For all the talk of “reforming” or “repealing” Section 230 in Congress, the fact is that the courts over the past three or four years have effectively chipped away so steadily at the law that it’s lost a significant chunk of its usefulness. The latest comes from the Ninth Circuit, which ruled earlier this week that Section 230 is not, in fact, an immunity from lawsuit, but merely a defense against liability. This may sound like a procedural technicality — and, indeed, the coverage of this case from the likes of Reuters covers it as a boring procedural story — but it’s a huge deal.

To get there, the panel had to rewrite the history of Section 230 and wave off a whole stack of its own prior rulings as either sloppy word choice or mere dicta.

To understand why this ruling is such a big deal, you first have to understand Section 230’s true benefit: it would get bogus cases tossed at the earliest moment. This is the entire key to why Section 230 is important. The point of Section 230 is to put the liability on the party actually violating the law — which would be the creator of the content, and not the intermediary tool they use to host/distribute that content. But the mechanism used to protect speech is that it gets the cases against intermediaries dismissed very early (aggrieved parties can still sue the actual speakers).

If it didn’t do this, the vast majority of the benefits of Section 230 would be lost. Indeed, in one of the many early Section 230 cases, the Ninth Circuit’s Alex Kozinski colorfully described why Section 230 immunity was so important in the famous Roommates case:

Websites are complicated enterprises, and there will always be close cases where a clever lawyer could argue that something the website operator did encouraged the illegality. Such close cases, we believe, must be resolved in favor of immunity, lest we cut the heart out of section 230 by forcing websites to face death by ten thousand duck-bites, fighting off claims that they promoted or encouraged—or at least tacitly assented to—the illegality of third parties…

Every bit of that bolded section is important — and it’s what the court is now ignoring. First, it’s Kozinski not just calling out that Section 230 provides “immunity” but that without it, we would “cut the heart out of Section 230” by “forcing websites to face death by ten thousand duck-bites.” Kozinski was exactly correct, and Section 230’s authors, Ron Wyden and Chris Cox, have said he got it right (I was at a conference years ago where both Cox and Kozinski were present, and when Cox said this interpretation was correct, Kozinski made a joke to the effect that it wasn’t often that a priest got word directly from God that his interpretation of the scriptures was correct).

The operative aspect of 230 is that it’s an immunity that gets rid of those cases early. Because without that, the mere threat of litigation would force many websites to simply remove content to avoid the cost of going through litigation. That’s the duck bites part of this.

And part of what’s important about it being an immunity is that if the district court refuses to dismiss the case on Section 230 grounds, you can immediately appeal that (“an interlocutory appeal”) to the appeals court to say that the district court got this wrong… rather than having to go through the entire litigation process (the thing you’re supposed to be immune from) and then telling an appeals court about the error. By not allowing an interlocutory appeal, it would do away with the element of Section 230 that makes it so effective.

Yet, on Monday, the same Ninth Circuit basically said “eh… nope.” Yes, the ruling was specifically procedural, but it was procedural on that point. Meta and TikTok — and, by extension, every other company facing these suits — have to get pecked to death by ducks first, and only afterwards can they tell an appeals court they never should have been pecked at all. The “procedural” rejection by the Ninth Circuit means that more than 3,000 lawsuits filed against these companies can move forward. It’s not (yet) the full ten thousand duck bites Kozinski warned about, but it’s in the ballpark. And we’re already seeing those duck bites in action.

What’s incredible, though, is just how confused the panel is about all of this. Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, writing for the court, starts by getting the history of Section 230 wrong:

The drafting history adds weight to the view that Congress employed a belt and suspenders approach. In the House bill, where section 230 originated, subsection (e)(3) contained only the first sentence. See H.R. 1555, amend. 744, 104th Cong. (1995), 141 Cong. Rec. H8469 (daily ed. Aug. 4, 1995). In reconciling a competing bill, the Senate adopted the House proposal “with minor modifications,” including what is now the second sentence. S. Rep. No. 104-230, at 194 (1996) (Conf. Rep.). It would be surprising if these “minor modifications” included the addition of immunity from suit.

However, as Jeff Kosseff — literally the guy who wrote the very comprehensive book on the history of Section 230 — notes, Judge Nguyen is exactly wrong.

Kosseff notes that his book goes through this, though so does the law review article he published a few years ago, which details how Section 230 changed during the conference committee and how it was, deliberately, about making internet intermediaries immune from lawsuits. He points out that while the initial draft of the law was supposed to prohibit the FCC from regulating the internet, during the reconciliation process, they deliberately “clarified the intention to preempt litigation” by adding in that “No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.”

If it was just about being a defense against liability, they would not have included “no cause of action may be brought.” But the ruling this week claims that Congress was just being superfluous there:

Meta argues that the phrase “[n]o cause of action may be brought” implies immunity from suit because reading it to provide immunity from liability would render the phrase “no liability may be imposed” superfluous. Id. § 230(e)(3). Not necessarily. Congress may have included “cause of action” to encompass suits for injunctive and declaratory relief, since “liability” could be read to encompass only damages. At the same time, Congress may have prohibited the imposition of “liability” to encompass orders by state administrative agencies, which may not involve causes of action. Whatever Congress’s reason for including both phrases, “sometimes the better overall reading of the statute contains some redundancy”

The ruling this week then dismisses all of the many other times that the Ninth Circuit (and other courts) said that 230 was an immunity from suit by basically saying “eh, previous courts were sloppy with language” along with “and when we said that it was never that important.”

It is true that we have used the phrase “immunity” somewhat loosely in our section 230 jurisprudence; although we generally describe it as “immunity from liability,” we sometimes describe it as “immunity from suit.” But none of this usage is binding, because we have never addressed whether the denial of a section 230 defense is a collateral order…

In a footnote, the ruling lists off many (though not all) of the times the same Ninth Circuit has said “immunity from suit.”

See, e.g., Lemmon v. Snap, Inc., 995 F.3d 1085, 1087, 1090 (9th Cir. 2021) (describing section 230(c)(1) as immunity “from . . . suit” and “from liability”); Barnes, 570 F.3d at 1099–1100 (stating that section 230 “protects certain internetbased actors from certain kinds of lawsuits” and that it “protects from liability”); Zango, Inc. v. Kaspersky Lab, Inc., 568 F.3d 1169, 1173, 1175 (9th Cir. 2009) (describing the statute as “plainly immuniz[ing] from suit” and providing “protection . . . for civil liability”); Carafano, 339 F.3d at 1122, 1125 (referring to “immunity from liability” and “immunity from suit”).

So, in order to reach this result, the Ninth Circuit needed to reinterpret and dismiss both many prior Ninth Circuit cases, claiming they were just sloppy with their language and the literal text of Section 230, again insisting that the “no cause of action may be brought” was just the drafters being redundant, rather than the much more likely (and as Kosseff’s history has shown, accurate) interpretation that the law was literally written to prevent intermediaries from having to face these kinds of lawsuits entirely.

It is true that the Tenth Circuit (and only the Tenth Circuit) has also ruled this way, but the Ninth Circuit has way more impact because a huge number of internet companies are based in California, which is covered by the Ninth Circuit. And many other circuits have ruled the other way. In Nemet v. ConsumerAffairs, the Fourth Circuit talked about “a sphere of immunity” created by 230 and points out that:

Section 230 immunity, like other forms of immunity, is generally accorded effect at the first logical point in the litigation process. As we have often explained in the qualified immunity context, “immunity is an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability” and “it is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to trial.” Brown v. Gilmore, 278 F.3d 362, 366 n.2 (4th Cir. 2002) (quotations omitted) (emphasis in original). We thus aim to resolve the question of § 230 immunity at the earliest possible stage of the case because that immunity protects websites not only from “ultimate liability,” but also from “having to fight costly and protracted legal battles.”

In the Sixth Circuit, in the Dirty World case, the court quotes the Eleventh Circuit’s Almeida v. Amazon ruling to note:

The majority of federal circuits have interpreted the CDA to establish broad “federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service.”

So while the Ninth Circuit argues that this is some sort of novel issue… it’s simply not. Other than the Tenth Circuit in that one case, almost every other court (including the Ninth Circuit itself) has always held that Section 230 provides for immunity from suit, which as the record and the authors make clear, was exactly the point.

Technically, the panel isn’t wrong that none of those other cases squarely held that a 230 denial is immediately appealable. Courts aren’t bound by things they assumed rather than decided. But there’s a difference between “no court has ruled on this” and “every court to touch this for thirty years, plus both authors of the statute, absolutely understood it the same way to the point that they never needed to directly say so.” The panel treats three decades of consistent understanding as if it were a typo.

And while this latest ruling notes that this is fine because the court can always “revisit the issue of section 230 immunity at a later stage of the proceedings,” once again that destroys the very point of 230. This new ruling even points out that the district court is skeptical the plaintiffs even have a case here:

The court expressed its “skepticism” about plaintiffs’ ability to proceed on their “novel” failure-to-warn theories in light of section 230 but allowed the claims to proceed “for now” given that the litigation was at an “early juncture” and the law regarding section 230 immunity was “in some flux.”

But, once again, that’s the entire point of Section 230! To end these weak cases early!

Indeed, going all the way back to the Roommates case that we mentioned up top, where Kozinski coined his duck bites line, what was most memorable about that case is that the ruling denied Section 230’s protections to Roommates.com over one feature (though dismissed other claims because of it). And Roommates then had to spend four more years litigating the case… only to still win many years, and many millions of dollars later.

That, on its own, shows how important 230 is in getting rid of cases early. The whole point is that most of these kinds of cases are losers for their plaintiffs in the long run on First Amendment or other grounds. The benefit of Section 230 is that the companies don’t have to waste many years and many millions of dollars to get to that final conclusion. But the Ninth Circuit, apparently no longer caring about death by ten thousand duck bites, now says that such cases are free to proceed without interlocutory review at the very point it matters most.

Now the internet companies have a choice: they can ask the entire Ninth Circuit to review en banc, even as that’s a crapshoot with its current roster. They can ask the Supreme Court to weigh in, when we already know a few of the Justices hate Section 230. Or, they can submit to the first 3,000 duck bites, and see if they survive.

Which is the real irony here: for all the years of congressional threats to gut Section 230, it turns out the courts are the ducks, and there’s less of the law left after every bite.

When it comes to the bullshit, batshit-crazy anti-vaxxer movement that currently has the United States in its un-scientific grip, I’ve focused most of my attention on RFK Jr. And, frankly, for good reason. For arguably decades, but definitely for the last five to ten years, RFK Jr. was the most infamous anti-vaxxer in the world. Kennedy would deny this, of course. In fact, it is old habit for him to talk out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to vaccines, but his anti-vaxxer side speaks much more loudly. And, because of course, one of his chief claims has been that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism.

When Donald Trump tasked Kennedy with finding the “cause” of autism, it came off looking like Trump fulfilling his promise to let Kennedy promote his pet conspiracy theories in exchange for gobbling up the MAHA vote when he ran for president. Then Trump himself started parroting some of the same claims you would normally hear from Kennedy. Still, it all looked like performative promise-keeping.

All of that has changed. Donald Trump just made himself the most famous anti-vaxxer on the planet. On Monday, Trump signed an Executive Order making enormous changes to vaccine schedule recommendations for children, both limiting the number of vaccines recommended and advising that vaccines be split up and not offered in combo-shots.

The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can “overwhelm” children’s immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

During a signing event at the White House on Monday afternoon, Trump falsely claimed that pediatricians “have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda,” that is “poured into a little child’s body, and bad things happen in too many cases. This is an explosion; this is an epidemic,” Trump said.

He also tied the new vaccine recommendations to his goal of finding out “what’s going on with autism.” Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data on millions of children have found no evidence linking the neurodevelopmental condition to immunizations. Nevertheless, Trump suggested that the changes outlined in the order would reduce autism rates in the US.

This is madness. Trump has no understanding of the science or medicine behind vaccines. The fact that he’s layering lies into his signing ceremony for this unscientific proclamation should tell you everything you need to know. It was not that long ago that my own children received their childhood vaccines. I can promise you that no doctor approached them with a syringe the size of a soda can to pour into them. These are lies. Bald-faced lies.

And, while this has been pitched as putting America in line with the vaccine schedules of other developed nations, that is also a lie.

Under the new recommendations, Trump said children should get fewer vaccines, suggesting that the US recommends an excessive number of vaccines compared with other high-income countries. In reality, by dropping down to only 11 recommended vaccinations, the US becomes an outlier in recommending so few, according to fact-checking by Stat News in January. The only other country that recommends so few vaccines is Denmark, a small, relatively homogenous country with universal healthcare.

As for breaking up the MMR vaccine into individual shots, that specific part of the EO also came with lies from Trump. In the signing ceremony, he claimed that the combo MMR shot was “quite lethal.” There is has never been a death linked between the MMR shot and a person with a normally functioning immune systems. Those who are immuno-compromised are already warned against getting the combo shot. In fact, that warning and inability to get what are otherwise normal vaccinations is why it’s so damned important that everyone else immunize based on the previous recommendations, which were made under good science. It’s herd immunity that protects the immuno-compromised. This EO, to whatever extent it is implemented, will be “quite lethal” or otherwise produce negative health outcomes for a non-zero number of people, mostly young children.

This EO will almost certainly result in the deaths of at least some children.

And why? Ego, it appears.

The order is in line with reports that Trump personally promotes the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and that he wants part of his legacy tied to curing autism. Trump had reportedly put pressure on anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to do more to link vaccines and autism. In the signing event, Trump praised Kennedy, saying, “He’s doing a fantastic job,” and telling the anti-vaccine advocate “I’m proud of you.”

That Trump would prioritize his own legacy over the health of American children is about as surprising dilated pupils at a Grateful Dead concert. But Trump now directly owns the consequences of promoting anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories to his dedicated flock, as well as the health outcomes for their children. I expect lawsuits to come fast and furious from medical associations and institutions. And I hope they work, but they won’t be enough.

Some percentage of the country will listen to Dear Leader, because that is how cults work. And their innocent children, vulnerable to the misinformed demands of their parents, will be hurt. Perhaps time, money, and effort will be wasted doing trials on individual vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. What comes next is not certain.

But what is certain is that this EO is crafted from a place of selfish ignorance. It does no good and can only cause harm. And our own president is the one harming us.

Police departments across the country are lining up to launch drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs, and hundreds have cleared a necessary hurdle toward making deployment a reality, expanding aerial surveillance and data collection even in areas patrol officers typically can’t reach.

As of February 2026, over 1,000 public safety agencies—including police, fire, and other emergency management agencies—had received Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) waivers needed to automate drone operations and launch a DFR program, according to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release listing agencies that have obtained Part 91 waivers since the FAA streamlined and sped up the process in April 2025.

The changes led to a massive increase in the number of waivers issued. Only 976 DFR waivers had been granted since the first DFR program launched in 2018 through April 2025, according to an FAA representative. The agency issued more waivers between April 2025 and February 2026 than it had in the previous seven years combined.

The new FAA process for waivers and the rush of police departments to obtain them signifies a shift in law enforcement’s use of drones: from human-operated aerial surveillance to AI-based autonomous drone use. 

Typically, a drone operator is only permitted to fly in areas that can still be seen by the pilot, and that drone pilot needs to be certified under FAA Part 107. To fly drones “Beyond Visual Line of Sight” (BVLOS) requires additional approval from the FAA, as do flights above 200 feet, due to the risk of colliding with planes and other aircrafts. Without such approval, an officer could not pilot a drone from a desk inside a building and fly it to a call across the city because they could not possibly have line of sight on the drone. 

FAA rules for police drones also required a human operator to manually fly the device to a scene, but DFR technology has become a more common and more automated police technology. DFR programs increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to automate drone flights from launchpads placed around the city, often atop municipal buildings, and make it possible for one drone operator to “fly” multiple devices at once. Though not every police department that has received BVLOS has launched a DFR program yet, by going through this process, every department on this list has signified it has strong enough interest to clear the necessary regulatory hurdles.

Police departments and the companies that sell DFR equipment claim that these drones make it easier for officers to establish “situational awareness” of a scene before they arrive. Early drone adoption centered on similar claims, particularly related to high-risk situations like vehicular accidents or incidents involving an armed suspect. However, these kinds of situations may make up only a small portion of deployments, which often occur in response to low-risk calls for service related to unhoused people, mental health concerns, and loud music, as a Government Technology analysis of the system in Chula Vista, California, found. 

DFR programs have become important sources of revenue for companies like Flock Safety and Axon, the latter of which reported that its DFR platform has become one of the company’s fastest growing sectors. Axon is also known for products like the TASER and the Fusus camera system that lets police integrate viewing of public and private cameras. 

Footage from drone flights is streamed back to a police office, and it can be stored, shared, and analyzed like other video. Turning drone footage into fodder for automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, for example, requires very little additional software, and Flock Safety was quietly able to turn its drones into “flying ALPRs” last year. 

The normalization of police DFR programs jeopardizes privacy in communities across the country. As flying cameras, drones can capture footage from areas typically inaccessible to a casual patrol officer—backyards, roofs, through windows—at distances that leave subjects of surveillance completely unaware of the spy in the sky. A recent leak of drone footage from the San Francisco Police Department illustrated the ease with which surreptitious drone flights could observe innocent individuals for minutes without them realizing it. EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance contains a list of police departments with drones, including those with DFR programs.

While daytime DFR use grows, police departments are exploring other ways to expand overhead surveillance. In October 2024, the Campbell Police Department in California announced it had received the first FAA approval for BVLOS operations at night, claiming it was the “first to incorporate radar technology with electro-optical sensors to enhance airspace monitoring, enabling a single remote pilot to safely deploy drones both day and night.”  

As communities consider drone use, it’s crucial that they have a say in whether the program is acquired at all, not just how it’s run once purchased. Throughout the process, police should be transparent with the community and comply with local regulations about its adoption.

Many cities provide portals that log the flight paths and reasons for each drone flight, often in real time, an important transparency practice. In California, under AB 481, police departments are required to provide advance notice of intent to acquire drones, establish policies before they’re procured, and provide annual updates on their uses—giving communities and city councils the opportunity, before any contract is signed, to weigh in or object to the acquisition itself. 

For police departments and communities considering drone use, clear policies on appropriate use, transparency around deployment, and regular re-evaluation—including the choice to discontinue a program that isn’t working—are all vital for protecting people’s privacy and security. 

Originally published to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

If you know anything about Techdirt, you know we’re big fans of the EFF and its decades of advocacy for digital rights and the open internet. Recently, the organization went through a big change in the form of a new executive director: legal expert and long-time leader in the space Nicole Ozer. On this week’s episode, Nicole joins the podcast to talk about her new role and what’s coming next for the EFF.

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For many, many years now we’ve been calling out how the entire narrative around the “censorship industrial complex” was absolute bullshit, made up by a group of either deliberate misinformation peddlers or confused “contrarian” journalists too stupid to understand how basic things work. And I say that as someone who has long been critical of efforts to “ban disinformation” online, and especially of attempts to regulate mis or disinformation.

So when the whole narrative of the “censorship industrial complex” came about, you’d think that I would have been on board, having called out years of efforts by politicians to pressure companies into removing certain speech along with a moral panic about “disinformation.”

But, reality matters. And that’s why, when stories started popping up about a vast collaboration between tech companies and governments to “censor” people based on ideological viewpoints, I looked at the details — and it was basically all bullshit.

The reality is that there are efforts at spreading disinformation and propaganda. And while I’m skeptical about how powerful or successful those can be… ironically, the one example that has caused me to reconsider my position is the success of the blatant lie about the “censorship industrial complex.”

Type Investigations and the MIT Tech Review teamed up to put together a deeply researched article highlighting how a group of bullshit peddling right-wing influencers basically invented the entire concept of the “censorship industrial complex” and were able to mainstream it across the right-wing mediasphere, deep into the Trump White House, and are likely a big part of the reason Elon Musk focused on killing USAID in his early days at DOGE. It’s quite a report. The key thing, though, is that a bunch of motivated propagandists took any effort at making internet websites safer… and insisted that they were about censorship. And then they would put together conspiracy cork boards insisting that these efforts were really controlled by the government.

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. 

Much of what has been characterized as censorship is really part of an effort to make the internet safer. This could include work quantifying just how often people online have generated nonconsensual sexualized content of women and children; helping victims of online stalking, doxxing, and other crimes seek justice; or identifying whether someone we are interacting with online is genuine and not, say, a foreign agent posing as an American voter. 

At the center of it all is a dude named Mike Benz, who was outed as a racist internet troll who spent years pushing the “great replacement theory” and screaming about “white genocide,” who reinvented himself from a low level Trump staffer in Housing and Urban Development into a self-styled “cyber expert” in the State Department who claimed he had inside knowledge on the whole “censorship industrial complex.” The reality is that Benz worked in the State Department for just a few months after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and already had a history of insisting that basic trust & safety work — including fact checking, let alone limiting or banning someone for violating a site’s terms of service — was “censorship.”

At the center of this effort is Mike Benz, Rubio’s interview partner last April. Benz served a brief stint in Donald Trump’s first administration but has largely remained unknown, even as some of his ideas—including the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a NATO asset and the pro-white-identity content he published anonymously before he joined the government—have gained followers. Our analysis uncovers just how integral he in particular was to spreading the CIC theory: We found him to be the most prolific creator of related content online, which was in turn picked up by right-wing media outlets and podcasts and eventually reached the highest echelons of power in the US. His work prompted congressional—and eventually presidential—action and generated both attention and financial benefits for Benz personally. (Benz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Last April, near the end of the interview at the State Department, Rubio shot Benz a friendly finger gun. 

“Thanks for your attention to this topic,” Rubio said. “I know you’ve been on this a long time.”

Benz spent much of the Biden administration trying to convince everyone of this vast censorship industrial complex. Notably, just days before this Type Investigations piece came out, Renee DiResta (who Benz and others falsely insist was a key player in this mythical censorship industrial complex) published a recording and transcript of the Twitter Spaces where a very credulous Matt Taibbi fell for Benz’s bullshit, leading to years of Taibbi spewing complete nonsense about the so-called “Twitter Files.”

Benz did not mention that he was appointed to this portfolio in November 2020. The Trump administration ended on January 20, 2021. His State Department tenure lasted roughly two months…over the holidays.

Taibbi bit immediately. He told Benz he’d sent him a DM, adding: “I’m very anxious to talk to you in a longer setting if that’s possible.” Benz, he said, “could probably be invaluable” to a huge project he was launching to map the same world.

Benz continued listing his bona fides: there was no close second with his knowledge, he said. He had delivered “eight or nine congressional briefings,” spoken with “four or five senators,” and briefed House and Senate committees. If Taibbi would talk to him privately, Benz said, he could describe “every single individual, institution, the chronology, the pretexts that were used, all of the dirty little tricks that were done each step of the way.”

“I can tell you literally everything,” he said.

“That’s great,” Taibbi replied.

As this new report points out, once Benz reached Taibbi (and via him, Michael Shellenberger), combined with Rep. Jim Jordan, you had a closed loop of utter bullshit, with each of them egging the others into deeper conspiracy theories on a foundation of confirmation bias and not bothering to check.

In a 2023 podcast interview, Shellenberger credited Benz with opening his eyes to the full extent to which conservative voices were being silenced. “We basically went from being concerned about bad forms of censorship by Twitter and other social media platforms to being concerned about government censorship,” Shellenberger said.

“We were, like, proverbially touching the elephant. We didn’t understand what the elephant was [until] we discovered your work, Mike.”

And it’s one thing if the damage to this were just about disinformation research. All that effort absolutely kneecapped the ability of the US to deal with foreign misinformation (and it’s mildly amusing watching MAGA folks now freaking out about how the US is so bad at responding to foreign influence campaigns, when they’re the reason that we destroyed our capacity). But as the Type Investigations article shows, the machinery Benz had spent two years building was also a big part of why Elon Musk shut down USAID, likely leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Benz deserves some of the credit for that apparently:

The agency had been a longtime obsession for Benz, who argued that it was an instrument of censorship as early as FFO’s first report in July 2022. An effort in Brazil to limit the spread of disinformation on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, FFO alleged, was a form of censorship financed by USAID and others. Later that year, Benz also accused USAID of funding what he called a “Countering Disinformation Guidebook for Digital Censorship.” In reality, it was a USAID primer for its overseas staff on how to recognize disinformation campaigns in the foreign countries where the agency operated. 

Our analysis shows that Benz and FFO were the dominant voices promoting conspiracy theories around USAID and censorship from 2022 until late 2024, when Benz talked about it on Rogan’s podcast. “USAID is effectively a ‘switch player’ to assist the Pentagon on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operation front,” Benz alleged.

His appearance drew millions of viewers, including Musk. The trillionaire retweeted an X user’s glowing summary of the interview. “Mike Benz just revealed everything,” the user wrote, including “how ‘democracy’ was redefined to silence you.” 

This marked the first time Musk, newly installed at DOGE, had posted specifically about USAID. But Benz and Musk were already acquainted. The two had exchanged tweets and threads about censorship and other conspiracy theories for years.

Oh, and it should be mentioned that Marco Rubio hired Benz to spend his time sorting through what’s left of USAID to try to justify his bullshit claims, just as Musk had Taibbi and Shellenberger sniff through Twitter’s internal docs in the hopes that they would craft a narrative to support his prejudices.

The incredible bit to me here is that in both the Twitter Files nonsense and with the US government, Musk was always in a position where he could look at the source documents and details himself. He could speak to actual experts. Instead, he took the kook conspiracy theories from nonsense peddlers, assumed they were true because they fed into what he wanted to believe, and ran with them — with every bit of available evidence saying he was just swallowing propaganda.

The article also details the plumbing: how a small, heavily interconnected — and largely commonly funded — slice of the right-wing media ecosystem pumped these ideas back and forth until they looked like consensus:

In each case, our analysis found, CIC-related conspiracy theories on social media were supported by a number of conservative groups; key among them were FFO and AFL, which played a crucial role in obtaining government records they claimed showed evidence that conservatives were censored. FFO then used these documents to write exhaustive reports supposedly connecting the dots to explain how the censorship industry worked. AFL also instigated a number of lawsuits against supposedly CIC-implicated individuals and organizations. 

These materials were then amplified by a slew of right-wing media outlets, many with shared funding.

Much of that financing was funneled through the Informing America Foundation (IAF), a media-oriented grant-making organization that John Solomon helped to launch after leaving his position at The Hill back in 2019, following public scrutiny of columns about the Bidens and Ukraine. IAF funds a network of podcasts called Real America’s Voice, which includes shows run by key Trump allies like Steve Bannon, Jack Prosobiec, and the late Charlie Kirk, as well as Solomon himself. It also finances a network of what media scholars call “pink slime” websites, which are designed to look like nonpartisan local news but have a partisan slant. Benz appeared regularly on these podcasts and in these outlets, further embedding the CIC narrative in the right-wing information ecosystem—while simultaneously enhancing his own profile and revenue streams on X Premium and other platforms. 

As the article also notes, all of these jackasses pushing nonsense about a non-existent censorship industrial complex have basically all been either entirely silent or — worse — have effectively cheered on examples of the Trump administration actively censoring speech of critics. But, as free speech expert David Kaye mentions in that article, it seems like the claims about the censorship industrial complex is all fluff and nonsense to distract from the very real censorship of the Trump administration:

That’s why it’s important to look beyond the political narratives themselves and consider actions, says David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a former UN special rapporteur for free speech. “The administration probably realizes that … Americans do not generally feel censored by Europe or Brazil,” he says. But by focusing on Europe, Brazil, and the broader CIC idea, it hopes to “distract” from the fact that “Americans are definitely facing the most substantial censorship in, I don’t know, 100 years,” he adds—though “it’s actually the Trump administration” that is responsible.

The notion of a censorship-industrial complex is proving again and again to be a convenient and powerful pretext for silencing the loudest critics of those in power. “The very thing that they are accusing people of—censoring—is something that they’re now perpetuating,” says Jankowicz.  

And as the article points out, Benz is 100% on board with using the government to stifle speech. Just so long as it’s the speech of his ideological foes.

That, of course, may have been the goal all along. From the stage of the Heritage Foundation back in 2024, Benz spoke of the CIC as having its hand on a “God button” giving it the power to “control discourse on every political issue.” Now conservatives can wield that power themselves.

“Democracy is about the hearts and minds of the people,” he told the audience. “If you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default.”

There’s much more in the article (also available at MIT Tech Review), and you should read it — not because you need convincing that Mike Benz is full of shit, but because bits of this conspiracy theory have leaked well outside of MAGA world. I still regularly run into perfectly reasonable non-MAGA people who believe some version of “the Biden administration worked with social media to silence conservatives.” It didn’t. But the story was told loudly enough, for long enough, by enough people who had a financial and/or political interest in telling it, that it became accepted wisdom among many.

And look at where it landed. The State Department shut down the office that tracked foreign influence operations, and Rubio announced it in a friendly video chat with the guy who spent a decade inventing the reason to shut it down. Rubio then banned five Europeans from entering the United States for the crime of advocating for content moderation rules he doesn’t like — calling them “agents of the censorship-industrial complex” — until a judge blocked it as “likely viewpoint discriminatory.” The State Department launched a website, freedom.gov, whose entire purpose is to relitigate other countries’ moderation decisions. And, of course, you have the Trump FCC chair going after broadcasters for airing jokes about the president and for platforming Democratic candidates.

Every one of those is actual censorship. Every one is the government using state power to punish speech it dislikes. None of those are a trust & safety team enforcing violations of its terms of service on its own private property.

So it was a disinformation campaign so successful that it kneecapped our ability to fight disinformation campaigns. That would be bad enough on its own. But the more lasting damage is that the censorship-industrial complex Benz spent a decade describing didn’t exist when he started describing it. But it exists now, and it’s controlled by Marco Rubio, Elon Musk… and Mike Benz.

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Will anyone ever hold an ICE officer accountable for shooting or killing someone? Maybe, but it won’t be anyone from this administration — one that has actively blocked state investigators from following up on ICE shootings and even pulled FBI agents from ongoing investigations so ICE can forgive itself for its officers actions.

While ICE continues to engage in violent acts and the administration scrambles to cover for their actions, immigration officers are undermining prosecutions targeting the victims of their violent actions because they can’t stop lying.

And while this seems to be a long shot, maybe we’ll see at least one ICE officer convicted for their criminal acts. It’s not just the jurisdiction issues that lower these odds. And that’s if you just limit it to state vs. federal. In this case, one of Trump’s favorite targets is requesting assistance from one of Trump’s most loyal supporters.

A Minnesota prosecutor is asking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to authorize the extradition of a federal officer who shot and injured an immigrant in Minneapolis in January.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a letter to Abbott that his sign-off is the “final step” in transferring Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Christian Castro to Minnesota to face state criminal charges.

As long as Trump remains in office, I can’t see Greg Abbott doing the right thing and turning over an ICE agent his state actually arrested using a warrant issued by Minnesota law enforcement.

Castro is facing multiple criminal assault charges for firing into a home and wounding Julio Sosa-Celis. This happened in January, only a few days before immigration officers murdered Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti just four days apart.

The DHS immediately responded with lies that were disproven shortly thereafter.

In the immediate wake of the shooting of Mr. Sosa-Celis, federal officials defended the agents, saying they had been attacked with a broom and shovel. Kristi Noem, who was then the secretary of homeland security, described it as “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.” Within days, Mr. Sosa-Celis and a housemate, Alfredo A. Aljorna, who was also from Venezuela and involved in the confrontation, were charged with federal felonies.

But aspects of the government’s account soon began to unravel. The charges against both men were dropped, and federal officials said they were instead investigating the agents. Video footage of the incident obtained by The New York Times did not show a sustained attack with a shovel and more broadly contradicted the agent’s claim of a roughly three-minute beating. 

So far, so ICE. But the charges managed to stick, even though the FBI locked state officials out of the investigation almost immediately. More amazingly, Texas law enforcement actually arrested an ICE officer on a Minnesota warrant.

The wheel of justice, etc. But anything going forward depends on a lot of things that don’t work in Minnesota’s favor. First, the Supremacy Clause is a tough hurdle since it can easily block state prosecutors from bringing cases against federal officers. Then there’s the ICE officer himself, who has refused to voluntarily comply with extradition requests. Finally, there’s a man who’s as corrupt as Trump himself — one who’s certainly not going to “export” a jailed ICE cop, especially not to the People’s Republic of Minnesota. But here’s hoping Governor Greg Abbott decides an ICE officer with a Mexican-sounding last name can get out there and “take one for the team.”

There have been rumblings for a while that America’s richest and most annoying white supremacist, Elon Musk, really wants to get into the wireless phone business. His lobbyists have been making noise in support for broader phone unlocking rules, and there’ve been several IPO-fluffing press leaks over the last few months indicating they’re keen on building a Starlink phone.

They’ve also leaked word to Semafor, likely in part to boost Musk’s sagging and disastrous IPO, that Musk’s companies are on the hunt for spectrum allowing them to offer wireless phone service in more dense, urban markets (since Starlink LEO satellite lacks the capacity for that):

“SpaceX, which is trying to fill a hole in its airwaves crucial for a full-service wireless network, has been hunting for spectrum that works well in cities and dense areas, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is considering buying competitors to acquire the spectrum or competing at a government auction set for next year, the people said.”

There have been some rumblings that Musk Corp could try to acquire T-Mobile, which they’re already partnering with on a hybrid LEO satellite and cellular phone offering that lets you use Starlink in remote areas for calls and cellular when in more dense locations.

One of several problems for Musk is his highly-fraudulent IPO is cratering, adding additional financial pressure to the mix. Massive acquisitions, which you’d probably need to do this effectively, are costly, debt-riddled, notoriously time-consuming and resource intensive.

SpaceX’s IPO promised that Starlink would quickly jump from 10 million current subscribers to 300 million or more in very short order. That’s pretty much impossible with just Starlink (despite some delusional numbers being tossed around by Jason Calacanis and friends). Even if you acquired T-Mobile (142.6 million subscribers) it would take years and a ton of good luck to get anywhere close.

Telecom is also a massively cash-intensive business to jump into. Spectrum, tower leases, backhaul is all annoying, complicated, pricey, and time consuming to get right. Assuming 100% competency you’d be talking years before any sort of meaningful traction, by which time they could be facing less Musk-friendly regulators at the FCC.

Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast also just inherently loathe competition, and can be quite formidable when they join forces to box out any new competitors. The highway of telecom history is littered with corpses of folks who believed they could break through the monopolistic, government-coddled logjam (Dish Network being just the latest). As is the highway of very deep-pocketed companies trying to offer their own smartphones (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft).

You’ve also got other companies like Amazon considering similar phone networks. Musk’s companies, especially Starlink, also are notorious for refusing to have competent customer service, something they’d need to excel at to disrupt cellular and gain fast market share. And this is all while Musk continues to show signs of massive instability as he dedicates the majority of his time to being a bizarre and unhinged egomaniacal racist on his personal propaganda website.

Though Musk does have some things in his favor. Like an army of cultists who’ll praise his barely available and expensive phone service no matter how clumsy or half-completed any network build is. People in the extended Roganverse already think the costly and congested Starlink network is akin to magic, and the marketing hype surrounding a Musk phone would be utterly deafening.

That doesn’t naturally equate to success in competently challenging some of America’s biggest and most politically powerful monopolies in brick-and-mortar reality, though.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions from a Senate committee more than 100 times on July 29, 2026.

The Republican-led hearing – convened to scrutinize Fauci’s management of the pandemic and the origins of COVID-19 – was the latest chapter in a political story that began in 2020, when uncertainty, fear and frustration with the government became entangled with conspiracy theories.

In the past six years, some of these theories have emerged from the margins of the internet and made their way into Republican politics, the MAGA movement, anti-vaccine communities and even white-nationalist extremist networks.

Conspiracy theories do not simply explain events, they identify villains – and Fauci has become one of the most popular in this particular story.

In the years since the pandemic, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and others have accused Fauci of many things, but the central conspiracy accusation is that Fauci helped enable the COVID-19 pandemic through U.S.-funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, and then participated in a coordinated government-scientific cover-up, misleading Congress to conceal that connection and suppress the laboratory-leak explanation. Paul, a Republican, has repeatedly called for Fauci’s prosecution.

In January 2025, President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon covering potential federal offenses related to his government service since 2014. Fauci had not been charged with a crime, but critics portrayed the pardon as evidence that he had something to hide. Fauci has denied claims of wrongdoing and has testified multiple times before Congress.

The Fauci conspiracy is much bigger than Rand Paul, though. Paul may be its most persistent congressional promoter, but it’s been amplified by a wider network of Republican lawmakers. Several Republican members of Congress, such as Rep. Steve Scalise, Rep. James Comer and former Rep. Brad Wenstrup, among others, have advanced versions of the Fauci/COVID-origin narrative. House Republicans formally investigated these claims for two years, while members repeatedly accused Fauci of suppressing the lab-leak theory and misleading the public.

That investigation ultimately endorsed a central claim of the conspiracy narrative: the House GOP’s COVID-19 investigation concluded the virus most likely leaked from a Wuhan lab, that Fauci helped shape a scientific paper dismissing that theory, and that he privately testified the “six feet apart” guidance “sort of just appeared” – though these are the conclusions of a partisan committee, not an independent inquiry, and Fauci and Democratic members have disputed them.

I’m an associate professor of sociology and criminology, and my scholarship focuses on far-right networks and digital radicalization – the exact ecosystem where these conspiracy theories have taken root and spread. My research on how these movements evolve online and intersect with political activists and extremist networks was directly relevant to tracing how COVID-origin claims moved from fringe communities into mainstream political discourse.

Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment, which he and his lawyer explained not only as a basic constitutional right but also a strategy to avoid the possibility that Paul might try to prosecute him for lying to Congress based on anything he might say, may be politically explosive and provide his opponents with another talking point. But, in my assessment, the spectacle says more about what happens when conspiracy theories become embedded in political institutions than it does about the origins of COVID-19.

From uncertainty to conspiracy

COVID-19 created the conditions in which conspiracy theories flourish: enormous uncertainty, frightening consequences, rapidly changing information and distrust of institutions.

People wanted explanations. Why did the virus appear in Wuhan? Why did recommendations about masks change? How were vaccines developed so quickly?

These questions were legitimate. Problems emerged when those questions became connected to a predetermined conclusion: Powerful people either created the pandemic or concealed the connection to the lab in Wuhan.

A 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute illustrates how widespread one version of this thinking was. About 4 in 10 Americans – 39% – agreed that the coronavirus had been intentionally developed by scientists in a laboratory. Among QAnon believers – a sprawling conspiracy theory claiming that a cabal of powerful elites, often portrayed as child-trafficking Satanists, controls government and society and that Donald Trump was secretly fighting it – the figure was dramatically higher, at 85%. The same survey found that people who embraced anti-elite and anti-expert attitudes were more likely to accept coronavirus conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy thinking is rarely isolated. For example, a person who comes to believe that public health officials are secretly manipulating information may be more receptive to claims that vaccines contain hidden dangers. Someone who distrusts pharmaceutical companies may be more receptive to claims that the pandemic was engineered for profit. Someone who believes powerful elites routinely operate in secret may be more receptive to broader conspiracy narratives such as QAnon.

These beliefs can reinforce one another, creating a broader worldview in which institutions, experts and government officials are presumed to be acting deceptively.

The Fauci conspiracy

Because Fauci was highly visible during the pandemic, advising presidents and appearing on television, he quickly became associated with government efforts to control the spread of the virus.

For some Republicans and MAGA activists, and others who distrust the government and scientific institutions, Fauci came to represent lockdowns, masks, vaccines and government mandates.

Anti-vaccine activists incorporated him into broader narratives about pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies. Conspiracists took the story further, portraying Fauci as part of a secret effort to conceal the origins of COVID-19. Extremists connected these claims to older ideas about government tyranny, social control and corrupt elites.

The result was a feedback loop.

Claims were generated in online communities, repeated by political figures and amplified by media personalities, who injected these talking points back into supporters’ social media feeds. The repetition made the claims feel increasingly familiar – and familiarity can be mistaken for evidence.

The lab-leak question is not the same as a conspiracy theory

Asking whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged through either zoonotic spillover, which is when a virus jumps from animals to people, or through a laboratory-related incident is not inherently a conspiracy theory. Scientists and governments have legitimate reasons to investigate the origins of a pandemic.

The World Health Organization’s independent scientific advisory group reported in 2025 that much of the information needed to fully evaluate the competing hypotheses had not been provided by China. It concluded that the available evidence suggests spillover but maintained that the laboratory-leak hypothesis could not be ruled out.

There is, however, a distinction between investigating whether a laboratory accident might have occurred and claiming that scientists created a virus and intentionally released it. That distinction is important in returning to Fauci and the claims raised at the July 29 hearing: Were lawmakers investigating the possibility of an accidental laboratory release, or were they advancing the more conspiratorial idea that scientists deliberately created and released the virus?

The Republican-led House subcommittee argued that U.S. government–funded research may have contributed to the pandemic.

The investigation did not establish that the virus was intentionally manufactured or released.

Today, the scientific question of where SARS-CoV-2 originated remains unresolved. But conspiracy theories can transform the absence of evidence into evidence of concealment.

From fringe theory to political reality

The most consequential feature of conspiracy theories may be their ability to move from one group to another.

A claim can begin in an obscure online community and spread through social media to become a political weapon.

The Fauci hearing demonstrates the culmination of that process. These claims have moved into the formal machinery of government, where they are being amplified by elected officials and federal agencies. A theory’s credibility can increase simply because someone with greater institutional authority has repeated it.

That may be the most important question surrounding Fauci’s hearing: What happens when conspiracy theories acquire the authority of the government?

Art Jipson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton