The “GEC Files” Don’t Show a Censorship Operation

On Aug. 21, Sarah B. Rogers, the State Department’s under secretary for public diplomacy, published a 19-post thread on X announcing what she called “GEC’S PARTICIPATION IN 2020 ELECTION CENSORSHIP-BY-PROXY OPERATION.”

The circumstances of the post were extraordinary. Rogers had attempted to leak files to DataRepublican—the online alias of Jennica Pounds, a pseudo-analyst known for mining public grant databases to build elaborate conspiracy-style maps of the “Deep State.” Pounds instead chose to publicly reveal the attempted leak, because she believed Rogers was trying to get her to do something illegal. That exposure made Rogers the target of mass outrage on X, and so she posted her files herself, in DataRepublican’sreplies. The fight escalated into increasingly bizarre territory—at one point, DataRepublican’s mother weighed in.

Posting through it, Rogers released the documents that, she said, were the long-awaited “GEC Files.” They purported to show collusion between the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a research consortium run by Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) (before it was shut down) and three other research organizations.

The EIP, Rogers declared, had only “styled itself as an academic nongovernmental effort.” In reality, it “functioned as a government censorship-by-proxy operation,” with the GEC—the now terminated State Department office charged with countering foreign propaganda and disinformation—“heavily involved.”

Rogers advanced the following theory: GEC had a mandate to counter foreign propaganda but wanted to target domestic political speech—specifically, the speech of Trump supporters. Since it was constrained from doing that directly, she argues, it used EIP—a consortium I helped lead—as a cutout.

“The workaround for GEC to target domestic content during the 2020 election season?” she wrote. “Outsource the censorship work to university labs and NGOs comprising the EIP.” Once GEC submitted material, she said, it entered EIP’s “censorship pipeline.” Ultimately, “the GEC’s goal was to see platforms take the content down.”

“Internal records confirm this,” Rogers declared.

They don’t.

I have a particular interest in this allegation. For more than three years, some version of the claim that EIP was an unconstitutional censorship cutout has been repeated by Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) House Judiciary Committee, America First Legal, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Mike Benz, Elon Musk, and others. My colleagues and I were subpoenaed by Congress over it. We produced thousands of documents and sat for hours of transcribed interviews. We were sued. Stanford spent seven figures responding to investigations and litigation.

Earlier this summer, Hines v. Stamos—the America First Legal case built around the alleged censorship conspiracy—was dismissed after years of discovery failed to establish that EIP caused the plaintiffs’ content to be censored. In Missouri v. Biden (later Murthy v. Missouri), the Fifth Circuit removed the State Department (and SIO) from the initial injunction, finding “no indication” that GEC officials had flagged specific content for censorship or meaningfully participated in platforms’ moderation decisions. Another case against GEC was tossed as a “shotgun pleading”. And the Trump Justice Department chose to settle Daily Wire v. State Department—after the administration changed sides.

So Rogers is not arriving on untouched terrain with newly discovered evidence of a secret cabal. The theory has been investigated aggressively for years and found lacking.

More importantly, the operational record at the center of her exposé has long been public. And it doesn’t say what she claims it does.

Jim Jordan Already Released the “GEC Files”

GEC’s participation in EIP was never secret. GEC tracked foreign influence operations targeting American elections; EIP tracked election rumors as an analysis center that accepted tips from civil society, state and local election officials, and GEC. The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee were both invited to submit tips. The NAACP sent one about what turned out to be the Iranians impersonating the Proud Boys and sending threatening emails to Trump supporters.

EIP had been established by SIO on the assumption that foreign actors would attempt significant election delegitimization efforts. Instead, most of those narratives came from the sitting president of the United States and his inner circle—including some of the very people who now propagate the “censorship complex” conspiracy theory.

In March 2021, EIP released a 292-page final report documenting its work, including GEC’s participation and the Jira system used to track election rumors. It was transparent from the start. The project processed 639 in-scope tickets, most created by EIP’s own analysts (primarily Stanford undergraduates), and all independently assessed by the research team.

In some cases, EIP notified platforms about content that appeared to violate their policies: Platforms took no detectable action on 65 percent of reported URLs, labeled 21 percent, removed 13 percent, and soft-blocked 1 percent. Removals were concentrated in straightforward violations such as phishing and fake official accounts. We published all of this at the time. The report is still online.

But in November 2023, after subpoenaing Stanford and other EIP participants, the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government published a 104-page report accusing EIP of being part of a federal censorship operation. A section titled “The State Department’s Direct Participation in the EIP’s Censorship Operation” leaned heavily on innuendo: EIP had “openly admitted” that GEC submitted tickets. The committee also released the Jira records we had produced, including the GEC tickets.

The 15 tickets have been publicly available for almost three years now. EIP ignored 6 of them, and none involved government requests to censor anything.

The documents Jordan released offer hard evidence that EIP independently assessed all tips and frequently declined to escalate them. Several tickets were marked as out-of-scope—not relevant to the project. Others received a form response: “Thank you very much for your submission. We will be monitoring this situation for further updates.“ If this was a censorship cutout, it was strikingly undisciplined about executing the Deep State’s plan.

Dig a bit further and the numbers get more damning—for Rogers.

The GEC tickets Jordan released reference 192 URLs in total, some appended during discussion as EIP analysts (students, not government actors) traced how a narrative was traveling. More than a third of the Twitter URLs came from just two foreign-propaganda accounts: Fort Russ News and RT’s main account. EIP analysts decided to raise the underlying content with tech companies in only nine of the 15 tickets—cases overwhelmingly focused on state media.

A quick check of the URLs suggests much of the content is still online without so much as a label. Five Twitter accounts now appear to no longer exist; one belonged to Fort Russ News, a Kremlin-linked outlet. Archival evidence suggests three of the others kept posting for months or years after EIP’s work.

Yet the under secretary of public diplomacy claimed that GEC was “heavily involved” in EIP and “sought to get content taken down”. Jordan wrote that “according to [EIP’s] report, the GEC was one of the most frequently tagged organizations in the EIP’s Jira system.”

The chart he cites shows GEC tagged on 2.5 percent of tickets.

Rogers’s Cherry-Picked Example

Much of Rogers’s thread centers on EIP-556, a single ticket concerning leaked footage from multiple Zoom calls involving left-wing activists and federal employees, held shortly before Election Day and run by the Sunrise Movement. Edited clips went viral, and right-wing media reported that participants were preparing a post-election “coup” and planning to shut down Washington.

Rogers argues that the ticket’s mere existence shows the GEC analyst who filed it “egregiously violated” the center’s foreign-facing mandate by flagging domestic political content to EIP.

Here is what the analyst actually wrote:

I came across these tweets while looking for foreign amplification of election violence narratives, but due to potential nexuses with U.S. persons, I am unable to investigate the tweets or videos further. However, this sort of content is ripe for foreign proxy media amplification.

Three days later, the same analyst filed another ticket documenting Sputnik amplifying the claims.

Set aside that GEC’s participation in EIP had been approved by Trump State Department lawyers—messages Rogers presumably could access, but chose not to leak. The substance of their tickets, as shown in the Jira data, was overwhelmingly foreign: 13 of the 15 tickets name a specific foreign state outlet or proxy—RT, Sputnik, SouthFront, OneWorld.Press, Fort Russ News, or Spanish-language pro-Maduro accounts.

Because the content wasn’t actually controversial, and because none of it involved censorship demands, Jordan’s report omits any statistics about the tickets or what they actually contained.

The Conspiracy vs. the Reality

The “censorship industrial complex” conspiracy theory is about mass censorship: the claim that the government used EIP as a proxy to get tech companies to censor millions of posts. The purported scale is key to the theory, because a few hundred tweets would hardly support the idea that there had been an impact on the 2020 election. It would not justify the subsequent dismantling of federal government capacity to disrupt foreign propaganda.

Rogers tried to supply a big number. Citing EIP’s final report, she writes that the project “tracked nearly half a million Tweets” relating to the Sunrise Zoom-call videos that GEC had flagged— 475,581, to be exact. After a thread alleging sweeping government censorship, that number is intended to be read as damning evidence of scale.

But that number doesn’t measure any GEC, or platform, activity. It’s from a row in a table headed “# of Related Tweets” in EIP’s final report—a post-election analysis examining how widely some election delegitimization rumors spread. The Dominion Voting Systems narrative, for example, generated more than 7.1 million related tweets as it went viral. Stop the Steal generated 2.9 million. Sharpiegate generated 822,477. The Sunrise Zoom Calls generated 475,581.

EIP calculated those totals after the election, from a database of historical tweets. GEC didn’t send those tweets to EIP, and EIP didn’t send them to Twitter. There were not 475,581 suppressed tweets.

That number, in fact, reflects the opposite: it shows just how viral the narrative actually was.

“A Nothingburger”

On April 16 2025, Marco Rubio published an op-ed in The Federalist declaring that protecting free speech required dismantling the “censorship industrial complex.”  In an interview with Mike Benz, he claimed to have  “ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department” and promised the “GEC Files” exposé. “People who were harmed deserve to know and prove it,” Rubio said. “Accountability provides justice and prevents future occurrences.”

By this point, Congress had already declared GEC a censorship operation and dismantled it. The promised files were supposed to supply the proof. Sixteen months later, this is what they came up with: a document drop that DataRepublican—the ideological ally the administration had hoped would leak it—called “nothingburgers.”

A handful of tips focused on foreign interference was spun into a massive operation to steal an election. Academic research was recast as the work of a “cutout” rather than the First Amendment protected speech of the researchers themselves. And federal capacity for countering actual foreign propaganda was gutted: GEC was abolished and SIO shut down as institutions caved to political pressure.

Perhaps the real revelation of the GEC Files release is that DataRepublican herself is a special government employee at the Department of Defense—a fact she hadn’t disclosed to her followers until the blowup forced it out.

On Aug. 26, a State Department contractor posted a job opening for a research analyst to support the Office of Policy, Planning, and Resources for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. The work: analyzing foreign propaganda and disinformation, investigating coordinated influence campaigns, mapping social and bot networks, conducting open-source investigations, and working with academia and civil society.

They’re hiring people to do the very job they just spent 16 months claiming was a conspiracy.