Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department under President Biden had labeled one of President Trump’s cabinet officials as a purveyor of disinformation and had collected a dossier on their social media posts.
Rubio did not identify the individual, revealing the information during a round-table meeting of Trump’s cabinet officials, but said it was someone at the table. He said he would hand over the information to the person and allow them the decide whether to make it public.
An unidentified person in the room shouted out, “Was it me or Elon?” referring to Elon Musk, owner of the X social media site, who has used his platform to amplify conspiracy theories and promote falsehoods on political, social and foreign policy issues.
“We had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans,” Rubio said, referring to previous administrations.
“And by the way, I’m not gonna say who it is, I’ll leave it up to them. There’s at least one person at this table today who had a dossier in that building of social media posts to identify them as purveyors of disinformation,” he added.
“We have these dossiers. We are going to be turning those over to these individuals.”
Rubio appeared to be referring to the now-shuttered Global Engagement Center, initially a bipartisan effort to track foreign disinformation online campaigns abroad, but that Republicans accused of policing Americans’ social media activity.
Supporters say that the GEC provided critical assistance for small countries to push back against disinformation campaigns sponsored by China, Russia and Iran.
In September 2023, the GEC released a report documenting how China spent billions of dollars to “construct a global information ecosystem in which is propaganda, censorship and disinformation gain traction.”
In February, the GEC released a report on the Kremlin’s campaign spreading disinformation in Africa.
Miranda Nazzaro contributed to this report.
