Lawfare Daily: Eileen Guo on Whether “the Censorship-Industrial Complex” Actually Exists

become really hard to tell if you're just a person on the internet if this idea that sounds like it matches your experience of reality if that's actually another person that lives next door or in the next street from you was saying or if that's something that is coming from a foreign intelligence service. It's the Wallfair podcast. I'm Wallfair Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and I'm here

today with a lean glow of the MIT technology. Most of the experts that we spoke to for this story believe that we have really defamed ourselves in our ability to counter foreign disinformation or influence campaigns. We'll be discussing whether the censorship industrial complex is something that really exists or was created as a boogie man in order to justify a restructuring of the United

States as an anti-disinformation reference.

“Before we get started because I think there's a lot of threads to pull from your article”

can you just give our audience a sort of two minute overview of your narrative in case they haven't read it previously? Yeah absolutely so our article really traces the evolution of this idea of the censorship industrial complex and we kind of start out actually with the starting point of how I came to hear of the term and become interested in the topic which was when last April Marker

Rubio the Secretary of State went on a podcast and YouTube interview with someone that

I had never heard of before named Mike Benz to talk about this victory in fighting censorship

which was dismantling this office in the State Department that it and its predecessor office the Global Engagement Center have been monitoring and trying to counter disinformation efforts from Russia, Iran, China for many years and so the story is really our trying to understand how did this idea which on the surface you know if you don't follow these issues super closely as as Lafair actually does it just trying to understand how that came to be where

this idea came from where this person that got a massive scoop where he came from and then it was tracing the build up through the internet and the far right and into policy really

first through Congress and now through the Trump administration that's a really super top level

“of you and I'm happy to go into anything with more detail Okay so I think your explanation”

in the article itself begs a question that we have to address before we proceed and that is the dismantlement of an apparatus obviously requires that an apparatus be exist in the first place so what critics call this censorship industrial complex was presumably created for a reason regardless of whether its intentions were noble or malevolent it was theoretically responding to a problem so what are the institutions that made up this ecosystem and why were

they created it in the first place? Yeah that's a great question and I feel like the question should

be broken down into a couple of parts so I think the first one that I'm going to address is just when people like Mike Benz who was a central part of our story when they're talking about the censorship industrial complex who is it that they mean and so what they're really talking about is this network of academics civil society groups big tech to an extent although they're not primarily talking about big tech that have been working together to censor conservative and popular

“speech online and then the part that's really important here is that they claim that all of this”

was being done at the behest of the federal government and then even more specifically the Biden administration. The way that disinformation comes into all of this is that the argument is the reason that we cannot trust people that are trying to monitor or fight disinformation is that that has actually just become a way to label any kind of speech that the federal government and the Biden administration disagrees with. What it was trying to address is this was this growing understanding that the

internet is not quite the rosy place that we thought back in pre 2016 where it was just Facebook

anyone to have a voice you know it's just going to lead to all of these good outcomes but what we

were really starting to see and we start the story in 2016 but really you can go even further back but in 2016 we had some really at the time clear and generally agreed upon cases of attempts by Russia to influence opinion and elections in the United States and in the UK with the Brexit vote and as a result of that and as a result of you know other other things that we're happening in the years that followed social media platforms amped up their content moderation

and at times they had to make some decisions about what had to be moderated or not and people disagreed with that and so that's really where this idea of we are being censored comes from.

“Okay so let's dig into that because I think there is a temporal inconsistency in the world view”

you just described. This apparatus is originally created in the aftermath of the 2016 election right and both the presidential election in the United States and then to a lesser extent the Brexit vote. Yeah but there's a four-year gap between those events and the Biden administration which you claim the critics about whom you're speaking really focus a lot of their iron on.

Was anything going on in the counter disinformation sphere during the first Trump administration

or was this a beton that was only initially picked up by the Biden administration? Yeah that's a really great question and when we talk about the global engagement center which again was the starting point for me in the reporting this is something that you know people that defended the global engagement center brought up all the time. The GEC really shifted its focus to look at disinformation in this way under the Trump administration. So yes absolutely there was a lot

that was going on you know in the first Trump administration and even before the Trump administration

“I think you know so there have always been these allegations swirling of censorship”

you know before it was a censorship industrial complex before it was quite the focus on online censorship there has been this sense for decades really that Republican or conservative ideas have been censored by the elite whether that's the media whether that's academic institutions. So it's part of this broader conversation. What really changed and what really started to focus everything on the Biden administration is according to our reporting you know this

this kind of opposition that was really starting to build up during the Biden administration where a lot of former Trump officials began to start their own network of non-profits, media organizations that were creating this idea that kind of jelled into the censorship industrial

“complex. And you've mentioned one individual so far but who are the major players in this effort?”

Some of the major players in this effort include Stephen Miller who founded an organization called

America First Legal they focus on a whole slew of other issues someone described them I think

shortly after they were founded as kind of the rights answer to the ACLU. So they were not just focused on censorship or free speech but they did do a lot of public records request and then public records litigation that got documents from government agencies that were kind of taken out of context to support this narrative that there was you know collusion and censorship that was happening. And so they would pass that on to other organizations like the foundation for freedom

online which was started by Mike Benz and from there and I'm leaving out a lot of other characters but from there it would really go out to media organizations like John Solomon's just the news. He also was a really big part of media grant organization that would push the narrative to a bunch of podcasts on real America's voice which again his organization founded and then from there it would get into ever more like kind of mainstream circles so Fox News would eventually pick up a lot

of these narratives and then there was Jim Jordan who after the Republicans we took the house

organizations that had been identified as so-called actors in the censorship industrial complex and

“around that same time of course there was then Elon Musk giving internal documents from Twitter”

to a group of journalists that then kind of tied this up in a bow in a sense in terms of we now we previously had the documents from the government and now there's internal documents from Twitter that show big text response to two government requests. Okay so there's something interesting here. At the time this is happening the events you just described with the exception

of Jim Jordan none of these individuals are in government but within the first two years in the

Trump administration every single person you mentioned is either a full-time employee of the executive branch or a special government employee right. So the dismantling of the organization within this state department that you mentioned in your article at the beginning is this something that becomes a target of opportunity once the Trump administration takes power for the second time or was this something that was planned out long in advance specifically for the contingency

if Trump won the 2024 election? You know we really tried to dig in and find concrete evidence that there was coordination between all of these groups that and people that we mentioned and in our reporting and research we could not find as clear of that coordination as to be able to say it

“but I think that there is evidence that suggests that this is more than just opportunity”

a lot of these individuals that were involved that rejoined the government as either special government employees or full-time employees they had been in the Trump administration during the

first the first term whether it was for a short time or a long time that's that's another story they

moved in the same circles and there was this buildup to every organization or agency or office that was targeted during the Trump the second Trump administration was also the target of at the very least supposed reports that were saying that they were censoring you know conservatives they were usually also the subject of inquiries sometimes the subject of lawsuits and then there you know the there was also so much rhetoric that was coming from Trump as well talking about how when

“he came into office he would take retribution so I think as an investigative journalist I probably”

have to stop short of saying you know that this was definitely a coordinated effort but there there are hints that that may have been happening okay Elaine so in doing the research for this article I'm assuming that you had to look at a lot of the articles or tweets or other publications of voices that then Jordan Moshk and others claimed were censored yeah that's right we ended up building a pretty big data set and and document corpus of what was posted on social media specifically x

or Twitter before it became x documents that were and blog posts that were published by a lot of these various people also we listened to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of YouTube videos and kind of then compared a lot of that with the documents that were being put out by some of these congressional committees and hearings okay I mean I'm assuming that in the course of investigating this article you had to go through a lot of the posts or articles or podcasts that were alleged to have

been censored and I'm curious did you find that conservative voices or voices from the right actually were censored with more alacrity and intensity in a frequency then voices from the center or the left that's a great question and it's it's kind of um it's tricky what our article didn't look at was whether conservative voices were censored at a greater rate than other voices

were pieces of content that were taken down and that became kind of this grain of truth that

this you know this broader conspiracy or a narrative was built off of what we found though was that when content was taken down it was usually because it was violating a platform norm and and I

“think the other thing that is important to know is you know a lot of what organizations like again the”

state department we're looking at was content that had originally come from you know Russian propaganda and and one of the things that we found in that experts that we spoke to also confirmed is that

part of this was just because that Russian propaganda effort was so good that it would become really

hard to tell if you're just a person on the internet if this idea that sounds like it matches your experience of reality if that's actually you know another person that lives next door or in the next state from you was saying or if that's something that is coming from a foreign intelligence service and that's where all of this gets super tricky okay so the individuals you mention namely Mike Benz but some of the others common to government and your article opens

with them being able to dismantle the state departments counter foreign influence apparatus but a lot of the groups you talk about within your article and that Benz and his accolites claim where part of the censorship industrial complex aren't actually government entities so what happens there are there still non-profits and academic institutes picking up the work that the government normally would have or do they get swept up in this whole supposedly counter

censorship campaign as well yeah that's a great question and I should say that when Mike Benz

“you know did this interview with Marco Rubio he was not yet in government again and I think that”

is important because when some of these individuals that were really promoting these ideas some of their power came from being outside of government and being able to speak a little bit more freely than they would have once they were inside okay let me let me interrupt you which I which I do hate doing from um perspective of the etiquette but I think there's something we have to drill down on there yeah if these people are not government employees what sort of authority are they leveraging

to get the government to enact all of their policy goals in other words I have lots of ideas on how the government should run certain things I even have expertise in some of those fields but

“if I called up the secretary of state or even my local congressperson my guess is they probably”

wouldn't listen to me so why do folks like Mike Benz get a hearing I mean the short answer is that people like Mike Benz are essentially just private citizens that have ideas and that have built a following and that's one of the reasons that this story was so interesting for us to look at how is it that people that were not voted into office were not appointed by the people that were voted into office or are getting this power to to really set policy and it does show to us just

the power of these online circles and how these conspiracy theories can grow in gain power that said this isn't just anyone and in part part of the way that Mike Benz and Darren Beatty who

we haven't talked about so much yet have become influential is you know they were in the first

Trump administration like Benz in particular he was at the state department for the final two months that Trump was in office the first time around he worked at the state department in kind of a low level role overseeing policy and he was able to use that time as a way to then bolster his claims of expertise when he was blogging and and putting out content for so long and so I think the other way that we could answer that question is you know he made himself into an expert

this just kept elevating him until he was in this position of doing this interview with Mark

“Rubio and then after that getting appointed to as a special government employee. Okay so that's”

incredibly helpful to understand but in the next locating that we did sort of detour from something we were discussing and what happens to the private sector NGO and academic outlets that are also involved in disinformation efforts because for example you mentioned the Stanford Internet Observatory Stanford is not a part of the federal government it is an institution that claims to visiferously believe in academic freedom and they wouldn't seem to be beholden to the whims of a special

government employee or somebody very active in this sort of online magazine so how do the academic

and non-profit entities involved in this try and protect themselves as this is all coming to the

“four and are they successful? Okay so to answer that question I actually want to go back to”

something that that's kind of again like it goes back to the question of what is the censorship industrial complex and how does that idea even make sense and have logic and and so we talked in the beginning about what is the censorship industrial complex according to people like my bends and the other promoters like the idea the other piece is just what is censorship right and and I think the word is an earlier when I answered a question I was careful to say content moderation

was being done by Big Tech because legally speaking censorship refers obviously to the suppression of

like first amendment protected activities specifically by the government now we talk about censorship

like colloquially in a much broader way but the reason that that distinction is important and the

“reason that civil society is so important to this broader picture is that I think at some level”

you know the proponents of the CIC they understand that they can't just or they will have less credibility in just saying the Biden administration is censoring everyone on the right although that argument you know has also been made what they're saying though is that because the government cannot directly censor perhaps the way they want to they do it through what like then's and others have called government cutouts or here the the academic institutions like the Stanford

International Observatory or the nonprofit groups like the global disinformation index to do the censoring that the government cannot do and so now to go back to your question was actually interesting is that the attacks on these government offices actually was preceded and in a way predicted perhaps by the attacks on these non-profits and academic institutions that was happening back in 2023 you know they were they were the subjects of rumours

like going back even further so going back to your question of what is their status well a lot of them have been subject to subpoenas they've been subjected to congressional inquiries to even more individual targeting they were kind of famously five Europeans that really were pro-content moderation or pro-content moderation more specifically by the European Union through the digital services act that were individually called out and banned from entering the United States and that has

sensed been stayed at least as litigation continues but it just speaks to some of the ways that civil society has been targeted for a much longer period than then government offices that work on these issues okay so let me ask you a question and this may go a little bit beyond the scope of the article and require you to just open as a human being who has looked at this stuff but let's say the worst allegations are true and that the Biden administration through a series of

cutouts was attempting to influence what voices were able to break through through the public through social media let's just for the sake of arguments take that as a fact sure how is that any

to go after Jimmy Kimmel for promoting thought that leads more liberal yeah well I think it is

“different and it's it's actually not quite as bad as what the current administration is doing”

because it's one thing to say to Facebook hey we don't like this content the second pieces and

if you don't do what we want we will take some kind of regulatory or other action against you and that was not really happening during the Biden administration so it is different but you know the conclusion that we come to in the piece is that the Trump administration has been building its own censorship industrial complex and and that's kind of at least if you look at the narratives and what people have been saying about why censorship is bad or you know why we have to control the

information that the conversations out there that's really the direction that those narratives are pointing okay so let's talk about how that movement builds steam the movement to create the sort of

CIC on the right when the first Trump administration ends in 2020 2021 a lot of these people

or at least a decent number of these people are not well-known as you put it Mike Benz is a relatively minor staffer in a policy position at the state department Steven Miller was obviously well-known he was very much still a bit noir for the left but he's off running America first legal which doesn't really break through in the news until later Elon Musk is releasing the Twitter files but that comes a little bit later and he's not really known as a far-right figure then the way he is now

so how are the ideas that people like Mike Benz are promoting how do they gain a wide platform it's not like this is somebody who had a podcast that reached millions of people from day one

“well I think it speaks a little bit to just how these playbooks kind of operate the the podcasts”

that Mike Benz started and was featured on at first they were really obscure but

every time there was another active content moderation that seemed to confirm this idea that that people were already feeling that you know their voices are less important it would grow a little bit and and I think one way that I've been thinking about it is it's almost like Mike Benz has been creating this quasi academic body of literature that would get cited by ever made more mainstream figures until it really broke through shortly after for example the Twitter files was released and

he connected with Taiyubi and Sheldonberger who were some of the you know the more prominent journalists that got access to the Twitter files and and the ones that were really focused on censorship just just because we haven't really talked about them yet yeah you explained who those two individuals you just mentioned are for our listeners yeah so Taiyubi and Sheldonberger are two of the journalists that Elon Musk decided to give the Twitter files to access to and the two of them were

really interested in this question of censorship and and free speech and what was being censored and they ended up being the ones that wrote up and claimed that there was censorship that was happening at Twitter and these narratives that they put forth really helped to move the narrative at the censorship industrial complex from some of the more fringe outlets where and and podcasts where it was circulating to a more mainstream audience and really importantly to Jim Jordan during the Twitter file hearings

“and that's what kind of pushed all of this into the sphere of policy. Okay so you mentioned”

Jim Jordan sort of taking the lead on this we've talked about a lot of different things so before I'm gonna ask my next question I want to make sure I have the chronology of what we've discussed thus far correct. All right so during Trump won couple of organizations are set up both within the government

2016 election. Yeah and then following Trump won there in the next few years there are a lot of content

“moderation decisions that figures on the rights take issue with and there are allegations that some”

of the civil society groups which were created actually during Trump won are being used as cutouts by the Biden administration to encourage those content moderation decisions. Correct yes and this starts with individuals like Ben's sort of beginning with small audiences finding their way to larger audiences that effort picks up steam tangentially when Elon Musk releases the Twitter files

and then Jim Jordan who for those who don't know is currently the chair of the judiciary committee

in the House representatives he picks up the baton and starts holding hearings on these issues. Is that

“a good summary of the timeline must far? Yes there's obviously a lot that happens in between but”

that is a good summary. Okay so what happens once Jordan enters this arena? Yeah once Jordan enters the arena we get to a place where what was previously just complaints and grievances on the internet and you know identifying people as the problem. Now there's actually teeth to do something

about it and so Jordan holds a number of hearings he requests documents from a lot of the

organizations he brings them before the various congressional committees that he's he's a part of and starts submitting letters as well to the tech platforms asking for information essentially

“to prove this theory that he already has about censorship occurring and all of these different”

groups being a part of that. And what groups really come under fire in those hearings? Yeah so there's a couple that are really prominent one you've already brought up the Stanford internet observatory and the election integrity partnership that they worked with that looked at both COVID misinformation and previously to that to election integrity issues during the the reelection campaign. There was also a office that was started at the Department of Homeland Security the disinformation

governance board which was just meant to coordinate how DHS would handle you know rumors and how it would coordinate you know the the briefings that it would give out in response to say about disaster relief about migrants, about all of these different topics and all of them became subject to disinformation or misinformation and conspiracies about them and then from that there were there were attacks from the news that led to these to action by by Jordan and and other policymakers. Okay so

do these civil society organizations still exist? Great question most of them do but not all of them so one of the targets was a group called the Global Disinformation Index which is a London-based non-profit that rates different websites for how brand-safe they are or just how reliable they are. That was central to a lot of the narratives around conspiracy and censorship that is still around they no longer take government money as they did for a time there are other

organizations like Garm that are no longer around and sorry Garm is the global alliance for responsible media which was you know this initiative from the world federation of advertisers which was just trying to prevent like brands from having their advertising appear next to like hate speech or or things that were clearly against their brand's best interests that was the target of both investigations as well as in the end of lawsuit by by Musk and it was the the cost of

fighting these lawsuits that made it shut down and that was a thing that happened quite a lot and you

of whether it was the lawsuits or whether it was Jim Jordan's inquiries it became so challenging

“and costly for them to just focus on this kind of law fair that it made it hard for them”

or in some cases impossible to do their actual work. Okay so there's something that doesn't that that's not going to fully connect for a lot of our listeners. There's really four parties alleged to be part of the censorship industrial complex as as the individuals you write about describe it. You have the Biden administration which is voted out of office in the longer player. You have a couple different government agencies all of which is you document are

disbanded. You have the civil society group which is we just talked about some still exists some still don't but all of them are in a more financially precarious position than they were before this effort began and have sort of been for lack of a better word to think but then you also have the social media platforms themselves. They're the ones actually making the content moderation decisions. Why do they seemingly come under less fire than the other groups or if they do get as much

criticism as the other groups why are they still operating that in like profit maximizing conditions and continuing to capture market share when all of the other groups that were alleged to be involved in this no longer exist or have a lot of influence. Yeah that that is the key question. The social media companies did come under fire in certain ways. President Trump after he left office he sued the major platforms YouTube Facebook or meta and Twitter for removing his account

on January 6th. So there's you know the the targeting of the platforms themselves and the

“platforms really capitulated. Almost I think all of them at this point have reached settlements”

with the president you know Mark Zuckerberg spoke to how he wants to be a part of fighting censorship. They have removed a lot of the jobs that focus on content moderation the trust and safety workers and they've really come to think about content moderation and fact checking and all of these all of these topics that for a while was really the norm and what everyone was trying to work towards in a in a very different way. They've insured like just fallen into line but I think the other

part of that is you know there's the tech companies as these powerful entities and then there's the

people that work for the tech companies the content moderators the trust and safety professionals that have also been targeted as part of the censorship industrial complex and so we see kind of this like two track path of how they have been handled and one is just the entities that have power the companies themselves are aligned now with a lot of the Trump administration's policies and then there are the individuals that have been then just lumped in with these other

I mean another way to think about it is less powerful players that are less powerful players

“that have also been quite critical. Does that answer that question? Yeah I think it does and it”

leads to what might be the most difficult question for you to answer. It's probably the last question and I fear it also might be the most despair inducing. What do we as the United States, however you wanted to find it? The government, the polity, the combination of the citizenry and public servants and elected officials, if a hostile nation, if a Russia or an Iran or a China wanted to launch a massive interference effort either on a specific matter of policy or a

cultural issue or an election, are we as a nation prepared to counter it? Most of the experts that we spoke to for this story believe that we have really defanged ourselves in our ability to counter

I think there are still a lot of people that have worked in this field that are working really hard

“to try to identify and fight this but it's a very different thing to be doing it as an academic”

that is also you know losing funding if they have not lost the funding already or facing all of these other attacks on academia that are ongoing or a civil society organization versus these government offices that had the power of the U.S. government to do it. Yeah we're

“we're definitely not in the best of positions. Well on that optimistic note I think we will”

leave it for the day. I lean low thank you again for coming on today and talking your about your article in the MIT technology review and just in the issue of fairness and politeness since I did not do this at the outset. I will note that you are one of three authors. You're just the only one talking to us today. So congratulations to your entire team on this incredibly deep dive into disinformation efforts and the revolution against them. Yeah thank you so much and yeah I

could not have done this without my co-authors jazella per day's day ashta and Martin Sona who are

both incredible Ocent reporters and researchers. Thank you so much for having me.

“Wawfare podcast is produced by the law fair Institute. If you want to support the show and listen”

ad free you can become a law fair material supporter at law fairmedia.org/support. Supporters also get access to special events in other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help and be sure to check out our other shows including rational security, allies, the aftermath and escalation. Our latest law fair presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written

work at law fairmedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Potcha with audio engineering by goat

rodeo. Our theme song is from alibi music and it's always thanks for listening.

Thanks for watching. It's a pleasure to have you here. It's a pleasure to have you here.