28 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL in the Near East and North Africa, where many terror groups were headquartered, but social media’s growth soon expanded the reach of malign influence and deliberate dissemination of false or misleading information. To address this, in March 2016, President Barack Obama renamed and expanded the CSCC into the “Global Engagement Center” by Executive Order 13721. The GEC’s work soon revealed that other adversaries, not just terrorists, were exploiting online anonymity to target U.S. national security interests; potential interference in our democratic processes became a serious concern by the time of the 2016 U.S. elections. With the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017, signed into law by President Obama on December 23, 2016, the GEC was to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and its allies and partner nations.” This mission was to be accomplished by tracking counterfactual narratives abroad, identifying trends in foreign propaganda and disinformation, and utilizing information from appropriate interagency entities to identify the countries, geographic areas, and populations most susceptible to propaganda and disinformation “where it is likely to cause the most harm.” Because the GEC was based in R, Smith-Mundt Act restrictions on the distribution of public diplomacy media inside the United States were rigidly applied. Staff could trace the shadowy footprints of online propagandists and disinformers on other shores, but the minute the disinformation crossed U.S. borders or involved any Americans, the GEC’s investigations stopped. At one time, the GEC enjoyed strong bipartisan support: It was co-sponsored by Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and its first coordinator was a Trump appointee, Lea Gabrielle. As American politics grew more polarized, that bipartisan base of support began to change, but the organization and its funding still drew steady support from leaders of both parties until the end of 2024. Troll Warfare I joined the GEC in 2021, soon after I was PNGed from Moscow, along with other U.S. diplomats, as U.S.-Russian relations began their current nosedive. What I had learned in Russia and elsewhere in my career stimulated my interest in this new topic: the hybrid form of warfare fought against us in cyberspace via false personas, paid influencers, deepfakes, bots, troll factories, AI programs, and other manipulative tools. The internet allowed violent extremist organizations and authoritarian nations to meddle in the information space of other nations while hiding their fingerprints and practicing deniability. The openness and free-debate tradition of democracies created openings these adversaries eagerly exploited. Earlier, in 2016–2017, when I was on a State Department detail to George Washington University teaching undergraduate courses on public diplomacy, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick chose to kneel during the national anthem at football games to protest endemic discrimination against Black Americans. Other players soon joined, and a national debate began. As a capstone project, a group of GWU graduate students studied the sources of tens of thousands of social media posts generated during the controversy’s height, and we were surprised to see that twothirds of the posts studied did not originate in the United States. Most of them came from St. Petersburg, Russia. There were not (and still are not) a lot of NFL fans in Russia, but St. Petersburg was home to the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm run by the erstwhile Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin. His trolls were pretending to be Americans, and the same individuals were posting concurrently on both sides of the debate: beseeching Black Americans and those left of center to defend Kaepernick’s rights, while exhorting conservatives online to oppose the protests that they claimed were “trampling on the American flag.” The Russian trolls did not really care about the NFL, Kaepernick, Black American rights, or our national anthem. All they wanted to do was provoke controversy and conflict. Journalist Jacob Weisberg, writing in The New York Review of Books in September 2025, noted that digital tools have an extraordinary power to shape public opinion and mold mass culture. This is particularly true during election campaigns, when each party plays up its differences with other parties, and exaggerates its own candidates’ virtues and their opponents’ vices. Conflict draws attention, and social media posts with explicit, violent, aggressive, fearmongering, or otherwise emotive content tend to move faster and higher up the algorithm hierarchy than fact-based news and information (cute cat videos being an exception). When the GEC began, few countries were aware of the disinformation threat from within, and even fewer were tracking it.
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