How Mike Benz's censorship theory shaped Trump State Department policy

One morning in April 2025, staff at the State Department's Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R/FIMI), a unit that tracked foreign disinformation, got an email asking them to meet in half an hour. Darren Beattie, then acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, told them the office was being shuttered and their jobs eliminated. One former staffer, granted anonymity for fear of retaliation, said staff had long dreaded this moment and described the room as full of "young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked." Elsewhere in the department, the closure was celebrated. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced it in a video interview with right-wing internet activist Mike Benz, saying "We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department." Benz called it "obviously amazing news."

R/FIMI and its predecessor, the Global Engagement Center, had for years been targets of a theory that a "censorship-industrial complex" (CIC), a network of government agencies, academics, civil society groups and Big Tech platforms, was working under the banner of fighting disinformation to suppress conservative and populist speech. MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations, in a piece produced with support from the Wayne Barrett Project, spent nine months tracing how this idea moved from the online fringe to shape a wide range of second Trump administration actions. The investigation used open-source methods to scrape right-wing websites, reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of public records, videos and podcasts, and analyzed over 100,000 social media posts promoting the narrative. It found the CIC framework took off in early 2023, driven by a handful of individuals backed by a close-knit group of right-wing organizations and media outlets.

The investigation identifies Mike Benz, who served a brief stint in Trump's first administration and had previously published pro-white-identity content anonymously and pushed the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a NATO asset, as the single most prolific creator of CIC-related content online. That content was picked up by right-wing media and podcasts and, the reporters say, eventually reached the highest levels of US power, prompting congressional and then presidential action and bringing Benz both attention and financial benefits. Benz did not respond to multiple requests for comment for the piece.

The authors trace the CIC narrative's roots back a decade. In 2016, an anonymous former Facebook employee claimed the platform was suppressing conservative news in its "trending topics" section; Facebook denied it but still cut its human editors. After Russian influence operations around the 2016 US election and the Brexit vote, platforms tightened content moderation, which also caught some conservative accounts, feeding the sense that moderation specifically targeted the right. Claims that Twitter "shadow-banned" conservatives in 2018 and suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 kept the narrative alive. Covid-19 misinformation moderation, including bans on prominent vaccine skeptics such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., further hardened the grievance. Following the January 6 Capitol riot, platforms banned Trump himself, which his allies took as proof of coordinated suppression. Benz later told Joe Rogan on his podcast that Trump "got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass-censor virtually every narrative that he was putting out, that he lost."

The piece's authors argue that much of what has been characterized as censorship is actually work to make the internet safer, such as tracking nonconsensual sexualized content of women and children, helping victims of stalking and doxxing, or identifying whether an online account is a foreign agent posing as a voter. The Trump administration's anti-censorship campaign, the investigation says, has contributed to dismantling the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force and USAID, has been used to justify travel bans and sanctions, has strained relations with the European Union over its tech regulations, and has reshaped US national security strategy. David Millar, a longtime US intelligence official who taught diplomats to recognize propaganda at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, said the most effective propaganda campaigns "are seldom just complete lies. They're usually taking something out of proportion or amplifying something that actually happened into something that didn't." Dannagal Young, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication, said Russian disinformation efforts around 2016 "had done their homework so well that the kinds of things that were generated by Russian propagandists were not that distinct from things people in the States would say," and that the pandemic became a pivotal moment in conservative radicalization as believers felt "Not everyone's getting censored, just us."

Key facts

In April 2025 the State Department shut down R/FIMI, its unit tracking foreign disinformation, eliminating staff jobs; Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it ending "government-sponsored censorship."
MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations spent nine months on the probe, analyzing over 100,000 social media posts and hundreds of thousands of pages of public records, videos and podcasts.
The investigation identifies right-wing activist Mike Benz, a brief veteran of Trump's first administration, as the most prolific creator of "censorship-industrial complex" content, and dates the framework's takeoff to early 2023.
The campaign against alleged censorship has contributed to dismantling CISA, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force and USAID, and has strained US relations with the EU over tech regulation.
Reporters trace the narrative's roots to the 2016 Facebook "trending topics" claims, 2018 Twitter shadow-ban claims, the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story, covid-era content moderation, and the post-January 6 bans on Trump.

Why it matters

The piece documents a rare, traceable path from a fringe online theory to concrete US government action: the closure of a federal disinformation-tracking office, the dismantling of other agencies, sanctions and travel bans, and friction with the EU over tech rules. It matters beyond US politics because the offices and norms being dismantled were part of the infrastructure that curbs foreign influence operations and helps make the internet safer for everyone who uses it, not just Americans.

Who it affects

R/FIMI staff lost their jobs in the April 2025 closure. More broadly, the investigation ties the anti-censorship campaign to the dismantling of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force and USAID, to travel bans and sanctions on targeted individuals and industries, and to tension with the European Union over its tech regulations. The authors also argue the rollback affects the billions of people globally who rely on platforms' efforts against nonconsensual sexual content, stalking, doxxing and fake foreign accounts.

How to use it

This is a free investigative report, produced by MIT Technology Review in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Wayne Barrett Project, useful as a primary reference for understanding where the "censorship-industrial complex" framework originated, who has driven it, and which specific US government actions it has been used to justify.

How solid is it

The investigation is built on nine months of open-source research: scraping right-wing websites, reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of public records, videos and podcasts, and analyzing more than 100,000 social media posts. It draws on named on-record sources, including a State Department propaganda expert and an academic who studies political communication, plus an anonymous former R/FIMI staffer granted anonymity over fear of retaliation. The reporters state they sought comment from Mike Benz multiple times and he did not respond.

Risks and caveats

The captured text ends mid-sentence in a passage dated April 2022, so it does not cover everything the full article addresses. The source gives no count of how many R/FIMI employees were affected by the closure, no dollar figure for the financial benefits it says Benz personally gained from his work, and does not name who specifically at the State Department or White House ordered the office's closure beyond attributing it to the second Trump administration generally.

“We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department”

— Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State