the GEC or anything else from Elon Musk, I'm highly dubious. I'll just close these comments by noting Musk's use of his platform as an overt political project supporting MAGA world, Trump, and either conservative or far-right parties in other countries. It's a constant stream of disinformation most days because I see it. Notably, also, three European leaders (of the UK, France, and Germany) have denounced Musk in recent days for his overt intervention in their politics and their elections.