One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading.
For months, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had been cutting a wide swath through federal agencies, gutting teams that worked on everything from scientific research to Social Security to international aid. So when the employees of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R/FIMI)—a unit tasked with tracking foreign disinformation—received a note asking them to meet in half an hour, many sensed their time had come.
Darren Beattie, a far-right provocateur who had been serving as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, wasted no time with pleasantries, telling the gathered employees that the office was being shuttered and that their jobs were being eliminated. The mood in the room oscillated between somber and outraged, the former employee says, with “lots of young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked.”
The notion that the State Department had been working to silence Americans is perhaps unfamiliar to many people, but it’s a key part of a larger web of conspiratorial ideas that have been promoted for a decade on far-right blogs, podcasts, and social media. The basic theory is that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms—or what believers refer to as the “censorship-industrial complex”—has been working to suppress conservative and populist speech online.
The second Trump administration’s war on censorship has contributed to the dismantling of numerous government agencies, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s razed the infrastructure that tracks and counters attempts by foreign powers to influence elections and popular opinion. It has also been used to justify sweeping travel bans and sanctions on targeted individuals and entire industries. It’s provoked tensions with the European Union over its tech regulations, which these critics say silence Americans. And it’s even reshaped US national security strategy.
Its reach, though, isn’t limited to US bureaucracy, academia, or civil society groups. 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, just about everyone.
