The 'Information State': How America’s Censorship Machine Was Built

The speaker argues that opposition to free speech among Americans is not an organic phenomenon. Instead, it is the result of a decades-long process that has conditioned a new attitude towards speech. This shift redefines speech as a tool of oppression rather than an essential medium of liberty, leading to a vast institutional infrastructure designed to engineer consensus.

This shift is evident in changing elite attitudes towards free speech, which, in turn, occasions a generational change. A prime example is an article published by The New York Times magazine on October 13, 2020. The cover story, titled 'Free Speech in the Age of Disinformation' by Emily Basilon, presented an extended argument against the principle of free speech, suggesting it is antiquated and unsuited to modern internet conditions.

This progressive, technocratic attitude, exhibiting condescension and disdainful dismissal of free speech as unsuitable for current technological conditions, directly mirrors Woodrow Wilson's stance toward the Constitution. The timing of The New York Times article's publication on October 13, 2020, is significant because it occurred just before a major political event.

The New York Times article was published on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, specifically the day before the New York Post published its first story reporting on the Hunter Biden laptops. This timing suggests that the Times' attack on free speech principles foreshadowed the events that followed. Shortly after the Post's article appeared, major tech platforms implemented widespread censorship, banning its dissemination.

The ban was so comprehensive that platforms like Twitter even suppressed direct messages containing links to the New York Post's reporting. This was not an organic development, but rather the culmination of tremendous pressure exerted by a vast new constellation of agencies, sub-agencies, NGOs, and academic institutions. Organizations such as the Global Disinformation Index and the Internet Observatory contributed to this coordinated effort.

The FBI played a role by seeding the idea, prior to the 2020 election, that a significant Russian disinformation dump was imminent and urged tech platforms to prepare for it. All these elements combined to form a 'shaping operation'—an attack on free speech that created the pretext for mass censorship of a politically consequential story on the eve of a presidential election. The speaker believes this was done with the clear intention of influencing the election results.

The 'information state' can be understood as government operating through digital platforms. Its primary goal is to engineer public perception by controlling what information people can or cannot see online. By manipulating these perceptions, the information state attempts to engineer specific behavioral and political outcomes.

In the traditional American sense, government exists to protect constitutional rights and enact policies approved by the public through representatives. However, governance in the 'information state' operates differently. It is not primarily about protecting rights, as online rights like property and free speech remain ambiguously defined in the digital sphere.

Instead of protecting rights or enacting policies through traditional political processes, the information state governs by engineering perception and consent, and by monopolizing attention. This form of government emerges from and is suited to the material conditions of the digital era, exerting control over and regulating all online activities.

This includes not only online dating and socializing but also market activity and political organizing. The information state acts as a paragovernmental regulatory apparatus that controls these aspects in both visible and invisible ways. What makes it a regime, rather than mere propaganda, is the array of institutions that serve its functions.

These institutions include US intelligence agencies and a rapidly multiplying world of paragovernmental NGOs and federal agencies. Together, they form a comprehensive apparatus of governance, extending beyond mere censorship or propaganda mechanisms. This fully built-out infrastructure spans various organizations, each nominally dedicated to specific online issues.

These organizations are dedicated to combating hate speech, foreign disinformation, and terrorism online. Some exist within the government, others are fully in the private sector, and some operate in a gray area as NGOs. This combined institutional power creates a new apparatus of government that continuously reacts to developing events, whether public health crises like COVID or political movements like the rise of Donald Trump.

Chronologically, this apparatus began to take shape in December 2016, during Barack Obama's last month in office, with the passage of the Countering Foreign Disinformation Act. Although nominally focused on foreign disinformation, this act created or rebranded the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

The Global Engagement Center is not a standalone federal agency; it is a joint, coalitional task force. Its purpose is to unite the public sector, private sector, and specifically tech companies in a 'whole of society' effort to combat foreign disinformation. This initiative actively sews together new networks of power rather than merely engaging in propaganda.

Under the guise of fighting disinformation, the GEC aims to bring together some of America's most powerful institutions. This includes tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as academic institutions like Harvard and Stanford University, other federal agencies, the FBI, security services, and intelligence agencies. All these entities are brought together within this framework.

The goal is to coordinate their actions, ramifying top-down from commanding institutions to tech platform users and the public. This coordination is facilitated through joint research institutions like the Harvard Shorenstein Center and a center at MIT dedicated to combating disinformation. These efforts are partially funded, effectively coordinated, and facilitated by a federal push.

The initiative began in 2016 as an effort to combat foreign disinformation, specifically focusing on claims of Russian interference in the US presidential election. However, the framework quickly expanded beyond foreign disinformation to include misinformation, and later, 'malinformation.' This term, coined through a Harvard paper and adopted by the federal government, describes information that, while true, could cause harm.

This means the US government effectively legitimizes the idea of pathologizing true information if it is perceived to cause harm. What began as a fight against Russian disinformation quickly expanded. The same framework is now used to target conservative and even some left-wing populist voices in the American media space, becoming an expansive mandate to censor and control disseminated information.