I first heard the term \u201ccensorship-industrial complex\u201d on April 15, 2025. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s when I got the tip that a small office in the U.S. State Department, which focused on monitoring and countering foreign disinformation from the likes of Russia, Iran, and China, was facing imminent shutdown\u2014the next day. <\/p>\n
And the reason? R\/FIMI, as the office was called, was accused of serving as the State Department\u2019s central hub in the so-called censorship-industrial complex\u2014a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms allegedly conspiring to suppress conservative and populist speech online under the guise of combating disinformation. <\/p>\n
I broke<\/a> the story around 10:30AM on April 16, (and broke<\/a> more in the weeks that followed) but for me, it was just the start of a deep reporting rabbit-hole into an idea that had moved from the fringes of the right-wing Internet into the mainstream, championed and spread by a network of well-funded conservative media platforms and non-profits, and finally as a sort of prevailing logic behind much of the second Trump administration\u2019s domestic and foreign policy. <\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t just a policy story. 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, all of us. <\/p>\n