Don’t defund the fight against disinformation

This appeared in the Washington Post:

Two authoritarian U.S. adversaries, Russia and China, are carrying out what some have called a “hidden war on democracy,” attempting to shape global opinion using deception and false narratives. By one estimate, Russia spends about $1.5 billion a year and China $7 billion or more annually to influence overseas audiences. We’ve argued before that the United States should resist their information warfare. Unfortunately, House Republicans are threatening to eliminate a key U.S. agency that does so.

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), headquartered at the State Department, deploys a $61 million budget and a staff of 125 to counter disinformation from Russia, China, Iran and terrorist organizations. It was founded as part of the fight against terrorist messaging. It is due for congressional reauthorization by the end of this year. A measure has cleared the Senate, but the Republican-controlled House has refused to follow suit, meaning the program could lapse.

The GEC efforts to preempt disinformation have been promising. Last month, the GEC exposed an attempt by Russia’s security services to undercut U.S. influence in Africa through a new disinformation agency, called African Initiative. According to the center, this agency intended to spread tales about the outbreak of a mosquito-borne viral disease, to be followed by conspiracy theories about Western pharmaceutical corporations, health-focused philanthropic efforts, and the spread of disease in West and East Africa. Even before this, Russia had an active campaign in Moscow to claim, falsely, that the United States was testing biological weapons in Ukraine. The claim was based on twisted information about legitimate public health projects in Ukraine sponsored by the United States to fight disease. Russia’s untruths were picked up and widely disseminated by China, too.

The African Initiative was going to use social media and place articles in the news. It recruited staff from the enterprises of mercenary chieftain Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who started a Russian troll farm that attempted to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group had extensive contracts in Africa before his death in a suspicious plane crash in Russia.

The GEC got ahead and labeled the African Initiative as a Russian creation, thus preventing many from believing untruths that could have discouraged them from seeking legitimate health care. This fall, the GEC also unmasked a Russian effort in Latin America. The organization exposed how past Russian officials were launching a disinformation campaign to convince “Latin American audiences that Russia’s war against Ukraine is just” and to get across “Russia’s broader false narrative that it is a champion against neocolonialization.”

Conservatives in Congress and elsewhere have complained that the center is part of an effort to muffle conservative speech and ideas in the United States. They have pointed to the GEC’s funding of a London-based group, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), in late 2021. That $100,000 grant helped to expand a disinformation tool in Asia. An entirely unrelated GDI project, published in December 2022, had compiled a list of U.S. media outlets likely to be susceptible to disinformation. The GEC and GDI projects were quite separate, but conservatives charged the GEC with underwriting a blacklist of conservative voices. Elon Musk wrote on his platform X, “The worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC.”

Two news organizations on the list, the Federalist and the Daily Wire, have filed suit against the GEC, saying the GEC has infringed on their First Amendment rights by “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech.” This is misguided. The center does not look at what goes on inside the United States — all its programs are for fighting disinformation abroad. The GEC also instructs its grantees not to work in the United States.

The House Republicans who are taking down the GEC could, more constructively, reauthorize the program with legislative language that would ban any operations in the United States. By eliminating the program altogether, they would deny the United States a vital tool in a contest for hearts and minds around the world — while rewarding the purveyors of lies.