Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers

Scaled-back digital ID scheme can combat populism, UK minister says ft.trib.al/Pc5pgf3

Great to meet with @UnderSecPD Rogers at the State Department!  Discussed public initiatives that bring real and tangible results for the American people and forge new partnerships with the South and Central Asian region.

Dawn photo departing Seoul — hope to return soon! A highlight of my visit was my engagement with North Korean defectors (whose faces are concealed for their security). Raised in a closed information environment, they learned to conceive of freedom in small shards — a clip from a South Korean reality show depicting contestants with varied clothes and jobs; a radio snippet mentioning that American soldiers, unlike North Korean conscripts, choose to serve and are paid. These defectors then risked execution or torture — most at very young ages — fleeing overland under rugged conditions. I am recused from all @USAGM involvement pending my confirmation hearing, but this visit underscored the deep value of info access in authoritarian societies, and steps we take to assure the same.

NYT article is fake, and motivated, in two glaring ways: (1) As @UnderSecretaryF notes below, @StateDept never “dismissed” foreign propaganda threats. In @SecRubio confirmation testimony and my own, we framed these as serious challenges — but rightly excluded censorship of Americans as a response to them. Congress agreed, and declined to renew funding for GEC — even before our admin took office. An entire industry of “disinformation” experts strain to frame censorship opposition as sinister or naive. (They are eager to give quotes to journalists.) Once you’ve seen the intel and grasp the threat, they claim, you’ll understand why it’s vital to spend tax dollars suppressing content from outlets like @FDRLST and @unherd. If you disagree, they say, then perhaps you’re a foreign asset. Of course, that’s wrong. I have seen the intel and grasp the threat. Actors including Russia, China, and Iran — aided by unpaid volunteers who delight in spreading foreign regime propaganda for anti-American ideological reasons — do want to seed your timeline with slop. Effects of this are most acute in smaller, overseas info environments, where competing news sources can be sparse. This can harm American interests, and warrants an American response. We advocate a spectrum of them. But we exclude censorship — much to the chagrin of people who want to revive COVID-era absurdities and entrench them as the future of the internet. (2) Nobody instructed diplomats to prioritize tweeting (“push back on X”) as a response to propaganda. We did send a cable emphasizing counterspeech generally, which can be undertaken on any/all appropriate platform(s). And just as I’ve done publicly, our diplomatic cable highlights @CommunityNotes as an example of a constructive technology in the info space. This was a helpful counterexample to some of the censorious tech that governments previously promoted (eg, ad-blacklist tools). No single tool is a panacea, but crowd-sourced annotations show some promise, particularly when there are algo safeguards against dominance by “brigades” of coordinated users or ideological blocs. Finally, some reporters seem to find it notable that we mention coordination with DoW MISO ops (“psyops”). This is a longstanding practice, for obvious reasons: if State and DoW are messaging on overlapping issues in overlapping regions, one hand needs to know what the other is doing.

"At his funeral, six people came. He had helped start two revolutions." 💀 Thomas Paine was born in 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk. His family made corsets. He failed as a corset maker, a sailor, a tobacconist, a tax collector, and a teacher. England had nothing for him. At 37 he met Benjamin Franklin in London. Franklin handed him one letter of introduction and told him to go to America. He arrived in Philadelphia in November 1774 with almost nothing. 🌍 Two years later the American colonies were on the edge of revolt but most ordinary people still couldn't imagine breaking from the Crown. Paine sat down and wrote a pamphlet in plain English aimed at ordinary people, not politicians or kings. Common Sense. Published 10 January 1776. 100,000 copies sold in three months. 500,000 by the end of the year. In a country of two and a half million people. General Washington had it read aloud to his troops. Six months later, the Declaration of Independence. 🇺🇸 Paine gave away every penny of royalties to fund the Continental Army. Then he went to France. Wrote The Rights of Man in 1791, a direct challenge to hereditary power. The British government charged him with treason. He was already in Paris. The French Revolutionary government elected him to their National Convention. Then Robespierre had him arrested. He spent ten months in a Luxembourg prison cell waiting to be executed. He survived by chance. He came home to America in 1802. By then he was despised by the very establishment his ideas had helped create. He died in 1809, largely alone, in poverty, in a small house in New York. Six people attended his funeral. Half of them were formerly enslaved men who came to pay their respects. 🇬🇧 Human rights. Universal suffrage. The welfare state. Progressive taxation. All of it traces back to a corset maker's son from Norfolk who failed at everything England offered him. This history has no budget. No broadcaster. No institution behind it. Just the people who believe it deserves to exist. Support the channel: proudofus.co.uk/support 🇬🇧 Be Part Of Us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

This is such a contrived story. Nobody @StateDept “dismissed” foreign disinformation. What we dismissed was the notion that radical left organizations like the Global Engagement Center—which as @DarrenJBeattie @UnderSecPD have detailed engaged in gross abuses including censoring Americans and themselves promoting damaging disinformation—were part of the solution to genuine foreign influence operations.

NEW from @nytimes: Trump aides gutted some offices that worked to counter anti-American disinformation by foreign powers. Now the US finds itself embattled in an info war with Iran, Russia and China. The State Dept. tells diplomats to use X and work with Pentagon psyops teams.

Public diplomacy is where policy meets people. Honored to join the 2nd U.S.-ROK Public Diplomacy Dialogue with @MOFAkr_eng spotlighting the extraordinary bonds keeping our Alliance strong & sign the Memorandum of Cooperation to kick-off our joint celebration of #Freedom250. 🇺🇸🇰🇷”