At Tuesday’s House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing, Matt Taibbi explained how an Obama executive order led to the Censorship Industrial Complex.
MATT TAIBBI: Mr. Chairman, Madam Ranking Member, thank you. My name is Matt Taibbi, I’m the editor of the Independent Site Racket, and I’ve been covering digital censorship issues since 2018, the fictional ones. On March 14th, 2016, Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13721, Developing a New Integrated Global Engagement Center to Support Government-Wide Counterterrorism Communications Activities Directed Abroad.
It directed the Secretary of State to create a new body, the GEC or GEC, to quote, counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations, including ISIL, Al-Qaeda, and other violent extremists abroad. Seven years later, while working on a story involving internal communications at Twitter, I found myself reading emails between GEC officials and Twitter executives about subjects ranging from COVID-19 to the 2020 election to Donald Trump. Once, Mr. Chairman, you were right to point out that they were once focused abroad, but by this time, GEC officials were largely concerned with domestic English language accounts, people with no ties to terror groups or relationships with adversary nations like Iran, China, or Russia. When I went back this weekend through those documents to find examples of GEC pressuring Twitter to remove or deamplify Americans accused of misinformation, I found an exchange that we Twitter Files reporters missed in 2023. A lawyer at the company asked several other executives if they had any, quote, appetite for writing GEC a letter to ask them to stop going to the media with sensationalist claims about epidemics of foreign bots. One of the company’s senior communications executives gave a remarkably candid answer.