Most Americans never knew that tucked in the bowels of the State Department was a harmless-sounding agency called the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Center (R-FIMI). Thanks to the Trump administration, this eerie agency will no longer interfere in ordinary Americans' lives.
The R-FIMI budget was an astounding $50 million each year, which paid for 50 full-time employees and over 100 contractors. The organization worked in the shadows to "track misinformation" worldwide (primarily Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea) and either censor it so that it never reached target audiences or engaged in active countermeasures to eliminate the threat once and for all.
The misinformation footprint was not limited to foreign sources. R-FIMI spread its tentacles in the United States by working with NewsGuard, a for-profit company aimed at rating the credibility and transparency of news and information websites. It was founded in 2018 by journalists Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz. A team of 35-plus journalists evaluates sites using "human analysis" - whatever that term means. They place labels on over 9,500 websites originating in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and several European countries. Sites scoring 60 or above receive a green shield, while those below get a red shield, with detailed reports explaining the score.
Most of NewsGuard's sponsors—the Knight Foundation, Publicis, and the American Federation of Teachers—have ultra-progressive philosophies. American websites —such as Breitbart, Daily Wire, and Federalist - that carried COVID-19 information or information about the Russia-Ukraine war contrary to NewsGuard's priorities consistently scored red in NewsGuard's trust score and lost advertiser revenue.
R-FIMI worked with the Big Tech companies to throttle these publications and push them down in newsfeeds. It also began working with academics in the United States to monitor speech on social media networks and newspapers. The agency often demanded that Meta, Google, and Twitter (before it became X) take down posts and suspend accounts.
In his January 2025 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described instances when government officials would "scream" and "curse" at Meta employees, threatening repercussions if certain content wasn't removed. Zuckerberg expressed concern over being forced into determining what is true: "It's pretty bad when officials demand the takedown of true information."
An excellent example of R-FIMI's work is related to the 2020 presidential campaign. America was struggling to recover from dual threats as it fought an unprecedented pandemic and race riots in the wake of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis.
R-FIMI identified a network of over a dozen "fake news websites" operated by Iranian actors "designed to influence U.S. voters ahead of the presidential election." These sites, posing as legitimate U.S.-based news outlets, spread divisive narratives on topics like racial justice and COVID-19 policies to polarize American audiences. The operation used sophisticated tactics, including search engine optimization, to amplify its reach.
To retaliate, R-FIMI used the raw power vested in it as a State Department agency to work with Big Tech companies to disrupt these sites. Platforms like Google and Meta removed associated content, and by imposing a ban on those websites, R-FIMI ensured that similar issues would not occur during the 2024 U.S. election cycle—a blanket ban on news websites in America.
R-FIMI's work was completely un-American. In 2020, the Pew Research Center noted over 30,000 digital-native news outlets in the U.S., many of which are independent or hyper-local. In addition, platforms like Substack host thousands of individual journalists and writers, with over 20,000 newsletters (as of 2023), many of which function like news sources. Independent news organizations like TIPP and The Free Press reach hundreds of thousands of people each day, especially with pass-through readership on affiliated sites. Popular podcasts reach millions of viewers, far more than the mainstream media outlets. Why should a dozen, albeit fake, websites pose a threat to vibrant debate in the town square?
R-FIMI had become a version of the old KGB's Propaganda Directorate, also known as the Department for Active Measures and Disinformation, primarily responsible for censorship, the creation and dissemination of misinformation, and other forms of "active measures" against perceived enemies. It was astounding that the American taxpayer was funding such an organization to operate within America's shores against Americans.
In one of the most welcome moves by the second Trump administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio disbanded the R-FIMI organization altogether.
Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions.
That ends today.
I am announcing the closure of the @StateDept's Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, formerly the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year and actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.
Good riddance, GEC and R-FIMI. You should never have been established as an official wing within the United States government. We are glad that you are gone forever.
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