Journalist Matt Taibbi on Tuesday gave testimony before the House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee about how the government under former President Joe Biden sought to censor American accounts on social media.
During his testimony, he discussed the government’s Global Engagement Center (GEC). He explained how former President Barack Obama established the agency “to support government-wide counterterrorism communications activities directed abroad.”
However, the agency later became a mechanism for censoring online speech – especially among American users. Taibbi noted that by the time he reviewed the agency’s internal documents, “GEC officials were largely concerned with domestic English language accounts.” The agency’s operations targeted even those with “no ties to terror groups or relationships with adversary nations.”
Taibbi was one of the main journalists Elon Musk enlisted to create the Twitter Files. He told the committee about disturbing aspects of his findings, noting how the GEC pressured the company to suppress certain types of content – primarily those expressing narratives that conflicted with the Biden administration.
In one instance, an executive at the company expressed discomfort with the government’s approach, saying they were worried that the agency would become more aggressive in pushing its agenda in the leadup to the 2020 election.
Journalist @mtaibbi lays out how the State Department funded organizations bent on silencing "anti-war accounts, libertarians, and independents, as well as conservatives" on social media platforms. pic.twitter.com/5CwOqH34i2
— Jeff Charles, The Nullifier🏴 (@jeffcharlesjr) April 1, 2025
Taibbi compared the GEC’s tactics to those of the Hamilton 68 project, which was ostensibly intended to monitor Russian disinformation efforts on Twitter and other social media platforms. The program was controversial largely due to its lack of transparency. Some of the company’s executives indicated that the program targeted American accounts as well as Russian bots.
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“Hamilton 68 mixed the smattering of real Russian accounts with a crowd of mostly American, mostly anti-establishment accounts,” Taibbi noted. The journalist suggested that GEC operated in similar fashion, using minimal evidence to justify its effort to pressure Twitter to identify and suppress problematic accounts. The agency would use a company called Brandwatch “to monitor a handful of openly Russian accounts … and an unspecified number of accounts that they baselessly assert are inauthentic.”
GEC targeted “left-leaning figures like Sanders, anti-war accounts, libertarians, and independents, as well as conservatives,” according to Taibbi. Yet, to include American accounts on its list, the GEC required “no actual connection” to foreign propaganda or disinformation efforts. One only needed to express inconvenient viewpoints online.
Taibbi ended his opening statements by noting that GEC sought to censor certain voices under the guise of rooting out foreign disinformation. “They weren’t looking for misinformation and disinformation,” he said. “They were looking for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, obedience and disobedience.”
Taibbi characterized the agency’s actions as “a flagrant violation of First Amendment ideals” and called for dismantling GEC.
Over recent years, the extent of the government’s censorship operations has been exposed by multiple journalists, including Taibbi. The State Department has funded private organizations like the Global Disinformation Index, Newsguard, and the Election Integrity Project.
Each of these entities focuses primarily on pressuring social media companies to suppress anti-establishment content while also targeting companies that advertise on alternative news sites. Taibbi nailed it. The GEC should be burned to the ground (figuratively) and the State Department should not be funding biased organizations seeking to silence Americans. The fact that American taxpayers were paying to be silenced is the ultimate insult to injury.
One thing is clear: GEC would make an excellent target for DOGE.
You can watch the entire hearing below.
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