Lawfare Daily: Eileen Guo on Whether “the Censorship-Industrial Complex” Actually Exists
The Lawfare Podcast
Eileen Guo discusses her investigation into the concept of a 'censorship-industrial complex'—a narrative claiming that government-backed efforts
Key takeaways
- The 'censorship-industrial complex' narrative emerged as a political tool to justify dismantling U.S. anti-disinformation efforts, despite their long-standing existence under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Main topics
- Censorship-industrial complex
- Foreign disinformation campaigns
Notable quotes
"Most of the experts that we spoke to for this story believe that we have really defanged ourselves in our ability to counter foreign disinformation or influence campaigns."
Conclusion
The 'censorship-industrial complex' is less a real entity and more a constructed
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey friends, Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at VoteFromAbroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to VoteFromAbroad.org now and click Request My Ballot. Ask to receive it by email. All you gotta do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. VoteFromAbroad.org. Speaker 2 (0:30) 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. Speaker 4 (0:55) It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg, and I'm here today with Eileen Guo of the MIT Technology Review. Speaker 2 (1:06) Most of the experts that we spoke to for this story believe that we have really defanged ourselves in our ability to counter foreign disinformation or influence campaigns. Speaker 4 (1:19) We'll be discussing whether the censorship industrial complex is something that really exists or was created as a boogeyman in order to justify a restructuring of the United States' anti-disinformation effort. 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? Speaker 2 (1:52) 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, Marco 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 are trying to understand how did this idea, which on the surface, you know, if you don't follow these issues super closely, as lawfare actually does, 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 buildup 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 view, and I'm happy to go into anything with more detail. Speaker 4 (3:24) 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 exist in the first place. So What critics call the censorship industrial complex was presumably created for a reason. Speaker 2 (3:53) And Speaker 4 (3:53) 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 in the first place? Speaker 2 (4:10) 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 populist 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 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 and other social media platforms and the internet writ large is great for democratization. It allows 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. Speaker 2 (6:08) As a result of that, and as a result of other things that were 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. Speaker 4 (6:33) Okay, so let's dig into that. Because I think there's a temporal inconsistency in the worldview you just described. Speaker 2 (6:45) This Speaker 4 (6:46) 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. Speaker 2 (7:03) Yeah. Speaker 4 (7:04) 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 ire on. Was anything going on in the counter-disinformation sphere during the first Trump administration? Or was this a baton that was only initially picked up by the Biden administration? Speaker 2 (7:35) 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 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... So there have always been these allegations swirling of censorship. 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. Speaker 2 (8:42) is, according to our reporting, 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 nonprofits, media organizations that were creating this idea that kind of gelled into the censorship industrial complex. Speaker 4 (9:04) And you've mentioned one individual so far, but who are the major players in this effort? Speaker 2 (9:11) 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 requests 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 a media grant organization that would push the narrative to, you know, 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