In a major legal victory for free speech, the State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire and others in 2023, ensuring an end to its support for censorship of American media outlets and putting the burden on the government to prove compliance to outlets harmed by its actions.
A federal judge on Wednesday entered a consent decree placing The Daily Wire and the Federalist, a co-plaintiff, in charge of ensuring that future State Departments do not fund efforts to deem news outlets “disinformation,” concluding the years-long First Amendment battle. The settlement will prohibit the State Department from supporting any further censorship of Americans, and appoint the plaintiffs as compliance monitors until 2036.
“Today marks an important day for preserving free speech in the digital era,” said Caleb Robinson, The Daily Wire’s CEO. “The U.S. Government has acknowledged its censorship structures under the Biden administration, and will now be subject to limitations on similar behavior in the future.”
In 2023, the Daily Wire and the Federalist sued the State Department after Joe Biden’s administration used its Global Engagement Center to fund and promote companies that worked to bankrupt conservative news outlets by deeming them “disinformation.” The Daily Wire, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), demonstrated in the case how the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) was used during the Biden administration to deliberately target disfavored news outlets.
Many of the more than 30 products showcased by GEC would assign reputability scores to news outlets, often due to their coverage of issues like COVID and election integrity. At the same time, advertisers were pressured not to do business with flagged outlets, based on the idea that it would be toxic to their brand.
One such company was NewsGuard, which sells its ranking list to advertisers and whose co-CEO said it was “empowering governments… to support quality journalism and systemically defund sources of harmful misinformation.”
Another is the Global Disinformation Index, which claimed that liberal sites like ProPublica are among the “least risky,” while outlets like the New York Post, Reason Magazine, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire are among the “riskiest.” The group received a cash award from the State Department’s GEC and said it would “support market-wide deployment so that the ad-tech space can offer advertisers the chance to choose which sites their ads support.”
Ben Shapiro, who founded The Daily Wire, said that GDI “fed basically a blacklist of sites to advertisers so that advertisers would want to pull their money” and that the effort “deprived groups and organizations like the Daily Wire of legitimately millions of dollars in advertising.”
Outlets were down-rated for their coverage of vaccines, the efficacy of masking, election integrity, abortion, transgenderism, and other topics.
Since it would be unconstitutional for the government to work to bankrupt news outlets that criticized the government’s official line, the Biden administration backed third parties who were doing it, the lawsuit argued. GEC seemingly attempted to avoid scrutiny by using a mysterious company called Park Capital Investment Group, helmed by a former State Department employee, as an additional middleman.
In a historic first, the State Department has publicly acknowledged through a binding legal agreement that the types of speech it previously sought to censor like the news and opinions published by The Daily Wire and The Federalist are protected by the First Amendment, and the State Department has agreed to dismantle its censorship apparatus by no longer using “technologies to knowingly or intentionally suppress, censor, demonetize, or downgrade the constitutionally protected speech of Americans or domestic media outlets,” or recommending that third parties do so.
President Joe Biden alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken
/ Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/ For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Congress defunded the Global Engagement Center in 2024 following the lawsuit, but the Biden administration moved its employees to a similar group doing similar work, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April 2025, announcing that all those employees had been hit with layoff notices.
“Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” Rubio said. “This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.”
The agreement is a binding contract that cannot be dissolved by future administrations, and requires the State Department — including under any future Democratic president — to report annually on its activities so The Daily Wire and the Federalist can monitor for compliance.
If violations are uncovered and the government does not rectify them, a federal judge in Texas would force the State Department to come into compliance with the agreement. The State Department settlement also requires the department to hold employee trainings in 2030 and 2035 on how the First Amendment precludes them from censoring Americans.
“The prohibitions, reporting, and training required by the Consent Decree will protect Free Speech for well more than the decade that the Decree is in force,” said Zhonette Brown, a top attorney for NCLA.
The lawsuit said that GEC “researched, assessed, funded, investigated, evaluated, tested, marketed, and/or promoted over 365 so-called Countering Propaganda and Disinformation or ‘CPD’ tools and technologies, including tools and technologies that target American speech and the American press.” GEC created a platform called “Disinfo Cloud” to house them, and encouraged U.S. social media and tech companies to use the resources, even creating a Silicon Valley office.
Elvis Chan, an FBI agent involved in asking Twitter to take down posts including those related to the Hunter Biden laptop, told Congress that he worked regularly with GEC, and that GEC did not seem to be concerned with the First Amendment since it was used to operating in foreign countries.
The State Department has always been forbidden from running propaganda on Americans, yet GEC sponsored a “COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation” tech challenge, and the three winners were all “American companies which offer technologies that target Americans’ speech broadcast to Americans,” the conservative outlets argued.
“Media literacy” is a term that has been used by the State Department to import left-wing censorship from countries like Germany and impose it on Americans. The U.S. Embassy in Berlin funded a seminar for United States teachers who heard from an activist at a German group that lamented that on the internet, “it is not just progressive voices which are being spread,” but also “ideologies which are based on hatred.”
For that event, the State Department worked with Media Literacy Now, which calls media literacy a “tool to create the society we all deserve: one that nurtures racial equity, social justice, and true democracy. Media literacy equals cultural change.” It is a nonprofit linked to the for-profit Ad Fontes, which sells lists of “reputable” news outlets to advertisers.
The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan called it a “major victory for the Daily Wire, for the Federalist,” and a “major step in preserving the most precious right we have, a right that came very close to being extinguished during the Biden administration.”
The media outlets were represented on a pro bono basis by Margaret Little, Margot Cleveland, Casey Norman, Zhonette Brown, and Margaret Harker of the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
“We’re grateful to NCLA for representing us, and I also appreciate our co-plaintiffs’ efforts in this landmark case,” Robinson said. “We’re proud to join them in the fight for freedom.”
The Daily Wire stands for the American birthright of freedom – freedom of speech, faith, open debate, and the pursuit of objective truth. These are not just ideals; they are the promise of America, and we refuse to surrender them.
If you believe in this nation’s greatness, stand with us in the fight to preserve it.
