Update 12:35PM: Sources confirm that, at an 11:15AM meeting, undersecretary Darren Beattie has announced the closure of the office, and the termination of all remaining positions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also confirmed the closure in an article published on The Federalist and a conversation and a YouTube interview with a former Trump administration State Department official Mike Benz who has become a vocal critic of the department.
The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is about to be eliminated, two State Department officials have told MIT Technology Review.
The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns.
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 those of 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.
Shortly after publication, employees at R/FIMI received an email, inviting them to an 11:15AM meeting with Beattie, where employees were told that the office and their jobs have been being eliminated.
Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed our reporting in a blog post in The Federalist, which had sued GEC last year alleging that it had infringed on its freedom of speech. “It is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” he wrote. And he told Benz, “We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department.”
Censorship claims
For years, conservative voices both in and out of government have accused Big Tech of censoring conservative views—and they often charged R/FIMI’s predecessor office, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), with enabling such censorship.
