How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy

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.

For months, Elon Musk’s 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)—a unit tasked with tracking foreign disinformation—received a note asking them to meet in half an hour, many sensed their time had come.

“We all had heard … that there was going to be a day they would shut down our office,” 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 “lots of young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked.”

But elsewhere at the State Department, the closure of R/FIMI was cause for celebration.

“We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced shortly after in a video interview with a right-wing internet activist named Mike Benz.

“This is obviously amazing news,” Benz responded, before teeing up a theory he’d been promoting for years: “We now have so many people wondering, Was I censored because of something the State Department did ?”

The notion that the State Department had been working to silence Americans is perhaps unfamiliar to many people, but it’s 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—or what believers refer to as the “censorship-industrial complex”—has been working to suppress conservative and populist speech online. The fight against “disinformation,” as Benz put it on a 2025 podcast, “is censorship in disguise.” R/FIMI, along with a predecessor office with the same mission, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), had been among the right’s long-standing targets; now it was one of its latest casualties.

The second Trump administration’s 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’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s 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’s provoked tensions with the European Union over its tech regulations, which these critics say silence Americans. And it’s even reshaped US national security strategy.

Its reach, though, isn’t 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—which is to say, just about everyone.

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.

But where did this idea come from?

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—and continues to—influence 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.

To understand just how it jumped from the edges of the information sphere to influence the decision-making of the country’s 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.

At the center of this effort is Mike Benz, Rubio’s interview partner last April. Benz served a brief stint in Donald Trump’s first administration but has largely remained unknown, even as some of his ideas—including the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a NATO asset and the pro-white-identity content he published anonymously before he joined the government—have 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—and eventually presidential—action 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.

“Thanks for your attention to this topic,” Rubio said. “I know you’ve been on this a long time.”

The origins of discontent

Every conspiracy theory is sustained by a unique blend of grievances and shadowy actors, but at their core, they’re shockingly similar . 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.

This also describes “the best propaganda campaigns,” according to David Millar, a longtime US intelligence official who spent years at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute teaching future diplomats how to recognize such agitprop. “They’re seldom just complete lies,” Millar says. “They’re usually taking something out of proportion or amplifying something that actually happened into something that didn’t.”

That’s the case with the idea of censorship that targets the right online. In 2016, an anonymous former employee of Facebook claimed that the site was suppressing conservative news in its “trending topics” section. The company scrambled to reassure conservatives that this was not the case—but still axed its human editors . Not long after, in the wake of Russian influence operations in the 2016 US presidential election and the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, social media platforms amped up 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 .

To right-leaning internet users, the posts and accounts flagged as problematic or false “sure sounded like stuff that agreed with [their] belief system,” says Dannagal Young, director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication. “Russia had done their homework so well that the kinds of things that were … generated by Russian propagandists were not that distinct from things people in the States would say.”

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—if at all. What should happen if, say, a foreign intelligence service impersonated people en masse on social media to manipulate citizens? What if someone—anyone—said something provocative, hateful, or meant to incite violence? Or something that didn’t directly call for violence but could provoke it nonetheless? The pressure on social media companies to act was immense.

The pandemic became a “pivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives… feeling like, This isn’t right. Not everyone’s getting censored, just us .” -Dannagal Young, political communications scholar

And more or less in real time, tech companies—as well as government bureaucrats, researchers, and journalists—had 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 “misinformation” and “disinformation,” though there wasn’t a clear definition of either term ( nor of “censorship”). As a result of this 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—as some tech leaders have since argued . Alternative services and platforms sprang up, intending to create spaces free of “censorship” (by which they meant content moderation); Parler, Gab, and others tended to cater to right-leaning voices. They themselves were later kicked off Apple’s and Google’s app stores or banned by hosting and payment services.

High-profile narratives—like the claims that Twitter “shadow-banned” conservatives in 2018 and suppressed news about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020—have 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.

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 (including claims regarding the pandemic’s origins), took down posts, and banned prominent vaccine deniers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—sometimes with the encouragement of parts of the federal government.

The pandemic became a “pivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives,” says Young. They were “feeling like, This isn’t right. Not everyone’s getting censored, just us .”

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’s allies and supporters, however, his removal only encouraged the idea that a network of actors was working behind the scenes to censor their voices—and keep the president from retaining power.

“It 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,” Benz later told Joe Rogan on his podcast. This was proof, Benz concluded, of the dark power of censorship.

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’s efforts on this front; it would be led by Nina Jankowicz, who had cut her teeth countering Russian propaganda in Eastern Europe.

But the rollout was clumsy ; and for the far right, the group’s 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 reported , 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 “one of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of disinformation in the entire country.” Beattie, the Trump official who later shut down R/FIMI, called her “Biden’s new minister of truth,” while Benz claimed she was a “registered agent for the British crown.” She became the target of an all-out harassment campaign—and multiple death threats.

Jankowicz was also named in a lawsuit against government agencies and officials that alleged “open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.” Benz submitted a legal brief in support of the case.

The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2024, but by that time Jankowicz was long gone—she resigned just three weeks after the task force launched, citing “vile personal attacks and physical threats.” The group never met.

In February 2023 Margot Cleveland, a contributor to the conservative outlet The Federalist , gave right-wing perceptions of these events their now familiar framing in an article titled “How Trump Derangement Gave Birth to the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

“The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a ‘Disinformation Board,’ but a more insidious ‘Censorship Complex’ already exists and is growing at an alarming speed,” Cleveland wrote. “Its 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’s ability to control the conversation—and thus the country and the world.”

According to our analysis of social media posts, Cleveland’s 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. “It’s definitely catchy,” she says. “People understand what it means, given that the military-industrial complex has … been in existence since the 1950s.”

Just a few weeks later, the idea jumped toward mainstream recognition.

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

What they found was widely regarded to fall substantially short of a conspiracy against the right—but on March 9, 2023, the pair appeared before Congress to discuss the results of their “Twitter Files” inquiry at a hearing convened by Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican. Shellenberger’s 68-page testimony laid out what he claimed was a vast network of government agencies and contractors that allegedly censored Americans through “blacklists of disfavored people”—“pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.” Shellenberger shared his testimony on Twitter, where it was viewed more than 2.7 million times, our analysis shows. A video of Taibbi’s 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.)

“We were, like, proverbially touching the elephant.” Mike Shellenberger

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

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 “a conservative-liberal issue.” “Though 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,” he said. Shellenberger, Jordan, Beattie, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

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.

Even among the conspiracy theory’s top proponents, however, Benz stands out in terms of output. Our analysis shows that by March 2026 he’d posted on X about the “censorship industry” or “censorship-industrial complex” more than 440 times since opening an account in December 2022, after Musk’s 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 “censor,” that figure jumped to over 2,200 times.

In a 2023 podcast interview, Shellenberger credited Benz with opening his eyes to the full extent to which conservative voices were being silenced. “We basically went from being concerned about bad forms of censorship by Twitter and other social media platforms to being concerned about government censorship,” Shellenberger said.

“We were, like, proverbially touching the elephant. We didn’t understand what the elephant was [until] we discovered your work, Mike.”

The amplifiers

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

This was when, as NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny later revealed , he began posting content online under a pseudonym, Frame Game. “Frame Game Radio” published across a number of platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, and Gab—mixing white identitarian and antisemitic views (though Benz identifies as Jewish) with alt-right-aligned complaints about the “diversity industry” and censorship. (In a lengthy rebuttal on X to the 2023 NBC News story, Benz claimed that Frame Game was a “project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews,” to which he “contributed in a very limited manner.” He also stated, “Let me be clear: I am extremely proud of this.”)

Frame Game’s content spoke positively about Hitler’s Mein Kampf , warned of “white genocide,” and claimed that “censorship is almost exclusively a Jewish phenomenon.” For a few months, the account ran a never-before-reported campaign for a “White Mother Fertility Fund,” which promised to donate 20% of the channel’s revenue to a mother nominated by listeners.

“Censorship” became a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation.

This kind of content earned Frame Game the praise of the white nationalist publication Counter-Currents , which described the anonymous figure in May 2018 as “a rising star” and a “pro-white and Judeo-critical online activist”—noting that the Twitter account was “followed by everyone from Steve Sailer to David Duke” (references, respectively, to a columnist for the white nationalist website VDare and the former KKK Grand Wizard).

Another preoccupation was the supposed suppression of conservative speech. In hours-long videos, Frame Game used “censorship” as a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation—going as far as to apply it to any kind of “critique” at all. The account was particularly incensed by the deplatforming of Alex Jones in 2018, which it called the “Pearl Harbor event of free speech.”

Online censorship was a “keystone issue,” the channel said in 2018, affecting the right’s ability to achieve any of its other goals: “You have to fix that, or else you can’t advocate for anything else effectively.”

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’s speechwriting team at the White House.

Then, in November 2020, Benz moved to the State Department, briefly serving in the first Trump administration’s 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: “All things related to the internet connected to US foreign policy were under my purview,” Benz told Shellenberger in a podcast in March 2023. “I got to see the inner nucleus of how Big Government and Big Tech have so completely fused together in relatively seamless ways.”

It also helped set up Benz’s post-Trump career. In April 2022, he launched the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), which describes itself as a “free speech watchdog” dedicated to championing “digital freedom around the world.” Though it calls itself a “foundation,” 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—and 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.)

“Its implications for politics are really scary, because it makes conversation and debate virtually impossible.” Political scientist Michael Barkun

One of FFO’s targets was a relatively obscure educational game called Cat Park. Created in 2022 with funding from the State Department’s GEC, Cat Park was designed to “build resistance to disinformation and promote digital media literacy” for kids ages 15 and up, according to its official description .

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.

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—far fewer than the numbers that played similar online games the agency had worked on to highlight the issue of disinformation. “As far as I’m aware,” he says, “there were no political goals at all.”

Nevertheless, FFO published a report—based on materials obtained by America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit started by Stephen Miller—claiming that Cat Park was part of the State Department’s effort to “subliminally train young people to associate social media posts alleging government corruption as being ‘fake news.’” The sinister interpretation was picked up by conservative media outlets like Just the News , which quoted Benz. That article was in turn picked up by Russia’s RT News, which also frequently quoted Benz.

It remained a relatively obscure, niche idea, but it didn’t need huge reach to set the stage for official government action. In 2023, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, citing FFO’s reports, demanded that the State Department turn over documents about its efforts to fight disinformation—efforts 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.

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 , and later of government agencies like R/FIMI.

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.

These materials were then amplified by a slew of right-wing media outlets, many with shared funding.

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 at The Hill back in 2019, following public scrutiny of columns about the Bidens and Ukraine. IAF funds a network of podcasts called Real America’s 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 “pink slime” websites , 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—while simultaneously enhancing his own profile and revenue streams on X Premium and other platforms.

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’ financial documents, Benz was paid $530,000 from one organization alone.

In an email, Solomon defended the accuracy of his reporting for The Hill and said that while he had helped to come up with the idea for IAF, he isn’t part of the group’s official leadership and doesn’t have a hand in issuing grants. He also noted that he was an early adopter of the “censorship-industrial complex” framing, having used the term as far back as 2021.

“There are no conspiracy theories about federally encouraged censorship,” Solomon said. “It happened.”

The CIC narratives circulating on the right-wing internet and podcasts repeatedly helped propel offline action, through both private lawsuits and congressional investigations. Musk’s 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 “weaponization of the federal government,” 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.

“Receiving a subpoena for your documents is absolutely overwhelming,” 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 April 2023 . “It can be financially crippling—and that’s the point.”

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 “because everyone’s already talking about it.”

“The number one thing is: Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it,” Benz said. It’s a mantra he seems to have taken to heart: Our analysis found he mentioned variations of the word “censorship,” on average, once every three and a half minutes in his YouTube videos.

“Don’t underestimate,” Benz said at the Heritage Foundation, “the power of one small voice accumulated over millions to do a lot of damage to this system.”

The damage

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 titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which accused the Biden administration of having “trampled” on Americans’ free-speech rights.

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—all 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 with US interests, but perhaps less well known is how false ideas about censorship played a critical part in its demise.

The agency had been a longtime obsession for Benz, who argued that it was an instrument of censorship as early as FFO’s 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 “Countering Disinformation Guidebook for Digital Censorship.” In reality, it was a USAID primer for its overseas staff on how to recognize disinformation campaigns in the foreign countries where the agency operated.

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’s podcast. “USAID is effectively a ‘switch player’ 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,” Benz alleged.

His appearance drew millions of viewers, including Musk. The trillionaire retweeted an X user’s glowing summary of the interview. “Mike Benz just revealed everything,” the user wrote, including “how ‘democracy’ was redefined to silence you.”

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

Only a few weeks after Benz’s Rogan appearance, Musk was using the “censorship-industrial complex” language directly—and USAID was on life support.

In February 2025, Andrew Natsios, a Republican who had led USAID under President George W. Bush, tried to defend the agency against Benz’s 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, “destabilize nations,” and craft strategic “disinformation campaigns.”

“What Benz told you is nonsense,” Natsios declared. Though he tried repeatedly to explain that the slide wasn’t made by USAID and therefore couldn’t represent its views, Luna remained unconvinced. After the hearing, she turned to X to thank Benz for exposing the censorship-industrial complex. “USAID is about as swampy as it gets,” she wrote. Benz responded with the American flag emoji.

“I was astonished by the whole hearing,” Natsios told MIT Technology Review 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 , and reached out to Rogan’s podcast. But the damage had already been done; by the end of March, the administration formally notified Congress that USAID would be shut down.

“They moved so rapidly,” Natsios says, “we couldn’t succeed.”

The narrative of a censorship-industrial complex is also reshaping the United States’ relationships with other countries, including ostensible allies. For instance, the White House’s latest national security strategy , released in November, argues that Europe is facing the “prospect of civilizational erasure”—partly because of the “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”

And the European Union’s 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’s “flagship online censorship law.”

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, “US tech companies would be forced to apply similar censorship measures at home,” Benz wrote in the conservative outlet Townhall in May 2022.

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 “in retreat.” Just a week later, Trump issued executive orders indicating that he would consider tariffs in retaliation for “any act, policy, or practice in the European Union,” like the DSA, that worked to “undermine free speech or foster censorship.” Last summer, Rubio instructed diplomats to lobby directly against it.

Internally, however, at least one effort to find evidence of censorship turned up little. Last spring, Vance tasked 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’t interested in “the imprisonment of human rights activists for speaking [out], or journalists, or academics” in Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, or Russia—issues the department already tracked. Instead, the staffer says, Vance “wanted to focus on an extremely narrow set of posts related to far-right ideology, things related to abortion,” and even coverage of his own Munich speech. Vance directed the investigators to focus on Germany, France, Ireland, and the UK—all US allies where the administration has recently expressed support for far-right parties and politicians.

The team followed Vance’s directive, but instead of a “vast conspiracy,” 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.

A spokesperson for Vance’s office declined to comment but pointed to previous remarks denying that he had ordered such a report. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

And the administration hasn’t let up. After the European Commission issued a €120 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’s Melford, “agents of the censorship-industrial complex.” (A judge has since blocked the government from enforcing these bans as litigation continues, calling them “likely viewpoint discriminatory.”)

The fight for truth

The war on supposed censorship continued to intensify over the first half of this year. In February the State Department announced a new web portal, freedom.gov , which will enable people abroad—especially Europeans—to 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 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 “transparency initiative” from Beattie, who shut down the office, could reveal sensitive information about individuals and organizations abroad who have put themselves at risk to fight propaganda from China and Russia.

Some of the key figures responsible for the CIC narrative from outside of government are now being rewarded with influential positions within it. “I’m like an octopus juggler right now,” 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. And that was even before he started working as a special government employee at what remains of USAID, now housed in the State Department, where he’s been reportedly investigating the wrongdoing that he has long alleged.

“ The very thing that they are accusing people of—censoring—is something that they’re now perpetuating.” Nina Jankowicz, disinformation scholar

In February, meanwhile, Beattie was appointed the State Department’s senior advisor for Brazil. And in May, the White House appointed John Solomon a special government employee focused on matters of “ transparency .” (Solomon noted that it was an unpaid position.)

The State Department did not respond to broader questions about the CIC narrative and its effects on policy, the vice president’s directive to department employees to find censorship in Western Europe, or the status of Beattie’s transparency initiative. “Under Dr. Beattie’s leadership … the Department made great strides in combating censorship groups,” a department official wrote in an email.

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—and, by many accounts , is winning the narrative war. Moscow has been working to inject 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.

Last summer, an AI-powered impostor pretending to be Rubio reached out to lawmakers and diplomats. “I was amused to learn that … at some point, Marco Rubio began to worry about deepfakes, and then it actually happened,” a former State staffer says. “And the people that were charged with working on it [at the department] were fired”—that is, they had been let go months earlier, alongside the rest of R/FIMI.

From a foreign policy standpoint, this is a “unilateral disarmament” by the United States, says former GEC head James Rubin—“leaving the information space open to America’s adversaries, especially China, Russia, and Iran.” The result is that everyone is more vulnerable to bad-faith actors online, often without being aware of the deception taking place.

MATTHIEU BOUREL

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 “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world” that were “going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” 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. (Google declined to comment. Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.)

“ 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.” Mike Benz to an audience at the Heritage Foundation

Today, the CIC narrative is far larger than any single organization or individual. And that’s by design. Its proponents have constructed the battle much more broadly, as a sweeping defense of free speech. “If we were allowed to speak freely, millions and millions of people would hear a truth they simply could not resist,” Benz said back in his Frame Game days. “They would join this movement.”

It’s a movement that above all appears to be attacking “the nature of truth,” says Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University who has studied conspiracy theories for decades . “The 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?”

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.

That’s why it’s 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. “The administration probably realizes that … Americans do not generally feel censored by Europe or Brazil,” he says. But by focusing on Europe, Brazil, and the broader CIC idea, it hopes to “distract” from the fact that “Americans are definitely facing the most substantial censorship in, I don’t know, 100 years,” he adds—though “it’s actually the Trump administration” that is responsible.

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. “The very thing that they are accusing people of—censoring—is something that they’re now perpetuating,” says Jankowicz.

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 “God button” giving it the power to “control discourse on every political issue.” Now conservatives can wield that power themselves.

“Democracy is about the hearts and minds of the people,” he told the audience. “If you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default.”

Eileen Guo is a senior reporter for features and investigations at MIT Technology Review. Gisela Perez de Acha is an open-source investigative reporter. Martin Sona is an open-source researcher with a background in applied social neuroscience.