{"id":109792,"date":"2026-08-07T20:33:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T20:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/youzum.net\/how-ideas-of-a-vast-censorship-network-moved-from-the-online-fringe-to-trump-policy\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T20:33:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T20:33:12","slug":"how-ideas-of-a-vast-censorship-network-moved-from-the-online-fringe-to-trump-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/youzum.net\/th\/how-ideas-of-a-vast-censorship-network-moved-from-the-online-fringe-to-trump-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was produced in partnership with <\/em>Type Investigations<\/em><\/a>, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project.<\/em><\/p>\n

One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For months, Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency had been cutting a wide swath through federal agencies, gutting teams that worked on everything from scientific research to Social Security to international aid. So when the employees of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R\/FIMI)\u2014a unit tasked with tracking foreign disinformation\u2014received a note asking them to meet in half an hour, many sensed their time had come.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe all had heard \u2026 that there was going to be a day they would shut down our office,\u201d says one former staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.<\/p>\n

Darren Beattie, a far-right provocateur who had been serving as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, wasted no time with pleasantries, telling the gathered employees that the office was being shuttered<\/a> and that their jobs were being eliminated. The mood in the room oscillated between somber and outraged, the former employee says, with \u201clots of young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked.\u201d<\/p>\n

But elsewhere at the State Department, the closure of R\/FIMI was cause for celebration.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWe ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,\u201d Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced shortly after in a video interview with a right-wing internet activist named Mike Benz.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is obviously amazing news,\u201d Benz responded, before teeing up a theory he\u2019d been promoting for years: \u201cWe now have so many people wondering, Was I censored because of something the State Department did<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

The notion that the State Department had been working to silence Americans is perhaps unfamiliar to many people, but it\u2019s a key part of a larger web of conspiratorial ideas that have been promoted for a decade on far-right blogs, podcasts, and social media. The basic theory is that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms\u2014or what believers refer to as the \u201ccensorship-industrial complex\u201d\u2014has been working to suppress conservative and populist speech online. The fight against \u201cdisinformation,\u201d as Benz put it on a 2025 podcast, \u201cis censorship in disguise.\u201d R\/FIMI, along with a predecessor office with the same mission, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), had been among the right\u2019s long-standing targets; now it was one of its latest casualties.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second Trump administration\u2019s war on censorship has contributed to the dismantling of numerous government agencies, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI\u2019s Foreign Influence Task Force, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It\u2019s razed the infrastructure that tracks and counters attempts by foreign powers to influence elections and popular opinion. It has also been used to justify sweeping travel bans and sanctions on targeted individuals and entire industries<\/a>. It\u2019s provoked tensions with the European Union over its tech regulations, which these critics say silence Americans. And it\u2019s even reshaped US national security strategy.<\/p>\n

Its reach, though, isn\u2019t limited to US bureaucracy, academia, or civil society groups. The weaponization of ideas about censorship also affects the billions of people globally who get information, or interact with each other, online\u2014which is to say, just about everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Much of what has been characterized as censorship is really part of an effort to make the internet safer. This could include work quantifying just how often people online have generated nonconsensual sexualized content<\/a> of women and children; helping victims of online stalking, doxxing, and other crimes seek justice<\/a>; or identifying whether someone we are interacting with online is genuine and not, say, a foreign agent posing as an American voter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But where did this idea come from?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Over the past nine months, MIT Technology Review<\/em> and Type Investigations have dug into its origins and traced how a relatively niche conspiracy theory from the far right was able to\u2014and continues to\u2014influence a wide range of actions by the second Trump administration. In myriad ways, the theory of the censorship-industrial complex, or CIC, explains the logic behind how the Trump administration operates both at home and in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To understand just how it jumped from the edges of the information sphere to influence the decision-making of the country\u2019s most powerful individuals, we used open-source methods to scrape content from right-wing websites; scrutinized hundreds of thousands of pages of public records, videos, and podcasts; and analyzed over 100,000 social media posts that have promoted the narrative. Our analysis found that although the roots of the idea run deep and wide, the CIC framework really took off in early 2023, driven by a handful of individuals, with support from a close-knit collection of right-wing organizations and media outlets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

At the center of this effort is Mike Benz, Rubio\u2019s interview partner last April. Benz served a brief stint in Donald Trump\u2019s first administration but has largely remained unknown, even as some of his ideas\u2014including the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a NATO asset and the pro-white-identity content he published<\/a> anonymously before he joined the government\u2014have gained followers. Our analysis uncovers just how integral he in particular was to spreading the CIC theory: We found him to be the most prolific creator of related content online, which was in turn picked up by right-wing media outlets and podcasts and eventually reached the highest echelons of power in the US. His work prompted congressional\u2014and eventually presidential\u2014action and generated both attention and financial benefits for Benz personally. (Benz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

\n

Last April, near the end of the interview at the State Department, Rubio shot Benz a friendly finger gun.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks for your attention to this topic,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cI know you\u2019ve been on this a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The origins of discontent<\/h3>\n

Every conspiracy theory is sustained by a unique blend of grievances and shadowy actors, but at their core, they\u2019re shockingly similar<\/a>. They often start with a few devoted believers operating on the periphery. They claim to uncover hidden truths about people in power. They offer order and meaning for believers, creating or affirming group identities. And the most successful ones contain a grain of truth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This also describes \u201cthe best propaganda campaigns,\u201d according to David Millar, a longtime US intelligence official who spent years at the State Department\u2019s Foreign Service Institute teaching future diplomats how to recognize such agitprop. \u201cThey\u2019re seldom just complete lies,\u201d Millar says. \u201cThey\u2019re usually taking something out of proportion or amplifying something that actually happened into something that didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the case with the idea of censorship that targets the right online. In 2016, an anonymous former employee of Facebook claimed<\/a> that the site was suppressing conservative news in its \u201ctrending topics\u201d section. The company scrambled<\/a> to reassure<\/a> conservatives that this was not the case\u2014but still axed its human editors<\/a>. Not long after, in the wake of Russian influence operations in the 2016 US presidential election and the United Kingdom\u2019s Brexit vote, social media platforms amped up<\/a> their content moderation efforts in order to filter out foreign disinformation. In doing so, they also ended up banning some conservative voices, often for violating platform policies against false information<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To right-leaning internet users, the posts and accounts flagged as problematic or false \u201csure sounded like stuff that agreed with [their] belief system,\u201d says Dannagal Young, director of the University of Delaware\u2019s Center for Political Communication. \u201cRussia had done their homework so well that the kinds of things that were \u2026 generated by Russian propagandists were not that distinct from things people in the States would say.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a messy moment in our collective digital life. Never before had anyone and everyone been given a megaphone to instantly broadcast to a global audience, for better and worse. These new powers prompted difficult questions about how that content should be policed, and by whom\u2014if at all. What should happen if, say, a foreign intelligence service impersonated people en masse on social media to manipulate citizens? What if someone\u2014anyone\u2014said something provocative, hateful, or meant to incite violence? Or something that didn\u2019t directly call for violence but could provoke it nonetheless? The pressure on social media companies to act was immense.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

The pandemic became a \u201cpivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives\u2026 feeling like, This isn\u2019t right. Not everyone\u2019s getting censored, just us<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

-Dannagal Young, political communications scholar<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

And more or less in real time, tech companies\u2014as well as government bureaucrats, researchers, and journalists\u2014had to chart a path for which there was no map. A new field grew to help inform and even make decisions on what qualified as \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cdisinformation,\u201d though there wasn\u2019t a clear definition of either term (<\/a>nor of \u201ccensorship\u201d). As a result of\u00a0this work, platforms have taken steps over the past decade to shield users from fake news, conspiracy theories, and covert foreign influence. In doing so, they sometimes went too far\u2014as some tech leaders have since argued<\/a>. Alternative services and platforms sprang up, intending to create spaces free of \u201ccensorship\u201d (by which they meant content moderation); Parler, Gab, and others tended to cater to right-leaning voices. They themselves were later kicked off Apple\u2019s and Google\u2019s app stores or banned by hosting and payment services.<\/p>\n

High-profile narratives\u2014like the claims<\/a> that Twitter \u201cshadow-banned\u201d conservatives in 2018 and suppressed<\/a> news about Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop in 2020\u2014have consistently kept alive the notion of conservative-targeting censorship. And online influencers like Benz have been able to twist what happened to tear down entire sections of the US government and silence individuals they disagree with.<\/p>\n

The covid-19 pandemic in particular proved an ideal breeding ground for the censorship narrative. As trust in institutions plummeted, and harmful rumors about the crisis proliferated online, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube adjudicated what qualified as covid-related misinformation<\/a> (including claims regarding<\/a> the pandemic\u2019s origins), took down posts, and banned prominent vaccine deniers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2014sometimes with the encouragement<\/a> of parts of the federal government.<\/p>\n

The pandemic became a \u201cpivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives,\u201d says Young. They were \u201cfeeling like, This isn\u2019t right. Not everyone\u2019s getting censored, just us<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol (itself driven by false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen), social media companies took more aggressive measures, including banning the president from their platforms, citing his potential to incite more violence. To Trump\u2019s allies and supporters, however, his removal only encouraged the idea that a network of actors was working behind the scenes to censor their voices\u2014and keep the president from retaining power.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass-censor virtually every narrative that he was putting out, that he lost,\u201d Benz later told Joe Rogan on his podcast. This was proof, Benz concluded, of the dark power of censorship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

In April 2022, the digital chatter about government censorship found a real-world villain. The Biden administration had announced the formation of a Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate DHS\u2019s efforts on this front; it would be led by Nina Jankowicz, who had cut her teeth countering Russian propaganda in Eastern Europe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the rollout was clumsy<\/a>; and for the far right, the group\u2019s ominous-sounding name and the scant details about what it would actually do made it the ultimate evidence of government censorship by another name. As the Washington Post<\/em> reported<\/a>, Fox News devoted 70% of its news segments to coverage of Jankowicz or the board in the week after its announcement, with Sean Hannity describing her as \u201cone of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of disinformation in the entire country.\u201d Beattie, the Trump official who later shut down R\/FIMI, called her \u201cBiden\u2019s new minister of truth,\u201d while Benz claimed she was a \u201cregistered agent for the British crown.\u201d She became the target of an all-out harassment campaign\u2014and multiple death threats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jankowicz was also named in a lawsuit<\/a> against government agencies and officials that alleged \u201copen collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.\u201d Benz submitted a legal brief in support of the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2024, but by that time Jankowicz was long gone\u2014she resigned just three weeks after the task force launched, citing \u201cvile personal attacks and physical threats.\u201d The group never met.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In February 2023 Margot Cleveland, a contributor to the conservative outlet The Federalist<\/em>, gave right-wing perceptions of these events their now familiar framing in an article titled \u201cHow Trump Derangement Gave Birth to the Censorship-Industrial Complex.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a \u2018Disinformation Board,\u2019 but a more insidious \u2018Censorship Complex\u2019 already exists and is growing at an alarming speed,\u201d Cleveland wrote. \u201cIts funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left\u2019s ability to control the conversation\u2014and thus the country and the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to our analysis of social media posts, Cleveland\u2019s article was shared by 168 accounts, marking the first time that something about the censorship-industrial complex was shared by so many different people. Its popularity showed that people were ready to gravitate toward the CIC framing, Cleveland told us in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely catchy,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople understand what it means, given that the military-industrial complex has \u2026 been in existence since the 1950s.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

Just a few weeks later, the idea jumped toward mainstream recognition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Musk, then the new owner of Twitter, had given internal company documents to two journalists, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, with the goal<\/a> of exposing how Twitter and the Biden administration had supposedly colluded to censor conservative voices. <\/p>\n

What they found was widely<\/a> regarded<\/a> to fall substantially short of a conspiracy against the right\u2014but on March 9, 2023, the pair appeared before Congress to discuss the results of their \u201cTwitter Files\u201d inquiry at a hearing convened by Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican. Shellenberger\u2019s 68-page testimony laid out what he claimed was a vast network of government agencies and contractors that allegedly censored Americans through \u201cblacklists of disfavored people\u201d\u2014\u201cpressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.\u201d Shellenberger shared<\/a> his testimony on Twitter, where it was viewed more than 2.7 million times, our analysis shows. A video<\/a> of Taibbi\u2019s testimony was viewed 4.3 million times, while a tweet sharing it got 40 million views. (As a point of comparison, in 2023 the average post on X received just 1,200 views, according to the data company Metricool.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe were, like, proverbially touching the elephant.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mike Shellenberger<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We found that these were among the most viral tweets to date about the \u201ccensorship industry\u201d or the \u201ccensorship-industrial complex.\u201d Overall, we identified nearly 30,000 tweets about these ideas between September 2011, when \u201ccensorship industry\u201d first popped up on Twitter, and March 2026. The clear peak came in March 2023, at the time of the Twitter Files hearing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In an email, Taibbi said he has regularly defended censored figures on the left as well as the right and does not believe censorship to be \u201ca conservative-liberal issue.\u201d \u201cThough the behavior we saw at Twitter in, say, 2020 was slanted against conservative content in the United States, we saw these techniques applied to both left and right around the world,\u201d he said. Shellenberger, Jordan, Beattie, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

While these social media posts had a wide reach, our analysis shows that the ideas related to the CIC were primarily driven by a small handful of individuals. Of the 13,475 Twitter\/X accounts that we found to have posted or reposted CIC-related content in that same time frame, 71% did so just once.<\/p>\n

Even among the conspiracy theory\u2019s top proponents, however, Benz stands out in terms of output. Our analysis shows that by March 2026 he\u2019d posted on X about the \u201ccensorship industry\u201d or \u201ccensorship-industrial complex\u201d more than 440 times since opening an account in December 2022, after Musk\u2019s purchase of the platform; this was far more than anyone else whose accounts we analyzed during the same period, including Taibbi, Shellenberger, or Beattie. When we added other variations of the word \u201ccensor,\u201d that figure jumped to over 2,200 times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In a 2023 podcast interview, Shellenberger credited Benz with opening his eyes to the full extent to which conservative voices were being silenced. \u201cWe basically went from being concerned about bad forms of censorship by Twitter and other social media platforms to being concerned about government censorship,\u201d Shellenberger said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were, like, proverbially touching the elephant. We didn\u2019t understand what the elephant was [until] we discovered your work, Mike.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

The amplifiers <\/h3>\n

To understand Benz\u2019s role in crafting and promoting the CIC narrative, MIT Technology Review<\/em> and Type Investigations examined thousands of his tweets, public statements, podcasts, and reports since 2015, including those from now-deleted accounts\u2014the most comprehensive collection of Benz\u2019s work assembled to date. We found that his interest in censorship dates back to the early days of this fight\u2014to at least 2016, when he was a corporate lawyer living in Brooklyn.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This was when, as NBC News\u2019s Brandy Zadrozny later revealed<\/a>, he began posting content online under a pseudonym, Frame Game. \u201cFrame Game Radio\u201d published across a number of platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, and Gab\u2014mixing white identitarian and antisemitic views (though Benz identifies as Jewish) with alt-right-aligned complaints about the \u201cdiversity industry\u201d and censorship. (In a lengthy rebuttal on X to the 2023 NBC News story, Benz claimed that Frame Game was a \u201cproject by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews,\u201d to which he \u201ccontributed in a very limited manner.\u201d He also stated, \u201cLet me be clear: I am extremely proud of this.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Frame Game\u2019s content spoke positively about Hitler\u2019s Mein Kampf<\/em>, warned of \u201cwhite genocide,\u201d and claimed that \u201ccensorship is almost exclusively a Jewish phenomenon.\u201d For a few months, the account ran a never-before-reported campaign for a \u201cWhite Mother Fertility Fund,\u201d which promised to donate 20% of the channel\u2019s revenue to a mother nominated by listeners.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cCensorship\u201d became a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This kind of content earned Frame Game the praise of the white nationalist publication Counter-Currents<\/em>, which described the anonymous figure in May 2018 as \u201ca rising star\u201d and a \u201cpro-white and Judeo-critical online activist\u201d\u2014noting that the Twitter account was \u201cfollowed by everyone from Steve Sailer to David Duke\u201d (references, respectively, to a columnist for the white nationalist website VDare and the former KKK Grand Wizard).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another preoccupation was the supposed suppression of conservative speech. In hours-long videos, Frame Game used \u201ccensorship\u201d as a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation\u2014going as far as to apply it to any kind of \u201ccritique\u201d at all. The account was particularly incensed by the deplatforming of Alex Jones in 2018, which it called the \u201cPearl Harbor event of free speech.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Online censorship was a \u201ckeystone issue,\u201d the channel said in 2018, affecting the right\u2019s ability to achieve any of its other goals: \u201cYou have to fix that, or else you can\u2019t advocate for anything else effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frame Game ceased posting that same year, when Benz started working as a speechwriter at the Department of Housing and Urban Development before joining Stephen Miller\u2019s speechwriting team at the White House.<\/p>\n

Then, in November 2020, Benz moved to the State Department, briefly serving in the first Trump administration\u2019s final months as deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. He has said this short-term experience gave him firsthand knowledge of how the censorship machine works: \u201cAll things related to the internet connected to US foreign policy were under my purview,\u201d Benz told Shellenberger in a podcast in March 2023. \u201cI got to see the inner nucleus of how Big Government and Big Tech have so completely fused together in relatively seamless ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also helped set up Benz\u2019s post-Trump career. In April 2022, he launched the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), which describes itself as a \u201cfree speech watchdog\u201d dedicated to championing \u201cdigital freedom around the world.\u201d Though it calls itself a \u201cfoundation,\u201d FFO is not registered as a nonprofit and has just a few contributors. But it quickly became an active part of a bigger web of new Trump-aligned organizations\u2014and in their eyes, even benign initiatives could be evidence for the machinations of the censorship-industrial complex. FFO has published critical reports claiming that efforts to promote media literacy, brand safety campaigns, and nonprofit journalism, including the work of the investigative organization Bellingcat, were all hidden forms of censorship, and labeling as suspect anyone affiliated with a government agency. (One of the authors of this article previously worked in international development in Afghanistan, on a State Department grant and USAID sub-grant, while two of the authors previously collaborated with Bellingcat.)<\/p>\n

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\u201cIts implications for politics are really scary, because it makes conversation and debate virtually impossible.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Political scientist Michael Barkun<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of FFO\u2019s targets was a relatively obscure educational game called Cat Park. Created in 2022 with funding from the State Department\u2019s GEC, Cat Park was designed to \u201cbuild resistance to disinformation and promote digital media literacy\u201d for kids ages 15 and up, according to its official description<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the game, players fuel opposition to a city-funded cat park by creating emotionally charged headlines and memes, and by manipulating images with AI. Then, halfway through, they learn that the campaign against the park was the brainchild of a billionaire with plans to buy the designated land for cheap once the outrage dissuaded the city from building it. At this point, players must use what they have learned about creating effective propaganda to counter their own disinformation.<\/p>\n

By 2024, only around 100,000 people had played the game, according to Martijn Gussekloo, a cofounder of the Dutch design agency that helped develop it\u2014far fewer than the numbers that played similar online games the agency had worked on to highlight the issue of disinformation. \u201cAs far as I\u2019m aware,\u201d he says, \u201cthere were no political goals at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, FFO published a report\u2014based on materials obtained by America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit started by Stephen Miller\u2014claiming that Cat Park was part of the State Department\u2019s effort to \u201csubliminally train young people to associate social media posts alleging government corruption as being \u2018fake news.\u2019\u201d The sinister interpretation was picked up by conservative media outlets like Just the News<\/em>, which quoted Benz. That article was in turn picked up by Russia\u2019s RT News, which also frequently quoted Benz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It remained a relatively obscure, niche idea, but it didn\u2019t need huge reach to set the stage for official government action. In 2023, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, citing FFO\u2019s reports, demanded that the State Department turn over documents about its efforts to fight disinformation\u2014efforts including Cat Park. By the end of the next year, Congress voted to defund the GEC, and news outlets like Fox News used Cat Park to illustrate the nefariousness of this work. It was the culmination of a conspiracy theory that had jumped from the fringes of the online right to more mainstream and high-profile outlets and later into the halls of power.<\/p>\n

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Though this dynamic is not unique to the CIC narrative, we found that it has played out again and again with numerous targets, from the early attacks on the Disinformation Governance Board to the subsequent shutdown of other disinformation-focused research organizations, like the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Election Integrity Partnership<\/a>, and later of government agencies like R\/FIMI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In each case, our analysis found, CIC-related conspiracy theories on social media were supported by a number of conservative groups; key among them were FFO and AFL, which played a crucial role in obtaining government records they claimed showed evidence that conservatives were censored. FFO then used these documents to write exhaustive reports supposedly connecting the dots to explain how the censorship industry worked. AFL also instigated a number of lawsuits against supposedly CIC-implicated individuals and organizations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These materials were then amplified by a slew of right-wing media outlets, many with shared funding.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Much of that financing was funneled through the Informing America Foundation (IAF), a media-oriented grant-making organization that John Solomon helped to launch after leaving his position<\/a> at The Hill<\/em> back in 2019, following public scrutiny of columns about the Bidens and Ukraine. IAF funds a network of podcasts called Real America\u2019s Voice, which includes shows run by key Trump allies like Steve Bannon, Jack Prosobiec, and the late Charlie Kirk, as well as Solomon himself. It also finances a network of what media scholars call \u201cpink slime\u201d websites<\/a>, which are designed to look like nonpartisan local news but have a partisan slant. Benz appeared regularly on these podcasts and in these outlets, further embedding the CIC narrative in the right-wing information ecosystem\u2014while simultaneously enhancing his own profile and revenue streams on X Premium and other platforms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, IAF indirectly supported FFO and Benz personally, donating millions of dollars to conservative organizations that acted as the biggest financial sponsors of his work. In 2023 and 2024, the only years that he appears directly in any nonprofits\u2019 financial documents, Benz was paid $530,000 from one organization alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In an email, Solomon defended the accuracy of his reporting for The Hill<\/em> and said that while he had helped to come up with the idea for IAF, he isn\u2019t part of the group\u2019s official leadership and doesn\u2019t have a hand in issuing grants. He also noted that he was an early adopter of the \u201ccensorship-industrial complex\u201d framing, having used the term as far back as 2021.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are no conspiracy theories about federally encouraged censorship,\u201d Solomon said. \u201cIt happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CIC narratives circulating on the right-wing internet and podcasts repeatedly helped propel offline action, through both private lawsuits and congressional investigations. Musk\u2019s X was especially litigious, suing at least three organizations that reported on or advocated against hate speech on the platform. (Those suits have since been dismissed.) Then, once Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2023, a new subcommittee on the \u201cweaponization of the federal government,\u201d chaired by Jordan, launched various investigations into the people and organizations that Benz, Taibbi, Shellenberger, Musk, and other proponents of the CIC theory had singled out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cReceiving a subpoena for your documents is absolutely overwhelming,\u201d says Clare Melford, executive director of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based nonprofit that assesses levels of disinformation on websites and was the focus of a congressional investigation starting in <\/strong>April 2023.<\/strong> \u201cIt can be financially crippling\u2014and that\u2019s the point.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Benz reflected on the impact of the right-wing internet during a symposium in April 2024 at the Heritage Foundation, which had published Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the second Trump administration, the previous year. While he credited Jordan and other members of Congress for fighting against the censorship-industrial complex, he argued that lawmakers had taken up the cause \u201cbecause everyone\u2019s already talking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe number one thing is: Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it,\u201d Benz said. It\u2019s a mantra he seems to have taken to heart: Our analysis found he mentioned variations of the word \u201ccensorship,\u201d on average, once every three and a half minutes in his YouTube videos.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t underestimate,\u201d Benz said at the Heritage Foundation, \u201cthe power of one small voice accumulated over millions to do a lot of damage to this system.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

The damage<\/h3>\n

The effects of this war on censorship became even more profound when the new administration took office the following year. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order<\/a> titled \u201cRestoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,\u201d which accused the Biden administration of having \u201ctrampled\u201d on Americans\u2019 free-speech rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This laid the foundation for administration decisions ending millions of dollars in support for disinformation- and misinformation-focused research and shutting down numerous government agencies\u2014all in the name of fighting censorship. One of the highest-profile examples was the dismantling of USAID, which has resulted in devastating cuts to programs designed to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS, improve maternal health, and provide food aid around the world. Administration figures claimed loudly that the agency wasted federal dollars and that its values were misaligned<\/a> with US interests, but perhaps less well known is how false ideas about censorship played a critical part in its demise.<\/p>\n

The agency had been a longtime obsession for Benz, who argued that it was an instrument of censorship as early as FFO\u2019s first report in July 2022. An effort in Brazil to limit the spread of disinformation on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, FFO alleged, was a form of censorship financed by USAID and others. Later that year, Benz also accused USAID of funding what he called a \u201cCountering Disinformation Guidebook for Digital Censorship.\u201d In reality, it was a USAID primer for its overseas\u00a0staff<\/a> on how to recognize disinformation campaigns in the foreign countries where the agency operated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our analysis shows that Benz and FFO were the dominant voices promoting conspiracy theories around USAID and censorship from 2022 until late 2024, when Benz talked about it on Rogan\u2019s podcast. \u201cUSAID is effectively a \u2018switch player\u2019 to assist the Pentagon on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operation front,\u201d Benz alleged.<\/p>\n

His appearance drew millions of viewers, including Musk. The trillionaire retweeted<\/a> an X user\u2019s glowing summary of the interview. \u201cMike Benz just revealed everything,\u201d the user wrote, including \u201chow \u2018democracy\u2019 was redefined to silence you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This marked<\/a> the first time Musk, newly installed at DOGE, had posted specifically about USAID. But Benz and Musk were already acquainted. The two had exchanged<\/a> tweets<\/a> and threads<\/a> about censorship and other conspiracy theories for years.<\/p>\n

Only a few weeks after Benz\u2019s Rogan appearance, Musk was using the \u201ccensorship-industrial complex\u201d language<\/a> directly\u2014and USAID was on life support.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

In February 2025, Andrew Natsios, a Republican who had led USAID under President George W. Bush, tried to defend the agency against Benz\u2019s conspiracy theories and other charges. During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, asked Natsios about a slide Benz had shared on social media that supposedly illustrated how the military could work with USAID and other agencies to incite riots, \u201cdestabilize nations,\u201d and craft strategic \u201cdisinformation campaigns.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Benz told you is nonsense,\u201d Natsios declared. Though he tried repeatedly to explain that the slide wasn\u2019t made by USAID and therefore couldn\u2019t represent its views, Luna remained unconvinced. After the hearing, she turned to X to thank Benz for exposing the censorship-industrial complex. \u201cUSAID is about as swampy as it gets,\u201d she wrote. Benz responded with the American flag emoji.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was astonished by the whole hearing,\u201d Natsios told MIT Technology Review<\/em> and Type Investigations, his frustration still evident. To defend the agency, he had made numerous media appearances, including interviews on Fox News and 60 Minutes<\/em>, and reached out to Rogan\u2019s podcast. But the damage had already been done; by the end of March, the administration formally notified Congress that USAID would be shut down.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey moved so rapidly,\u201d Natsios says, \u201cwe couldn\u2019t succeed.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

The narrative of a censorship-industrial complex is also reshaping the United States\u2019 relationships with other countries, including ostensible allies. For instance, the White House\u2019s latest national security strategy<\/a>, released in November, argues that Europe is facing the \u201cprospect of civilizational erasure\u201d\u2014partly because of the \u201ccensorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the European Union\u2019s 2022 Digital Services Act, which placed guardrails on online platforms, has become a key flashpoint in the transatlantic relationship, with Benz calling it the European Union\u2019s \u201cflagship online censorship law.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The EU regulation requires social media companies to remove content that violates national laws of member countries, including laws about hate speech and disinformation. But for Benz and his allies, the DSA aimed to achieve not accountability but an exportable censorship architecture. Because global tech platforms typically standardize their content moderation policies, \u201cUS tech companies would be forced to apply similar censorship measures at home,\u201d Benz wrote in the conservative outlet Townhall <\/em>in May 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vice President JD Vance later picked up this theme in a high-profile speech in Munich in February 2025, warning that free speech in Europe was \u201cin retreat.\u201d Just a week later, Trump issued executive orders <\/a>indicating that he would consider tariffs in retaliation for \u201cany act, policy, or practice in the European Union,\u201d like the DSA, that worked to \u201cundermine free speech or foster censorship.\u201d Last summer, Rubio instructed<\/a> diplomats to lobby directly against it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Internally, however, at least one effort to find evidence of censorship turned up little. Last spring, Vance tasked<\/a> a team at the State Department with gathering examples of incidents in which social media platforms had censored speech on the continent. A former official who received the request told us that Vance wasn\u2019t interested in \u201cthe imprisonment of human rights activists for speaking [out], or journalists, or academics\u201d in Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, or Russia\u2014issues the department already tracked. Instead, the staffer says, Vance \u201cwanted to focus on an extremely narrow set of posts related to far-right ideology, things related to abortion,\u201d and even coverage of his own Munich speech. Vance directed the investigators to focus on Germany, France, Ireland, and the UK\u2014all US allies where the administration has recently expressed support for far-right parties and politicians.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The team followed Vance\u2019s directive, but instead of a \u201cvast conspiracy,\u201d the former official says, it found fewer than 10 instances of content that had been removed from X, all related to ongoing law enforcement investigations into violent extremism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Vance\u2019s office declined to comment but pointed to previous remarks<\/a> denying that he had ordered such a report. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

And the administration hasn\u2019t let up. After the European Commission issued<\/a> a \u20ac120 million fine to X last December, the State Department announced that five Europeans who had advocated for tougher content moderation regulation through the DSA and other mechanisms would be banned from entering the US. Rubio called these individuals, including the GDI\u2019s Melford, \u201cagents of the censorship-industrial complex.\u201d\u00a0(A judge has since blocked the government from enforcing these bans as litigation continues, calling them \u201clikely viewpoint discriminatory.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The fight for truth <\/h3>\n

The war on supposed censorship continued to intensify over the first half of this year. In February the State Department announced<\/a> a new web portal, freedom.gov<\/a>, which will enable people abroad\u2014especially Europeans\u2014to view hate speech, foreign propaganda, and other online content that had been banned by their own governments. The same month, Jordan and his staff on the House Judiciary Committee put out a second report<\/a> on European censorship, naming additional organizations that they allege were involved. And former R\/FIMI staffers continue to worry that the release of a long-teased \u201ctransparency initiative\u201d<\/a> from Beattie, who shut down the office, could reveal<\/a> sensitive information about individuals and organizations abroad who have put themselves at risk to fight propaganda from China and Russia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the key figures responsible for the CIC narrative from outside of government are now being rewarded with influential positions within it. \u201cI\u2019m like an octopus juggler right now,\u201d Benz bragged in April 2025, shortly after his interview with Rubio about the demise of R\/FIMI. The activities he referred to, he vaguely explained, included his work in the media, on policy matters, and on litigation, as well as with Congress.\u00a0And that was even before he started working as a special government employee<\/a> at what remains of USAID, now housed in the State Department, where he\u2019s been reportedly investigating the wrongdoing that he has long alleged.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

<\/strong>\u201c<\/strong>The very thing that they are accusing people of\u2014censoring\u2014is something that they\u2019re now perpetuating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nina Jankowicz, disinformation scholar<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In February, meanwhile, Beattie was appointed the State Department\u2019s senior advisor for Brazil. And in May, the White House appointed John Solomon a special government employee focused on matters of \u201ctransparency<\/a>.\u201d (Solomon noted that it was an unpaid position.)<\/p>\n

The State Department did not respond to broader questions about the CIC narrative and its effects on policy, the vice president\u2019s directive to department employees to find censorship in Western Europe, or the status of Beattie\u2019s transparency initiative. \u201cUnder Dr. Beattie\u2019s leadership \u2026 the Department made great strides in combating censorship groups,\u201d a department official wrote in an email.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, the state-run digital influence campaigns that organizations like GEC were designed to fight are becoming more sophisticated. Over the course of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Iran has produced AI-generated propaganda\u2014and, by many<\/a> accounts<\/a>, is winning the narrative war. Moscow has been working to inject<\/a> Russian propaganda into the data sets used by US companies to train AI chatbots, increasing the likelihood that popular chatbots repeat Russian narratives. And the Chinese government has been recruiting its domestic AI companies to conduct state-aligned influence campaigns, according to an assessment from one US intelligence agency; the Trump administration has since dramatically downsized that office too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last summer, an AI-powered impostor<\/a> pretending to be Rubio reached out to lawmakers and diplomats. \u201cI was amused to learn that \u2026 at some point, Marco Rubio began to worry about deepfakes, and then it actually happened,\u201d a former State staffer says. \u201cAnd the people that were charged with working on it [at the department] were fired\u201d\u2014that is, they had been let go months earlier, alongside the rest of R\/FIMI.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

From a foreign policy standpoint, this is a \u201cunilateral disarmament\u201d by the United States, says former GEC head James Rubin\u2014\u201cleaving the information space open to America\u2019s adversaries, especially China, Russia, and Iran.\u201d The result is that everyone is more vulnerable to bad-faith actors online, often without being aware of the deception taking place.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"\n
MATTHIEU BOUREL<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

These threats are compounded by the way many tech companies have come to align with the Trump administration, a stance that critics say threatens the safety of their billions of users. Last January, Meta ended fact-checking on Facebook, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg stating in a video announcement that the company would \u201cwork with President Trump to push back on governments around the world\u201d that were \u201cgoing after American companies and pushing to censor more.\u201d Meta, X, and Google have also all paid tens of millions to settle lawsuits Trump brought for their decisions to remove his social media accounts after January 6.\u00a0(Google declined to comment. Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

\n

<\/strong>\u201c<\/strong>Democracy is about the hearts and minds of the people. If you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike Benz to an audience at the Heritage Foundation<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today, the CIC narrative is far larger than any single organization or individual. And that\u2019s by design. Its proponents have constructed the battle much more broadly, as a sweeping defense of free speech. \u201cIf we were allowed to speak freely, millions and millions of people would hear a truth they simply could not resist,\u201d Benz said back in his Frame Game days. \u201cThey would join this movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a movement that above all appears to be attacking \u201cthe nature of truth,\u201d says Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University who has studied conspiracy theories for decades.<\/em> \u201cThe implications for politics are really scary, because it makes conversation and debate virtually impossible. How can you talk to people if they believe that whatever you say is based upon some kind of set of falsehoods?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Benz and his peers have expressed similar sentiments. In the fight over censorship, the sides are constantly flipping: The accusers become the accused, the victims become the victimizers, and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to look beyond the political narratives themselves and consider actions, says David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a former UN special rapporteur for free speech. \u201cThe administration probably realizes that \u2026 Americans do not generally feel censored by Europe or Brazil,\u201d he says. But by focusing on Europe, Brazil, and the broader CIC idea, it hopes to \u201cdistract\u201d from the fact that \u201cAmericans are definitely facing the most substantial censorship in, I don\u2019t know, 100 years,\u201d he adds\u2014though \u201cit\u2019s actually the Trump administration\u201d that is responsible.<\/p>\n

The notion of a censorship-industrial complex is proving again and again to be a convenient and powerful pretext for silencing the loudest critics of those in power. \u201cThe very thing that they are accusing people of\u2014censoring\u2014is something that they\u2019re now perpetuating,\u201d says Jankowicz.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That, of course, may have been the goal all along. From the stage of the Heritage Foundation back in 2024, Benz spoke of the CIC as having its hand on a \u201cGod button\u201d giving it the power to \u201ccontrol discourse on every political issue.\u201d Now conservatives can wield that power themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cDemocracy is about the hearts and minds of the people,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cIf you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Eileen Guo is a senior reporter for features and investigations at MIT Technology Review.<\/em> Gisela Perez de Acha is an open-source investigative reporter. Martin Sona is an open-source researcher with a background in applied social neuroscience.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading.\u00a0 For months, Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency had been cutting a wide swath through federal agencies, gutting teams that worked on everything from scientific research to Social Security to international aid. So when the employees of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R\/FIMI)\u2014a unit tasked with tracking foreign disinformation\u2014received a note asking them to meet in half an hour, many sensed their time had come. \u201cWe all had heard \u2026 that there was going to be a day they would shut down our office,\u201d says one former staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Darren Beattie, a far-right provocateur who had been serving as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, wasted no time with pleasantries, telling the gathered employees that the office was being shuttered and that their jobs were being eliminated. The mood in the room oscillated between somber and outraged, the former employee says, with \u201clots of young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked.\u201d But elsewhere at the State Department, the closure of R\/FIMI was cause for celebration.\u00a0 \u201cWe ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,\u201d Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced shortly after in a video interview with a right-wing internet activist named Mike Benz. \u201cThis is obviously amazing news,\u201d Benz responded, before teeing up a theory he\u2019d been promoting for years: \u201cWe now have so many people wondering, Was I censored because of something the State Department did?\u201d The notion that the State Department had been working to silence Americans is perhaps unfamiliar to many people, but it\u2019s a key part of a larger web of conspiratorial ideas that have been promoted for a decade on far-right blogs, podcasts, and social media. The basic theory is that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms\u2014or what believers refer to as the \u201ccensorship-industrial complex\u201d\u2014has been working to suppress conservative and populist speech online. The fight against \u201cdisinformation,\u201d as Benz put it on a 2025 podcast, \u201cis censorship in disguise.\u201d R\/FIMI, along with a predecessor office with the same mission, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), had been among the right\u2019s long-standing targets; now it was one of its latest casualties.\u00a0 The second Trump administration\u2019s war on censorship has contributed to the dismantling of numerous government agencies, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI\u2019s Foreign Influence Task Force, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It\u2019s razed the infrastructure that tracks and counters attempts by foreign powers to influence elections and popular opinion. It has also been used to justify sweeping travel bans and sanctions on targeted individuals and entire industries. It\u2019s provoked tensions with the European Union over its tech regulations, which these critics say silence Americans. And it\u2019s even reshaped US national security strategy. Its reach, though, isn\u2019t limited to US bureaucracy, academia, or civil society groups. The weaponization of ideas about censorship also affects the billions of people globally who get information, or interact with each other, online\u2014which is to say, just about everyone.\u00a0 Much of what has been characterized as censorship is really part of an effort to make the internet safer. This could include work quantifying just how often people online have generated nonconsensual sexualized content of women and children; helping victims of online stalking, doxxing, and other crimes seek justice; or identifying whether someone we are interacting with online is genuine and not, say, a foreign agent posing as an American voter.\u00a0 But where did this idea come from?\u00a0 Over the past nine months, MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations have dug into its origins and traced how a relatively niche conspiracy theory from the far right was able to\u2014and continues to\u2014influence a wide range of actions by the second Trump administration. In myriad ways, the theory of the censorship-industrial complex, or CIC, explains the logic behind how the Trump administration operates both at home and in the world.\u00a0 To understand just how it jumped from the edges of the information sphere to influence the decision-making of the country\u2019s most powerful individuals, we used open-source methods to scrape content from right-wing websites; scrutinized hundreds of thousands of pages of public records, videos, and podcasts; and analyzed over 100,000 social media posts that have promoted the narrative. Our analysis found that although the roots of the idea run deep and wide, the CIC framework really took off in early 2023, driven by a handful of individuals, with support from a close-knit collection of right-wing organizations and media outlets.\u00a0 At the center of this effort is Mike Benz, Rubio\u2019s interview partner last April. Benz served a brief stint in Donald Trump\u2019s first administration but has largely remained unknown, even as some of his ideas\u2014including the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a NATO asset and the pro-white-identity content he published anonymously before he joined the government\u2014have gained followers. Our analysis uncovers just how integral he in particular was to spreading the CIC theory: We found him to be the most prolific creator of related content online, which was in turn picked up by right-wing media outlets and podcasts and eventually reached the highest echelons of power in the US. His work prompted congressional\u2014and eventually presidential\u2014action and generated both attention and financial benefits for Benz personally. (Benz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Last April, near the end of the interview at the State Department, Rubio shot Benz a friendly finger gun.\u00a0 \u201cThanks for your attention to this topic,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cI know you\u2019ve been on this a long time.\u201d The origins of discontent Every conspiracy theory is sustained by a unique blend of grievances and shadowy actors, but at their<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"pmpro_default_level":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center 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