Crushing dissent

A few weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk and other prominent users of his social media platform X shared an electoral map. Depending on your perspective, it was either your worst nightmare or a dream come true. It showed Donald Trump winning the election with 312 electoral college votes and Kamala Harris taking only 226. The map was produced by RealClearPolitics (RCP), a political news site that publishes an average of polls during each election cycle.

To some Harris supporters, however, predicting that Trump would win was not only inaccurate but harmful. To them, it exemplified one of the worst sins committed online: disseminating “misinformation.”

On Oct. 31, The New York Times published an article suggesting the RCP average was part of an effort to “deflate enthusiasm” among Democrats. Harris might be “poised for a surprise landslide,” and Trump could seize on the RCP poll average to dispute the results.

Wikipedia went so far as to remove the RCP average from a chart showing various poll aggregators. One of Wikipedia’s editors accused RCP of having a “strong Republican bias.” John McIntyre, publisher of the RCP poll average, found such claims perplexing. “It was interesting that the people at Wikipedia chose to basically censor and remove us when we were the original poll average and the best historically performing,” he told me in an interview.

On Nov. 5, RCP proved its accuracy wasn’t just historic.

Trump’s election victory vindicated RCP’s work and reinvigorated devotion to free speech. But censorship, deeply entrenched in many institutions, remains a pervasive problem in America. A large consortium of groups that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls “the censorship-industrial complex” work together to suppress disfavored narratives and promote favored ones. They include tech companies, media outlets, left-wing billionaires, private groups funded by the government, and government agencies—with the latter constituting a violation of the First Amendment. Unlike RCP’s removal from Wikipedia, censorship is often difficult to detect, but it usually takes the guise of combating “misinformation.” And proponents of free speech will need more than one election cycle to defeat it.

WIKIPEDIA’S DECISION TO REMOVE RCP is perhaps unsurprising. Earlier in 2024, a video emerged showing former Wikipedia chief Katherine Maher—who later became CEO of NPR—talking about how Wikipedia gave up its “free and open” mantra. She said she realized that approach resulted in too much emphasis on “this white male, Westernized construct around who matters.”

That might sound like typical left-wing bias, but the problem goes much deeper than that, according to Mike Benz, the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department official during Trump’s first term. Benz argues America has been building up a censorship apparatus for decades. Initially the government deployed it against foreign enemies during the Cold War and the War on Terror, but since 2016 the same tactics have been turned against populism, specifically American citizens who support Donald Trump.

In September 2024, Benz spoke to around 500 supporters of Hillsdale College, a prominent conservative school. They had gathered at a hotel just outside Washington, D.C., to celebrate Constitution Day. Guests were finishing their lunch at tables with centerpieces of pink roses and lilies when Benz took the podium. He showed the audience a photo of a 1948 memo by legendary diplomat George Kennan titled “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.” To counter the rise of communism, Kennan argued that U.S. intelligence services should build up the capacity to influence elections all over the world. This must be done secretly because the American people wouldn’t like it, Kennan wrote in the memo, which was declassified in 2005.

The intelligence agencies implemented Kennan’s ideas, but they didn’t stay focused on communism. “Understand that in the post-2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism,” Benz told the audience.

After the Cold War, terrorism became the most pressing threat to national security. And social media became a major part of the battle. Benz told me in an interview that, during the war on terror, the U.S. military developed artificial intelligence tools to combat ISIS recruiters. AI reviewed ­terrorists’ social media posts to determine “what kind of words they use, the dialect, the key words, the slang, the prefixes, the suffixes, sentiment analysis” and then restrict their online reach. However, in 2017, Benz was shocked to learn that a similar tool was being offered for sale to the private sector. It’s one thing for this technology to be used for counterterrorism purposes. “It’s a whole other thing when you have essentially this military technology that’s now being sold to or sometimes forced on the platforms to use against political parties,” Benz said.

This new emphasis began in 2016, when national security leaders and other elites on both sides of the Atlantic believed Brexit and Trump’s first election victory could destroy the “rules-based international order.” That catch-phrase refers to the system of international rules and structures many believe secured global peace and prosperity after World War II. They saw populism not as just another political viewpoint competing for votes but as an existential threat to civilization.

As soon as Trump won in 2016, his detractors started suggesting he colluded with Russia and that Moscow had interfered in the election to secure his victory. They blamed social media companies for not doing enough to prevent it. While claims of Russian collusion have since been disproved, the appetite among elites for social media censorship remains. Former Secretary of State John Kerry articulated this in September during a World Economic Forum panel. “I think the dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing. … The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree,” he said. “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just hammer [misinformation] out of existence.”

BRADLEY C.S. WATSON TEACHES AT the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C. He thinks elite disdain for populism dates as far back as the late 19th century, exemplified by President Woodrow Wilson referring to public criticism as “a rustic handling delicate machinery.” The latest manifestation of this mindset is what Watson calls the “unholy relationship” between government bureaucrats and Big Tech.

“There’s a sense in which all the pieces were already in place,” Watson said. “When a political disrupter like Donald Trump sprang onto the scene, and unexpectedly won an election in 2016, there was an enormous sort of bipartisan political establishment that was ready, willing, and able to do battle with a disruptive force like that.”

Under the pretext that Trump was a Russian asset, the Obama administration redirected government censorship and surveillance capabilities away from global terrorists and toward American populists.

On Jan. 6, 2017, the outgoing Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Jeh Johnson, announced that election infrastructure would be designated as critical infrastructure. “It was a clever bit of mission creep and linguistic sleight of hand,” Benz said. Critical infrastructure used to mean physical things like dams and federal buildings, but now it includes events like elections or public health campaigns. The designation of elections as critical infrastructure provided cover for censorship “because tweets can undermine public faith and confidence in the integrity of our elections, and they are a cyber activity that’s happening online,” Benz said.

Congress created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within DHS in 2018, as panic over false claims of Russian collusion with Trump reached a crescendo. According to its website, CISA “is responsible for protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure from physical and cyber threats.” But in fact, CISA serves as “the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media,” according to a report by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

FOR YEARS, CONSERVATIVES FACING ONLINE CENSORSHIP believed the social media companies were solely responsible. Their staff and algorithms typically skew left-wing, and their opaque content moderation policies give a wide berth for censorship.

In mid-2024, the educational nonprofit PragerU, named after its co-founder, conservative radio host Dennis Prager, launched a new documentary called Dear Infidels: A Warning to America. At one point in the film, a Palestinian man shares his experience growing up in Gaza. When he was 7 years old, he recalls, a teacher came to his school and said, “Listen, children. You must kill the Jews. Jews have three legs and an eye in the middle of their forehead.”

Soon after the documentary launched, Google labeled it “hate speech”—not toward Jews but toward Muslims. The company removed PragerU’s entire app, not only the offending documentary, from Google Play, one of the world’s largest app stores.

When Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, got the notification, his first thought was, “Here we go again.” PragerU was founded in 2009, but since 2016, censorship has become a regular headache, particularly during election years. “We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of videos censored and restricted by YouTube and Google. We deal with rejections on our ad account on a daily basis,” Strazzeri said.

He and his team quickly marshaled PragerU’s large following to raise a public outcry. A day later, Google reversed course, reaching out to announce the app had been restored and calling the removal a mistake. Strazzeri brands that “a complete lie.”

Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, followed the situation with PragerU’s app and agreed that it wasn’t a mistake. “The only thing that will convince me it’s a mistake is if they actually change the policies that cause the problems.” Those policies include prohibitions against things like “hate speech” and “misinformation,” terms Tedesco notes are overly vague and provide cover for censorship. “They have swept into the concept of hate the mainstream conservative values that PragerU promotes.”

While social media sites serve an important public function, they are private companies. Tedesco says that makes censorship hard to challenge. “We always used to think of the public square as being someplace that is essentially operated by the government. When censorship happened, you had the First Amendment and could file a lawsuit.”

In recent years, the government has been deputizing censorship to private groups—which makes it harder to detect but no less illegal.

In 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now renamed X, and opened the company’s internal documents and communications to a small group of journalists. Much of what we know about the censorship-industrial complex comes from what they discovered.

Michael Shellenberger was interviewing a source on Zoom when he got a text message from his friend and fellow journalist Bari Weiss. She said she was on a plane to San Francisco to look at Twitter’s documents and he was welcome to join. Shellenberger, who lives in the Bay Area, finished his call and immediately hopped in his car and drove straight to Twitter headquarters. He met Elon Musk at the company’s coffee station. Security was tight, but Shellenberger was eventually ushered into a conference room he describes as “a little hot house.” The reporters worked in shifts, between two and 12 at any given time, making requests for large batches of documents. “We were working long hours, sometimes going till very late at night or early in the morning,” he recalls.

Their reporting, which became known as “The Twitter Files,” uncovered a network of censorship almost too vast to comprehend. At the center of it all is CISA, which censors with the help of private groups, many of which receive federal funding. One of the most prominent was the Election Integrity Partnership. Its leader, Alex Stamos, said in a presentation at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council in 2021 that the EIP’s purpose was “to try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves” because the government lacked both “the funding and the legal authorizations.”

The Twitter Files revealed that tech companies, government employees, and the Election Integrity Partnership worked together in a real-time chat app to coordinate censorship. According to its own reporting, the EIP compiled a database of 859 million tweets connected to “election misinformation” in 2020. Of those, 22 million were censored. The Virality Project, formed by the same organizations as the EIP, later adopted the same methods to censor content critical of the COVID-19 vaccine.

CENSORSHIP TYPICALLY TAKES ONE OF THREE FORMS, sometimes called “remove, reduce, inform.” The most severe is to have a post removed altogether. More often, a platform will reduce a post’s reach. That usually means only people who follow an account or visit its page directly will see the offending post. PragerU experienced this on Twitter before Musk’s takeover. “We had almost a million followers, and some of our tweets would reach like 50 people or 20 people, which is just not possible with the amount of followers that we have on Twitter,” Strazzeri said. The third approach involves slapping a fact-check label on a post.

Shellenberger says the censorship-industrial complex also focuses more broadly on the ways news stories are framed. “There’s two parts of it: There’s taking away. That’s censorship, and then there’s adding to it, and that’s propaganda.” He cites one good example: the incriminating contents of a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The existence of the laptop could not be totally suppressed. But when the New York Post began reporting on it in October 2020, censorship ensured the story was framed as a plot by Russia to help Trump. Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter saying the laptop story “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Shellenberger admits he fell for that narrative. “I thought that it was Russian misinfor­mation,” he said, “so I ignored it and voted for Biden.”

In fact, the laptop was authentic. Trump stripped their security clearances the day he took office.

Strazzeri believes a larger aim of censorship is to get conservatives to self-censor. PragerU has the resources to fight back when its app gets removed, but smaller operations often don’t. He says he talks to conservatives who admit the risk of losing their income from a platform is significant enough that they avoid topics that might get them banned or restricted.

But some of that could change over the next few years. In his first major policy statement since his victory in November, Trump stated his goal to combat censorship: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that.” Trump’s campaign floated several proposals for executive orders and legislation. But Hillsdale’s Watson thinks their potential impact is limited. “I’m not saying we can’t have legal success at the margins. I just wouldn’t put a whole lot of faith in legalistic administrative solutions,” he said.

Watson thinks real change must come from “continued public awareness, public anger, demands for reform, and competition in the marketplace of ideas.”

Some of that change appears to be happening already. On Jan. 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a video announcing sweeping changes to content moderation policies on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg admitted “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” He then said, “The recent elections also feel like a ­cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.” Meta’s reforms include replacing fact-checkers with a community notes system similar to the one used on X. Meta will also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said.

That represents significant progress, but Watson worries long-term change will be difficult to achieve because the news cycle tends to move quickly, with the public soon ­forgetting one story and giving their attention to the next. “I would hope the incoming administration takes many opportunities to remind people of the recent past,” he said.

As for RCP’s McIntyre, I asked him if anyone at Wikipedia or The New York Times had apologized for censoring and disparaging his poll average. “Not yet,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not holding my breath.”