I first heard the term “censorship-industrial complex” on April 15, 2025.
That’s 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—the next day.
And the reason? R/FIMI, as the office was called, was accused of serving as the State Department’s central hub in the so-called censorship-industrial complex—a 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.
I broke the story around 10:30AM on April 16, (and broke 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’s domestic and foreign policy.
But this isn’t 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—which is to say, all of us.
For more on what the narrative means for the Internet, read my story here.
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