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 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, 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.