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Cyril Ip

A bipartisan effort in the US that was meant to unite both sides of politics against foreign propaganda has backfired, with critics accusing it of censoring Americans, especially those on the right.
While the little-known branch of the State Department may shut down next month before president-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, analysts predict that US policy on information warfare is unlikely to change course.
The Global Engagement Centre (GEC) was established in 2016 under former president Barack Obama to address “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts” targeting the US and its allies.
The GEC’s mission was significantly broader than its predecessor, the Centre for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which focused solely on countering terrorism.
Unless Congress acts to save it, the Obama legacy operation will shut down on December 23, when its seven-year mandate expires.
But the GEC’s potential shutdown does not mean the second Trump administration will lose sight or control of alleged propaganda from abroad, said Josef Mahoney, politics and international relations professor with the East China Normal University in Shanghai.
“Now whether the GEC disappears, I don’t think anyone believes that this would lead to the US fundamentally changing its position on China or Russia or Iran, and there are in fact other groups in the US government that are producing information campaigns against these countries,” he said.
The GEC is one of many US government offices directed at fighting foreign disinformation, from the Pentagon’s Influence and Perception Management Office to numerous organisations within the Department of Homeland Security and FBI.
Most of these organisations are supervised by the Foreign Malign Influence Centre (FMIC), which was formed in 2022 and names China, Iran, North Korea and Russia as target countries.


The scope of what constitutes “foreign malign influence” is notably expansive under the relevant law and any country can be added to the list as the FMIC director deems appropriate.
According to the legislation, the FMIC is empowered to counteract “any hostile effort” from foreign entities attempting to sway US policies, including electoral processes and “public opinion within the [country]”.
Mahoney noted that a Reuters investigation in June found the US military ran a clandestine programme in the Philippines to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation against Covid-19.
The news agency said it had identified at least 300 social media accounts that matched descriptions of former US military officials said to be familiar with the operation.
According to Mahoney, the campaign was intended to put the Philippine people and their leaders in a “confrontational position”, which was followed by decisions to again welcome American troops to their borders and buy US missiles.
“So, to what extent is the GEC part of a broader military campaign of disinformation where it’s playing a role in the information warfare, where the US itself is also a malign actor?” he said.




The GEC is also controversial in the US, where a group of Republican congressmen expressed their concerns in a letter of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July.
“Any value the GEC provides is tempered by genuine concerns that [it] is at best indifferent to, and at worst complicit in, an orchestrated and systematic effort to stretch the term ‘disinformation’ to encompass viewpoints that, among American progressives, are deemed to be politically disfavoured or inconvenient,” they said.
Trump ally Elon Musk, who is tipped to co-head an efficiency commission into government spending in the new administration, alleged last year that the GEC set out to shape social media content.
“The worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” the billionaire wrote on Twitter in February 2023, labelling it “a threat to [American] democracy”.
Two years before it was acquired by Musk and renamed X, the GEC claimed its investigations showed Beijing had coordinated nearly 250,000 accounts on the social media platform to disseminate disinformation related to the coronavirus outbreak.
Twitter pushed back on the accusation, saying that the information provided by the State Department had included numerous accounts belonging to government entities, non-governmental organisations and journalists.
“One of the problems with this effort is that Democrats and Republicans frequently have different interpretations on the right policy and information strategy towards these various countries,” Mahoney said.
“During the Biden administration, the GEC has been accused by Republicans of promoting a very specific narrative about its vision or understanding of the world – one that isn’t necessarily corresponding to objective facts, but supporting what might be described as the Biden doctrine.”


Zoon Ahmed Khan, a research fellow at the Beijing-based Centre for China and Globalisation, said that perceived state-directed censorship on social media platforms had led to growing criticism and scepticism towards the GEC’s practices.
“A perpetual anti-China posture and an inability to engage in objective discourse not only hurts the global credibility of Western media and think tanks, but also increases the [ideological] gap between audiences that follow and believe Western media and those who are sceptical,” she said.
According to Khan, Americans interpreted instances where criticism of the government was “misdiagnosed” as foreign-funded propaganda as a violation of their free speech.
While the messaging may change from Biden to Trump, the GEC’s potential shutdown is unlikely to “significantly alter US policy, or the US capacity to continue to wage this type of information warfare”, Mahoney said.
“In fact, it might get worse under Trump, given his history of an aggressive and culturally insensitive communication style, as well as the potential for increased conflict, for example, between the US and China or Iran, given several of the key figures being proposed as potential members of his cabinet.”
Florida Representative Mike Waltz, nominee for national security adviser, and Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, both maintain a “very hawkish stance” towards China, Mahoney said.


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Clock is ticking for Obama legacy operation, but Washington’s policy on information warfare is unlikely to change course


Clock is ticking for Obama legacy operation, but Washington’s policy on information warfare is unlikely to change course.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Clock is ticking for Obama legacy operation, but Washington’s policy on information warfare is unlikely to change course

Clock is ticking for Obama legacy operation, but Washington’s policy on information warfare is unlikely to change course