Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act (2016)

• Law: Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016, embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2017
• Passed: Senate 92–7, signed December 2016
• Signed by: President Barack Obama, December 23, 2016
• Sponsors: Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)
• Key funding: $160 million initial authorization

They told you it was about stopping Russian propaganda. Seven senators voted NO and were proven right about everything. The bill created a government censorship bureau — the Global Engagement Center — that within a few years was funding blacklists of American journalists and flagging American social media accounts to be silenced. The Secretary of State shut it down in 2025, calling it an "anti-free speech" operation. The damage had already been done.

How It Passed

The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act was introduced in the Senate by Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) as a bipartisan response to Russian information operations following the 2016 election cycle. The stated mission was to create a coordinating center — the Global Engagement Center — at the State Department to "counter foreign propaganda and disinformation campaigns" aimed at the United States and its allies.

The bill passed the Senate 92–7. Seven senators voted NO. Those seven votes represent the clearest possible record in this episode — the only members of the entire United States Senate who looked at this legislation and understood what it would become.

Like many of the most dangerous laws in this catalog, it was passed inside the NDAA — the year-end defense authorization that every senator feels compelled to support. Attaching it to the NDAA was not accidental. A standalone bill called "The Global Censorship Infrastructure Act" would have had harder sledding. Buried in the defense bill, framed as a counter-Russia operation, with a 92-vote Senate margin, it sailed through.

The original text authorized the GEC to "train journalists," "support private sector entities" involved in propaganda analysis, and coordinate with US allies on countering foreign-sourced disinformation. All of it sounded reasonable in 2016, in the specific political climate of Russian election interference anxiety. The $160 million was appropriated. The agency was stood up. And then it was turned around.

What It Does To You

The Global Engagement Center received funding and legal authority to combat foreign propaganda. It used that funding and authority to build or support a domestic censorship infrastructure targeting American speech.

Blacklisting American journalists. The GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a UK-based nonprofit that maintained a list of American news outlets it characterized as high-risk for "disinformation." The GDI used this list to pressure advertisers to withdraw funding from targeted outlets. Among the outlets on the GDI blacklist: the New York Post, RealClearPolitics, the Federalist, and other outlets whose editorial positions diverged from the mainstream media-government consensus. This was not neutral analysis. It was an advertiser pressure campaign against disfavored journalism, funded by the US State Department.

Funding academic surveillance operations. The GEC provided significant funding to the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), and similar university and think-tank entities. These organizations participated in what has been documented in congressional investigations and civil litigation as a coordinated censorship network — flagging American social media accounts and posts to be removed or suppressed by technology platforms including Twitter (now X), Facebook, and others.

The "Twitter Files" and congressional investigations. Internal documents released by Elon Musk after his 2022 acquisition of Twitter confirmed that government-affiliated organizations, including GEC-funded entities, submitted lists of American accounts for censorship to Twitter's content moderation teams. The accounts targeted were overwhelmingly American citizens and journalists expressing political views that conflicted with official government positions on COVID-19, the 2020 election, and foreign policy. This was done through what researchers described as a "censorship-industrial complex" — a network of government agencies, funded NGOs, and technology platforms operating in coordination.

Who got silenced. American citizens. American journalists. American doctors who disagreed with official COVID policy. American commentators who raised questions about election integrity. American veterans who shared political opinions. The GEC-funded infrastructure was used not to silence Russian propaganda — that was the pretext — but to silence Americans.

Rights It Strips

First Amendment — Freedom of the Press

The Global Disinformation Index's advertiser blacklist was a direct financial attack on news organizations whose editorial content diverged from preferred government narratives. Government funding of a private organization that pressures advertisers to defund specific news outlets is not "countering disinformation." It is economic suppression of disfavored journalism. The First Amendment does not permit the government to do directly what this arrangement accomplished indirectly.

First Amendment — Freedom of Speech

When GEC-funded organizations submitted lists of American social media accounts to technology platforms for suppression, they were operationalizing government censorship through private intermediaries. Courts have addressed this directly: the government cannot use private entities as a mechanism to accomplish speech suppression it would be prohibited from performing itself. The GEC-funded censorship network did exactly this at scale.

Fifth Amendment — Due Process

American journalists whose outlets were blacklisted received no notice, no hearing, no opportunity to contest their designation. American social media users whose accounts were flagged for suppression or removal received no notice that a government-funded organization had submitted their information to a platform, and had no avenue to challenge the designation. The designation process operated entirely in secret, by organizations accountable to no oversight body, with no due process protections for the Americans targeted.

First Amendment — Chilling Effect

The documented existence of a government-funded surveillance and blacklisting infrastructure targeting American political speech creates a chilling effect on every American who knows about it. If writing the wrong opinion about COVID policy, election integrity, or foreign policy could land your social media account on a removal list submitted by a State Department-funded organization, the rational response is to self-censor. That is not a side effect. For the architects of these programs, that is the mechanism.

Documented Harms

Secretary Rubio's February 2025 Shutdown

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down the Global Engagement Center in February 2025, the official statement was direct. The GEC had been "financing and promoting censorship technologies that targeted American media organizations under the guise of countering disinformation." Rubio called it an "anti-free speech" operation and defunded it immediately upon taking office.

This was not a partisan critic's characterization. This was the Secretary of State of the United States describing, in an official statement, what his own agency had been doing to American journalists and media organizations using taxpayer money. Read that sentence again.

The Global Disinformation Index Blacklist

Reporting by the Washington Examiner and other outlets documented the GDI's "Dynamic Exclusion List" — a database of news sites characterized as high-risk for disinformation. The GDI provided this list to advertising networks and brand-safety firms, which used it to steer advertising revenue away from blacklisted outlets. The US State Department, through the GEC, provided funding to the GDI. American news organizations lost advertising revenue because the US government funded a foreign organization to pressure advertisers against them. That is documented. That happened.

Stanford Internet Observatory and the Censorship Network

The House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government documented in a 2023 report that the Stanford Internet Observatory participated in a coordinated effort to flag and remove American social media content. GEC grants helped fund the "Election Integrity Partnership" — a consortium of academic institutions that reviewed and submitted flagging recommendations on tens of thousands of American social media posts during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. The posts that were flagged were overwhelmingly expressing political viewpoints, not foreign propaganda.

Missouri v. Biden / Murthy v. Missouri

Federal courts heard extensive evidence in Missouri v. Biden (later Murthy v. Missouri) that the federal government, including State Department-adjacent actors in the broader "disinformation" infrastructure, had used back-channel communications with technology platforms to suppress American speech. The district court issued a sweeping injunction in 2023 describing what it found as "the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history." The Supreme Court reversed on standing grounds in 2024, but the underlying factual record of what happened was never disputed.

What Was NOT Stopped

Despite billions of dollars spent on "counter-disinformation" operations over the decade following the GEC's creation, actual foreign propaganda operations by Russia, China, and Iran continued operating online without significant disruption. The operations that were disrupted — the accounts and content that were actually removed or suppressed — were overwhelmingly domestic. American citizens were censored far more effectively than foreign adversaries. That is the documented outcome.

Who Pushed This

Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) was the lead Republican sponsor. Portman later became a partner at Gibson Dunn, a major corporate law firm with extensive national security and technology industry practices. His post-Senate career benefited directly from the relationships and frameworks built during his Senate service, including the national security-tech industry nexus he helped construct.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) was the lead Democratic sponsor. Murphy has been one of the Senate's most consistent advocates for expanded government authority over online speech, including legislation that would hold technology platforms legally responsible for failing to remove content government agencies designate as harmful.

The State Department Bureaucracy was the institutional home for the GEC and provided both the administrative infrastructure and the career officials who expanded its domestic operations far beyond any reasonable interpretation of "foreign propaganda counter-operations."

NGO Network Recipients: The Atlantic Council, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Global Disinformation Index, and dozens of smaller organizations that received GEC grants built their institutional models around government funding for "disinformation research." These organizations had structural incentives to find, define, and catalogue "disinformation" — which they consistently found in American political speech rather than foreign propaganda — because their funding depended on demonstrating the existence of a problem they were paid to identify.

The Technology Platforms were willing participants, not passive recipients of government pressure. Executives at Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms maintained regular communication with GEC-funded researchers and government officials, and took action on flagging recommendations without requiring legal process. They provided the enforcement mechanism that turned GEC-funded research into actual speech suppression.

Key Votes

Senate: 92–7. The seven senators who voted NO deserve to be named, because their judgment was completely vindicated by what followed.

Senate NO votes in December 2016 on the NDAA containing the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act: Mike Lee (R-UT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Tom Udall (D-NM), Mike Crapo (R-ID), and Rand Paul (R-KY).

Every one of those seven senators was correct. The other 92 senators voted to create a domestic censorship infrastructure that targeted American journalists, American citizens, and American political speech.

The House vote was embedded in the NDAA conference report, which passed with broad bipartisan support.

Why This Matters for We The Citizens

The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act is the most direct legislative source of the censorship infrastructure that suppressed American political speech in the period from 2017 to 2025. It provided the legal authority, the funding, and the institutional framework. The GEC is shut down now. The organizations it funded are still operating. The relationships between government agencies, funded NGOs, and technology platforms that were built during this period are still in place.

Every senator who voted YES in 2016 bears responsibility for what that vote created. The outcome was not unpredictable — critics warned in 2016 that "countering disinformation" authority aimed at foreign propaganda would be turned inward. Those critics were right within a few years. The 92 senators who voted YES chose the national security framing over the free speech risk. Their constituents paid the price.

The seven NO votes are the cleanest records in the entire Senate on this question. Find out whether your senator was one of them.

See also: Bad Laws Overview | Smith-Mundt Propaganda Act | CISA 2015 | FISA Section 702