US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated, say officials
In shutting R/FIMI, the department’s controversial acting undersecretary, Darren Beattie, is delivering a major win to conservative critics who have alleged that it censors conservative voices. Created at the end of 2024, it was reorganized from the Global Engagement Center, a larger office with a similar mission that had long been criticized by conservatives who claimed that, despite its international mission, it was censoring American conservatives. In 2023, Elon Musk called the center the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation” and a “threat to our democracy.”
The culling of the office will leave the State Department without a way to actively counter the increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns from foreign governments like Russia, Iran, and China. The office could be shuttered as soon as today, according to sources at the State Department who spoke with MIT Technology Review.
Censorship claims
For years, conservative voices both in and out of government have complained about Big Tech’s censorship of conservative views—and often blamed R/FIMI’s predecessor office, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), for enabling this censorship.
GEC has its roots as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), created by an Obama-era executive order, but shifted its mission to fight propaganda and disinformation from foreign governments and terrorist organizations in 2016, becoming the Global Engagement Center. It was always explicitly focused on the international information space. It shut down last December, after a measure to reauthorize its $61 million budget was blocked by Republicans in Congress, who accused it of helping Big Tech censor American conservative voices.
R/FIMI had a similar goal to fight foreign disinformation, but it was smaller: the newly created office had a $51.9 million budget, and a small staff that, by mid-April, was down to just 40 employees, from 125 at GEC. Sources say that those employees will be put on administrative leave and terminated within 30 days.
But with the change in administrations, R/FIMI never really got off the ground. Beattie, a controversial pick for undersecretary— he was fired as a speechwriter for attending a white nationalism conference during the first Trump administration, has suggested that the FBI organized the January 6 attack on Congress, and has said that it’s not worth defending Taiwan from China —had instructed the few remaining staff to be “pencils down,” one State Department official told me, meaning to pause in their work.
The administration’s executive order on countering censorship and restoring freedom of speech reads as a summary of conservative accusations against GEC:
“Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
