‘The easiest way to counter disinformation is free speech,’ says the state secretary.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on April 16 introduced the closure of an workplace within the State Division that tracked overseas disinformation, saying it had censored Individuals.
Initially based because the Counterterrorism Communication Middle in 2007 to root out narratives from Al-Qaeda and different terrorist organizations, it turned the GEC in 2016 below the Obama administration with an expanded mission to broaden efforts countering overseas disinformation.
Rubio mentioned in his op-ed that “GEC was speculated to be useless already,” and that his predecessors below the Biden administration modified the middle’s identify to the Counter International Data Manipulation and Interference workplace within the hopes of it surviving the transition whereas retaining the identical worker roster.
In his op-ed, Rubio additionally accused the GEC of working in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic to label any hypothesis of the coronavirus being an engineered bioweapon or coming from analysis carried out in a lab in Wuhan as being Russian disinformation and overseas propaganda.
Fairly than restaff the workplace, Rubio took a stand towards what he referred to as the complete disinformation business and the concept the American folks wanted to be protected against lies on-line.
On the similar time, he mentioned he was assured that his division may stay vigilant towards communist China and different nations with rising authoritarian censorship with out this workplace.
“The easiest way to counter disinformation is free speech, is to be sure that what’s true has as equal or higher alternative to speak as what’s not true,” Rubio mentioned in the course of the interview. “We’ve discovered that the exhausting means.”