As he called the House Judiciary Committee into session on a cold and snowy February day in Washington, DC, Chairman Jim Jordan was ready to take a victory lap. American free speech had been critically threatened, and now it was saved — in large part thanks to him and his committee.

“What a difference a few years make,” the Republican congressman for Ohio’s 4th district told those present. “Four years ago, President Trump was banned from all platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Today, he has his own platform. He’s back on all the others. And of course, he’s president of the United States.”

Donald Trump was expelled from the major social networks in the final days of his first presidency, following the January 6th insurrection. Tens of thousands of his supporters were banned, too, for pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory or supporting the violent overthrow of the US government.

To those who had sounded the alarm on disinformation and radicalization online, these bans were a belated victory of sorts — after what they had warned of had come to pass. To Trump and his supporters, they were the ultimate proof that liberals sought to censor conservatives online.

Jordan was a leader of the Republican effort to fight back against this “censorship,” bringing the resources of the House Judiciary Committee — and its subpoena powers — to bear for the cause since 2023. His opening remarks on that day were anything but bluster. Over that time, he had racked up win after win against what had become known as a “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — the title of the day’s evidence session.

Big tech had been censoring Americans on the orders of the White House, he told the room. “You don’t have to take my word for it. Mark Zuckerberg wrote the committee a letter, told us it was going on.” He had — and a few months later, shortly before Trump’s second inauguration, Zuckerberg promised to swap sides in the censorship wars, abolishing Facebook’s use of fact-checkers and changing its global moderation rules to allow more widespread use of ethnic and anti-LGBTQ slurs, among other changes.

The committee had notched up no shortage of smaller victories along the way, which Jordan relayed with relish. His committee had helped to shut down academic units, NGOs, and coalitions of advertisers. All of them were now “out of business.” “What a difference a few years can make,” Jordan said, satisfied.

The day’s star witness was Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist and onetime liberal darling, who had been among those people handpicked by Elon Musk to publish revelations from the so-called Twitter Files, exposing — as they saw it — how concerns about “misinformation” had been exploited to censor conservative and dissenting voices on the platform.

Taibbi and company were calling for the government to do more in the name of free speech — defunding any efforts funding fact-checkers or misinformation research, and similarly ending US government funding of media across the world, which they dismiss as “propaganda.” Over the last few years, Musk, Jordan, and Taibbi had created something of an unstoppable machine: Jordan had the power to subpoena evidence, call witnesses, and create reports. Taibbi and others could testify at those hearings and report on them, as well as on material provided by Musk. Musk, in turn, could launch lawsuits based on the findings of Jordan’s committees and on the reporting of Taibbi and others.

To those people caught in that machine, though, things looked very different. From their perspective, they had been trying to protect America’s free speech. During the heights of covid, false information that stopped people from getting vaccinated or from masking, or which made them try unsafe “cures,” could prove fatal. The January 6th protests showed that political misinformation could be a life-and-death matter, too.

And now, the people who had tried to force social networks to take these issues seriously found themselves condemned in Congress, blazoned across Fox News, facing death threats and the end of their professional careers.

What started with a row over fact-checking and moderation of particular stories on social media — the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak theory of covid, the QAnon conspiracy theory — has turned into a worldwide battle on the nature and limits of free speech online, covering anywhere and everywhere the government interacts with social media companies, or where it funds anything relating to media. Even the future of the transatlantic alliance is at stake after JD Vance accused Europe of becoming an enemy to free speech.

But at its core, this is still a bloody fight over what is and isn’t true — with claims and counter-claims thrown in every direction. At various points, people involved have accused one another of being former CIA spies or PR flacks for Hugo Chávez, of having flung a custard pie laden with horse semen into the face of a rival, and more. (Almost all of the above turned out to be — more or less — true.)

The roots of the row go back decades, but if its modern iteration has a clear starting point, it would be a three-sentence missive tucked near the bottom of Playbook on April 27th, 2022. The Department of Homeland Security was setting up a Disinformation Governance Board, it announced, and a woman in her 30s named Nina Jankowicz would head it.

That announcement would prove enough for all hell to break loose. By the end of the day, a heavily pregnant Jankowicz would be sourcing security cameras for her home while her husband secured the doors. She would, within a few short days, become known across the media as Joe Biden’s chief censor.

But before we continue, a disclosure: I am not an entirely impartial observer of this battle, if it’s possible for such a thing to exist. In 2017, I wrote a book, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, on the dangers of misinformation and disinformation, which led to invitations to speak to policymakers in different countries on how the issue might be tackled. In 2018, I agreed to give a one-hour talk to journalists from Eastern Europe on Russian disinformation tactics and how to detect them — a talk I’d given before in other contexts. This time, the organization that paid for it (I got about $300) was called the Integrity Initiative, which I later learned had been funded by the UK Foreign Office.

As happened with organizations working against Russian influence operations with unsurprising frequency, Integrity Initiative’s internal emails and documents were hacked and leaked online. As a result, I have an entry on Wikispooks, noting I “was exposed as having in secret worked for the British intelligence propaganda unit Integrity Initiative.” More than that, it continued, my “work as a propagandist for British spy agencies … could explain his fast track in major media outlets.”

I am, to others, a part of the censorship-industrial complex.

Except I don’t see it that way, especially as for a time I moved to America for the express purpose of avoiding government censorship. In 2013, I was one of the team working at The Guardian to publish stories based on classified documents from the NSA leaked by Edward Snowden.

The Guardian had to destroy every copy of the files that we held in the UK to avoid an injunction preventing us publishing any stories worldwide. To keep reporting the story, I moved to the US, where we had sent an emergency backup. The irony of moving to the very country whose classified documents we were reporting on for the free speech guarantees to keep working on them was not lost on us, but we were exceptionally grateful for the protections the First Amendment granted us. Today, those who worry about the online information environment are portrayed as a threat to those free speech rights. But they argue instead that they’re actually just fighting to exercise them.

When we agree to speak, Jankowicz suggests that we meet at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where she’s recently secured a membership. Sitting in its dining room on the 14th floor, the location is almost painfully on the nose — a grand but dated dining room, almost empty, just 300 yards and yet a world away from Trump’s White House. Even the music that plays as we chat is a relic of another era.

Jankowicz, a registered Democrat and a former Fulbright fellow, was a disinformation expert and the author of How to Lose the Information War. She had been approached to help the Department of Homeland Security coordinate how it thought about and responded to disinformation threats that related to national security. That meant deliberate operations targeting critical infrastructure, elections, and even migration, she explains.

Her job as executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board would be to convene a group from across the department to consider these issues and how to respond to them — and not much more than that, she thinks. Once she had been hired and security vetted, she already realized it might be harder than she thought.

She was installed in the DHS’s sprawling campus, well out of the center of DC, sharing space with the Coast Guard. “The majority of it is a former psychiatric institution called St. Elizabeths,” she says. Adding to her isolation, she had to work in a secure room with limited access to the internet, called a SCIF, because her role involved occasionally accessing classified documents. But that meant even simple team calls were an ordeal, even though Jankowicz’s role was supposed to be helping the government communicate. “I think … they genuinely hadn’t thought [it] through.”

That came to a head when Jankowicz’s role was announced. She had pushed for it to become public before her maternity leave, fearing it would seem ridiculous if the announcement came when she was in a monthslong absence. The department assured her it was handling it, and her position was made public in a short Playbook announcement — with no further details available or on offer.

No one seemed to stop to wonder how a name like the “Disinformation Governance Board” might sound to the public — or to a conservative media still feeling persecuted after the mass-deletion of Trump-supporting accounts just a year before. Social media backlash from anonymous accounts started almost immediately. Within just a few hours, the alt-right influencer Jack Posobiec had picked up on the announcement and was calling the Disinformation Governance Board a “Ministry of Truth.”

Jankowicz knew the moment she saw Posobiec tweet about her hiring that a catastrophe would follow. “That becomes a Category 5 disaster immediately because of who listens to him,” she says. But the DHS not only refused to put out more information itself, it also barred Jankowicz from any public communications, instead advising her to wait until things had blown over.

They did not. What started on social media was soon leading Fox News, and was then picked up by Jim Jordan — then ranking member on the Judiciary Committee — who demanded Jankowicz hand over details and get ready to give evidence.

She was an almost perfect villain for the conservative media: She was a young, attractive woman, she was a Democrat, and even worse, she was goofy. In the midst of the right-wing uproar, someone unearthed a TikTok that Jankowicz had recorded during the covid lockdowns. In the video, Jankowicz — who is very much a musical theater kid — sings about disinformation, riffing on the Mary Poppins song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Between this self-effacing gag (panned as “cringeworthy” by the New York Post) and the Orwellian overtones of the newly announced Disinformation Governance Board, Jankowicz earned the moniker “Scary Poppins.”

The government wasn’t defending her, she was banned from defending herself, and even potential allies were staying quiet, having sensed which way the wind was blowing. Jankowicz was essentially on her own. The Disinformation Governance Board was disbanded before it had ever met, and while Jankowicz was offered other roles in government, she opted instead to resign.

Jankowicz is still frustrated that she never got a chance to do the actual job she was hired to do. Theoretically, fighting disinformation should be a bipartisan priority — in our conversation, she brings up, for instance, the role that disinformation might play in encouraging migrants to cross the border. If criminal gangs are using disinformation to suggest crossing the border grants automatic citizenship or other perks, shouldn’t the government think about how to respond to that to help tackle the border crisis?

But in the end, the fight against disinformation had become coded as liberal, and was now anathema to the Republican Party. And Jankowicz’s resignation was celebrated as a success, as a “kill.”

Republican lawmakers “celebrated the threats against me,” she says. “They sent out fundraising emails that literally were a gravestone that said ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’”

The right-wing movement had learned through this, too, that supposedly liberal-controlled institutions would stay quiet when under fire. From Jankowicz’s point of view, the right would successfully deploy the same tactics again and again, honing their strategies, while Jankowicz’s side — the fighters of misinfo, the fact-checkers, the disinformation researchers — kept succumbing without a fight. Time and again, whoever was targeted would keep their heads down in the hope that the media scrum would soon move on.

It doesn’t, says Jankowicz. At some point, organizations need to learn that, or they’ll keep losing. “You are never going to be out of the crosshairs. It’s been almost three years since I started at DHS, and I am not out of the crosshairs yet.”

Jankowicz feels like she was chewed up and spat out by a coordinated media and political nexus much larger than herself, and for which her own side had no defense. Maybe ironically, those on the other side, at the heart of the efforts to take down the “censorship-industrial complex,” seem to feel much the same.

Matt Taibbi rose to prominence as a guerrilla reporter, the journalist that caught the mood of much of the world in 2010 when he likened Goldman Sachs to “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” He had always had an independent bent; according to his memoir of his time in Russia, he had hit the then-New York Times Moscow bureau chief in the face with a custard pie laced with horse semen.

That same memoir would largely fly under the radar until 2017, when Taibbi was swept up in larger reckoning around #MeToo. The book’s passages detailing extensive sexual harassment and denigration of women sparked a delayed backlash, ultimately prompting Taibbi to both apologize and to say much of the book was satire. But his relationship with liberal media and liberal politics was never the same again. He even filed a $10 million libel suit against a Democratic politician after she called him a “serial sexual harasser.” Today, Taibbi strenuously denies past wrongdoing: “there is not and has never been even a hint of a rumor of sexual impropriety,” he said in an email to The Verge.

His run-in with so-called cancel culture seems to have left an impression. By 2020 he was railing against “the American left,” calling it “a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.” (Perhaps he felt burned by all the misinformation circulating about him online.)

When Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he handpicked journalists to, as he put it, show the public “what really happened” with “free speech suppression” under the previous management, working in cahoots with the government. With his antagonistic relationship with the liberal mainstream, Taibbi was a perfect fit for the job.

For many years, Twitter had been accused of “shadow banning” conservative users — that is, reducing their visibility in the algorithm. More recently, it had been one of the social networks that restricted links to a New York Post story reporting on the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop, full of incriminating photos and documents, at a repair shop. At the time, social networks had operated on an abundance of caution as well as the mistaken belief — supported by the many qualms of researchers and American intelligence officers — that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a disinformation operation. (The laptop turned out to be real, although the question of how the device ended up in the hands of the New York Post remains somewhat unsettling.) There was much that people wanted to know, and with Twitter’s internal files delivered into his possession, Taibbi was poised to slake a public appetite for a big frame-up.

Taibbi’s early reports, though, were underwhelming. One of his first bombshells was that Twitter received money from the FBI, supposedly for cooperating with its takedown demands. In reality, the payments were legally mandated compensation for cooperation with law enforcement requests for user data, which were already publicly disclosed as a matter of routine. Another early Twitter Files story showed the Biden campaign — prior to Joe Biden taking office — asking for some tweets relating to the Hunter laptop story to be deleted. But the tweets in question contained naked photos of Hunter in violation of the site’s policies on nonconsensual nudes. Censorship, yes, but not of a particularly Orwellian kind.

The revelations were largely shrugged off by the mainstream media, but found fertile ground on Fox News and its ecosystem — and with Jim Jordan, who saw an opportunity to build on the victory he had secured over Jankowicz and the Department of Homeland Security.

By the time he testified in front of Congress in February 2025, Taibbi was practically a veteran — he’d appeared before lawmakers several times, getting a rapturous reception from Republicans. His work had been a central plank of several of its reports. All the same, he told lawmakers about the hardships he’d faced for doing so, including a suspiciously timed IRS audit that came the same day as one of his appearances, he said (though it eventually resulted in a refund).

During that day’s testimony, Taibbi connected that ongoing mission against disinformation researchers with Elon Musk’s work at DOGE. “USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine,” he said. “Collectively, they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think tanks, research, fact-checking, anti-disinformation, commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, straight-up censorship. It is a giant closed messaging loop whose purpose is to transform the free press into exactly that consensus machine.”

Taibbi, in sworn testimony, was calling for the dismantling of newsrooms and fact-checkers across the world — funded by USAID or other agencies in the name of promoting democracy of free media — in the name of free speech. But disinformation research had made itself an easy target, not least by provoking grievances in those who found themselves on the wrong side of it.

If Nina Jankowicz was the first supervillain of the censorship-industrial complex, then Renée DiResta is surely its second. DiResta was the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research center on disinformation and misinformation that found itself first in the crosshairs of the Twitter Files journalists, and then of Jim Jordan’s committee.

To hear it described from the outside, the Stanford Internet Observatory was essentially the hub of the censorship-industrial complex, coordinating the effort of outside groups, the federal government, and social media companies. DiResta was the lead author on an extensive report on the effects of disinformation on the 2020 election — which had involved students monitoring social media 20 hours a day in the final days of voting. Using access to Twitter’s fire hose, DiResta and her team at the SIO identified around 22 million posts containing mis- or disinformation over the election period. It was a figure that would come back to haunt her.

Matt Taibbi would come to write extensively on the SIO, but DiResta’s first entanglement was with a different independent journalist, Michael Shellenberger, who would become, like Taibbi, another repeat witness for the House committee.

Shellenberger had reinvented himself on multiple occasions. He had been an environmental writer, albeit one skeptical of the severity of climate change as an issue. He had worked as a PR consultant, with his clients including former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. And he had been an active voice in San Francisco’s murky politics — DiResta had a passing acquaintance with him from being on the same side on a couple of local political fights. DiResta had been on what she calls “the moderate movement” to recall the school board — “I was really tired of teaching my kids at 2 years old what sharps were on the playground” — and Shellenberger was on the same side of that fight.

So when Shellenberger (who did not respond to requests for an interview for this piece), reinvented again as a free speech campaigner, got in touch to say he was working on the Twitter Files and would like to talk, DiResta agreed. When his piece was published — under the headline “Why Renee DiResta Leads the Censorship Industry” — she realized the extent of her mistake.

Pieces from Shellenberger and Taibbi painted the SIO as the nexus of a mass-censorship operation, making much of DiResta’s status as a CIA fellow as they did. DiResta’s report had said her team had analyzed 859 million tweets and out of these identified 22 million posts, retrospectively, as containing mis- or disinformation. In Taibbi’s hands, this turned into a claim that during the election campaign, DiResta had led an effort to censor 22 million tweets. In reality, during the election itself, the whole team had flagged only about 3,000 posts to Twitter, for it to deal with according to its usual rules.

By the time Taibbi and Shellenberger were writing about DiResta, Jim Jordan had set up the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Both journalists submitted extensive written statements to it. DiResta, whose work revolves around how both truths and lies spread, saw the threat immediately. She and her team pulled together a line-by-line rebuttal document, running to dozens of pages and thousands of words, wanting to get it out that very night — before a narrative had time to take hold.

Stanford vetoed its publication. “We were like, ‘You know we’re getting subpoenaed, right?’ And they’re like, ‘Maybe it’ll blow over,’” she says, still clearly exasperated. “I was like, ‘We study influence and propaganda … All we do is track viral narratives. This is going to be everywhere and they fucking lied about us. My name is in that bullshit testimony 50 fucking times, and you’re not letting me respond.’”

Stanford held the line, forbidding the team from ever publishing its rebuttal. Nothing blew over: The subpoenas arrived, as expected. America First Legal, a not-for-profit established by Trump senior strategist Stephen Miller, launched a lawsuit against the observatory. SIO won after a yearlong legal battle, but it cost millions of dollars in legal fees. The Observatory went very quiet over that time, until DiResta wrote an article in June 2024 saying it had been shuttered — a claim that Stanford went on the record to deny.

“The one time they mobilized to actually put out a statement was when it was a statement refuting a thing that was true,” DiResta sighs. Today, almost all mention of the SIO has been scrubbed from Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center site. The SIO is indeed defunct, as DiResta said. And DiResta herself no longer works for the university, having secured a new post at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Just as with Jankowicz, the institution that was supposed to give DiResta and her colleagues the power and protection to do their work did nothing as it was publicly trashed and then demolished.

I speak to DiResta again a few weeks later, because she’s agreed to show me the rebuttal document she and her colleagues prepared within hours of the claims against them being published. She has asked that I don’t quote from it directly, as it’s never been cleared by lawyers, and she said Stanford racked up seven-figure legal bills on her behalf during the House’s investigations and the related litigation it helped fuel.

The document is real and painstakingly detailed. It is 7,430 words long and addresses point after point in turn. It tackles issues that would later be raised again and again on television, online, in congressional reports, and in submissions to court. DiResta would like to imagine everything might have been different if they’d been allowed to publish it — but she suspects it wouldn’t. “And, you know, ultimately it gets you nowhere,” she says. “I don’t know if this would have nipped it in the bud, because who’s going to read 7,430 words on this?”

At the time we have this conversation, though, DiResta has just spent most of her weekend in a frenetic back-and-forth argument with Matt Taibbi, trying to get him to correct a fresh series of claims he has made.

It is almost impossible to cover a story about fact-checking, about claim and counter-claim, about who did what and when without getting sunk into that baffling array of claims — and this story is complex enough without it. But DiResta is trying to use the example of a few claims Taibbi has been making for years, and how they’ve been used in turn by others, to reveal how a playbook works. So just this once, let’s get into it.

The issues DiResta highlights include Taibbi’s testimony repeatedly making basic errors in the timeline — suggesting that the Disinformation Governance Board failed in 2020, requiring the government to find other ways to advance its censorship agenda, such as through outside entities. But in reality, this happened in 2022.

Taibbi repeatedly refers to the role of the federal agency CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in requesting content takedowns — in which it had no role. Instead, these came from the similarly named not-for-profit organization the Center for Internet Security, which is not a federal agency.

But the one still driving DiResta mad as we’re talking is that Taibbi keeps citing her as the source of a statistic that content linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (its euphemistically named online propaganda unit) reached 126 million people on Facebook. That claim is ridiculous: most of Meta’s $1.6 trillion valuation is based on the huge amount of data it has on its 3 billion users and on how they use the site. It knows better than anyone else what happens on Facebook.

The real origin of the statistic takes 30 seconds to track down: Meta itself submitted it as evidence to the Senate Intelligence Committee, arguing in context that this number is much smaller than it seems, making up less than 0.01 percent of people’s news feeds. Despite that, she could not get Taibbi to just correct even this one simple error.

Taibbi tersely declined a request for interview in relation to this piece, responding simply: “Thanks, but no thanks.” In later correspondence detailing the claims and counter-claims relating to his history and his reporting, Taibbi defended and doubled down on his claims relating to the apparent confusion of CIS and CISA, and the seeming confusion between the reporting of 3,000 tweets and the latter flagging of 22 million as relating to misinformation narratives.

His response to those two points — he ignored multiple others — exceeded 1,500 words and went into excruciating detail to explain away what still appear to me to be basic errors upon which his entire narrative, and much of the story of the censorship-industrial complex, relies.

In many ways, this is the curse of this battle — the detail appears so complex, filled with acronyms, references, and history, that ultimately almost no one can follow it all. We are left to do our own research, and for most of us that eventually comes down to deciding which story feels right to us. Who do we trust?

For those who wish to check the details for themselves, you can read Taibbi’s lengthier explanation here (as well as why I don’t think it changes the narrative). But Taibbi characteristically had a pithier response, too.

“I could go on, but obviously it won’t help,” he concluded. “Good luck with your bootlicking bullshit hit-piece of a story. I’m sure you’ll be editing The Atlantic in no time.”

Jankowicz and DiResta both lost their jobs and saw their institutions collapse. And that pattern keeps repeating. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a coalition of advertisers making recommendations on content and moderation standards for brand safety, next came to the attention of Taibbi and Shellenberger. In May 2023, it was subpoenaed by Jordan and his committee, who published a report on its conduct in July 2024. The following month, Elon Musk’s X — his new name for Twitter — launched a lawsuit against GARM and its parent organization, alleging a conspiracy to boycott advertising on the site — which immediately shuttered GARM.

Even before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the anti-anti-disinformation movement had chalked up a series of victories with a common set of tactics, combining independent media pressure, congressional scrutiny, and lawsuits that sometimes ran all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Several key watchdogs had been axed, and the social networks had declared themselves out of the “censorship” game. Twitter was now X, owned by Musk, and Zuckerberg in August 2024 wrote to Jordan saying the White House “repeatedly pressured” his teams “to censor certain Covid-19 content” and that pressure “was wrong,” months before his much more public turn post-election.

That Zuckerberg statement showed just how much the lens through which you’re looking changes what you see. To Jim Jordan and his supporters, the admission was a bombshell and a “big win.” But even in that letter, Zuckerberg admitted Facebook had retained the final say over what content it did and didn’t remove, and where it sets its rules. The White House had lobbied the company during a pandemic. Is that activity against free speech, or simply federal officials exercising their own First Amendment rights?

In any case, with Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans in both chambers of Congress, and the tech CEOs visibly on their side, the idea of the Democrats teaming up with anyone to “censor” the internet in the near future is absurd. But the crusade in the name of anti-censorship is nowhere near done.

By the time Matt Taibbi was sitting in front of the House Judiciary Committee of the 119th Congress, his ambitions had expanded. The censorship-industrial complex did not sit on the verge of defeat, he argued — they had only just started uncovering the full scale of a machine that now included US-funded newsrooms in dictatorships with no other independent media, initiatives to train journalists, and more.

“Many Americans are now in an uproar because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews,” Taibbi said, referring to one of the organizations that had just had its USAID grant suspended. As Taibbi told it, Internews had boasted of training “hundreds of thousands” of journalists across the world, but didn’t know the difference between propaganda and reporting. “There is no way to remove this rot surgically,” he warned. “The whole mechanism has to go.”

It’s a fairly drastic move to define US-funded newsrooms or trainers as censors and propagandists — and if that definition is taken seriously, there are real and heavy consequences.

Less than two weeks after Taibbi testified to Congress, police in Serbia launched a raid of the newsroom of the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), which has received funding from USAID and Internews. “The authorities in Serbia are citing these baseless statements about USAID from Musk and Trump as a justification for their investigation,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, of which CRTA is a member.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which operates primarily in Eastern Europe, also found itself under fire. The organization has won dozens of international journalism awards (including a share of a Pulitzer) and claims partial credit in dozens of prosecutions, the collapse of governments, and the levying of billions of dollars in fines. Its reporting from Ukraine was also involved in the first impeachment attempt against Donald Trump.

OCCRP does the kind of ferocious watchdog journalism of which Taibbi ostensibly approves. It works in countries with almost no freedom of the press. Its publisher and founding editor-in-chief, Drew Sullivan, is an American, and the organization has reported critically on the sitting president. But it is nevertheless a target in a crusade supposedly championing free speech.

Sullivan is now facing the same pattern that took down multiple organizations before him. Michael Shellenberger has written articles about him and has brought Jim Jordan’s attention to bear. OCCRP was particularly vulnerable because not only did it receive and disclose significant funding from the US government, those disclosures were hard to find. Sullivan’s explanation for this is that while OCCRP disclosed its funding in its accounts, it tended not to make a big deal of it given the sensitivities of receiving US funding in the countries it works in.

OCCRP is used to being attacked, Sullivan says, but “this is a new thing.” When we speak, Sullivan has just had to secure emergency funding and lay off 42 people — around a fifth of his staff. “What this feels [like] is very calculated … but they’re not doing it particularly well.

“Shellenberger’s stories are shit. He calls himself an investigative reporter but he couldn’t investigate his way out of a fucking paper bag,” he says, furiously. “But it’s done with a kind of workmanlike approach so that it’s relentless.”

Sullivan is worried, but confident it will survive. “The nice thing about a news organization is we’re kind of hard to kill,” he concludes. “We’re not reliant on Stanford University. We’re not reliant on a lot of stuff.”

But the most ironic victim of the war on censorship so far, though, must be the Open Technology Fund, which received its $43.5 million annual grant through the US Agency for Global Media — which was shut down as part of an effort to end the broadcasting of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and other overseas public radio.

The Open Technology Fund, though, did not have a newsroom and did not train journalists or research disinformation. Instead, it funded anti-censorship and anti-surveillance efforts, mostly centered around securing access to the open internet for users in China and other dictatorships. These efforts had attracted enthusiastic Republican support until now.

Insiders at the OTF are hoping its closure is an oversight that Republicans will be persuaded to reverse in the long term, and a legal challenge launched by the OTF reinstated its funding in June. But for a time, the US global war on censorship shuttered one of the government’s primary anti-censorship initiatives, even as the president threatens law firms and sues television stations at home.

Jim Jordan was right. Four years ago, the fact-checkers, disinformation researchers, or whatever label you would give them were ascendant, and seemed to have the backing of powerful institutions from big tech to universities to the government.

A combined effort of Jim Jordan and his committee, the aggressive journalism of Matt Taibbi, Mike Shellenberger, and others, and strategic lawsuits — mostly launched by Elon Musk — has systemically demolished that support. Now with the apparatus of the federal government behind them, they are extending the fight well beyond fact-checking.

First the Department of Homeland Security, then Stanford University, then Meta, the World Federation of Advertisers, and others — each in turn abandoned the disinformation researchers, and sometimes even switched sides. The only ones still going are the ones that never had the impressive backers in the first place. Otherwise, when it comes to deciding what’s true and what isn’t, we’re on our own.

Today, it’s Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Jordan that have the federal government and Big Tech on their side. In the US, Google’s parent, Alphabet, has joined the ranks of media owners settling with President Trump — agreeing to pay $24.5 million for banning Trump from YouTube in the wake of January 6th. CBS, under new ownership, has agreed to be overseen by an ombudsman from a right-leaning think tank.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration has threatened repercussions against anyone in the media — or even just posting online — who reacted in a way they deemed unacceptable. Early in December, State Department officials were told to check the resumes of H-1B applicants and their families to see if they had worked in disinformation research, online safety, fact-checking or related fields. If they had, their applications should normally be rejected.

Across the world, newsrooms and NGOs are being shuttered or even raided by authorities, all in the name of a crusade to protect free speech. And it’s just getting started.