How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy

庞大审查网络的构想如何从网络边缘走向特朗普的政策核心

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading. 本文由《Type Investigations》合作制作，并得到了韦恩·巴雷特项目（Wayne Barrett Project）的支持。2025年4月的一个早晨，美国国务院一个小办公室的员工们收到了那封他们一直担心的电子邮件。

For months, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had been cutting a wide swath through federal agencies, gutting teams that worked on everything from scientific research to Social Security to international aid. So when the employees of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R/FIMI)—a unit tasked with tracking foreign disinformation—received a note asking them to meet in half an hour, many sensed their time had come. 几个月来，埃隆·马斯克领导的政府效率部一直在联邦机构中大刀阔斧地进行裁撤，削减了从科学研究、社会保障到国际援助等各个领域的团队。因此，当负责追踪外国虚假信息的“反外国信息操纵与干扰中心”（R/FIMI）的员工收到通知，要求他们在半小时内开会时，许多人预感到他们的工作到头了。

“We all had heard … that there was going to be a day they would shut down our office,” says one former staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Darren Beattie, a far-right provocateur who had been serving as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, wasted no time with pleasantries, telling the gathered employees that the office was being shuttered and that their jobs were being eliminated. “我们都听说过……总有一天他们会关闭我们的办公室，”一位因担心报复而要求匿名的前员工说。曾担任负责公共外交的代理副国务卿、极右翼煽动者达伦·比蒂（Darren Beattie）没有浪费时间寒暄，直接告诉聚集的员工，办公室即将关闭，他们的职位将被裁撤。

The mood in the room oscillated between somber and outraged, the former employee says, with “lots of young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked.” But elsewhere at the State Department, the closure of R/FIMI was cause for celebration. 这位前员工说，房间里的气氛在沉重与愤怒之间摇摆，许多年轻、敬业的员工在哭泣和崩溃。但在国务院的其他地方，R/FIMI的关闭却成了庆祝的理由。

“We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced shortly after in a video interview with a right-wing internet activist named Mike Benz. “This is obviously amazing news,” Benz responded, before teeing up a theory he’d been promoting for years: “We now have so many people wondering, Was I censored because of something the State Department did?” “我们终结了美国国务院支持的政府审查，”国务卿马可·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）随后在与右翼网络活动人士迈克·本茨（Mike Benz）的视频采访中宣布。“这显然是个好消息，”本茨回应道，随后引出了他多年来一直宣扬的一种理论：“现在有很多人在想，我是否因为国务院的所作所为而受到了审查？”

The notion that the State Department had been working to silence Americans is perhaps unfamiliar to many people, but it’s a key part of a larger web of conspiratorial ideas that have been promoted for a decade on far-right blogs, podcasts, and social media. The basic theory is that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms—or what believers refer to as the “censorship-industrial complex”—has been working to suppress conservative and populist speech online. 国务院一直致力于压制美国人的言论，这一观点对许多人来说可能很陌生，但它是一个更大阴谋论网络的核心部分，该网络十年来一直在极右翼博客、播客和社交媒体上被推广。其基本理论是：在打击虚假信息的幌子下，一个由政府机构、学术界、公民社会团体和大型科技平台组成的庞大网络——即信徒们所称的“审查-工业复合体”——一直在努力压制网上的保守派和民粹主义言论。

The fight against “disinformation,” as Benz put it on a 2025 podcast, “is censorship in disguise.” R/FIMI, along with a predecessor office with the same mission, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), had been among the right’s long-standing targets; now it was one of its latest casualties. 正如本茨在2025年的一个播客中所说，打击“虚假信息”是“伪装的审查”。R/FIMI及其前身、肩负同样使命的全球参与中心（GEC）一直是右翼长期攻击的目标；现在，它成了最新的牺牲品。

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. 特朗普第二届政府发起的“反审查战争”导致了众多政府机构的解体，例如国土安全部的网络安全与基础设施安全局（CISA）、联邦调查局（FBI）的外国影响力工作组，以及美国国际开发署（USAID）等。它摧毁了追踪和反击外国势力干预选举及舆论的基础设施。

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. 它还被用来为针对特定个人和整个行业的全面旅行禁令和制裁辩护。它引发了与欧盟在科技监管问题上的紧张关系，批评者称这些监管压制了美国人的言论。它甚至重塑了美国的国家安全战略。

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. 然而，其影响范围并不局限于美国的官僚机构、学术界或公民社会团体。将审查观念武器化，也影响着全球数十亿在网上获取信息或进行互动的人——也就是说，几乎每个人。

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. 许多被定性为“审查”的行为，实际上是为了让互联网更安全所做的努力。这可能包括量化网上生成针对妇女和儿童的非自愿性化内容的频率；帮助网络跟踪、人肉搜索和其他犯罪的受害者寻求正义；或者识别我们在网上互动的人是否真实，而不是冒充美国选民的外国代理人。

But where did this idea come from? Over the past nine months, MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations have dug into its origins and traced how a relatively niche conspiracy theory from the far right was able to—and continues to—influence a wide range of actions by the second Trump administration. 但这个想法从何而来？在过去的九个月里，《麻省理工科技评论》和《Type Investigations》深入挖掘了其起源，并追踪了一个相对小众的极右翼阴谋论是如何能够——并持续——影响特朗普第二届政府的一系列广泛行动的。

In myriad ways, the theory of the censorship-industrial complex, or CIC, explains the logic behind how the Trump administration operates both at home and in the world. To understand just how it jumped from the edges of the information sphere to influence the decision-making of the country’s most powerful individuals, we used open-source methods to scrape content from right-wing websites; scrutinized hundreds of thousands of pages of public records, videos, and podcasts; and analyzed over 100,000 social media posts that have promoted the narrative. “审查-工业复合体”（CIC）理论在无数方面解释了特朗普政府在国内和国际上的运作逻辑。为了了解它是如何从信息领域的边缘跃升至影响国家最有权势者的决策，我们使用了开源方法抓取了右翼网站的内容；审查了数十万页的公共记录、视频和播客；并分析了超过10万条推广这一叙事的社交媒体帖子。

Our analysis found that although the roots of the idea run deep and wide, the CIC framework really took off in early 2023, driven by a handful of individuals, with support from a close-knit collection of right-wing organizations and media outlets. At the center of this effort is Mike Benz, Rubio’s interview partner last April. 我们的分析发现，尽管这一思想的根源深远且广泛，但CIC框架在2023年初真正兴起，由少数几个人推动，并得到了一个紧密联系的右翼组织和媒体集合的支持。这一努力的核心人物正是去年4月鲁比奥的采访对象迈克·本茨。

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… 本茨曾在唐纳德·特朗普的第一届政府中短暂任职，但一直鲜为人知，尽管他的一些观点——包括泰勒·斯威夫特是北约资产的阴谋论，以及他在加入政府前匿名发布的亲白人身份内容——已经获得了一些追随者。我们的分析揭示了他个人在传播CIC理论方面是多么不可或缺：我们发现他是网上相关内容最丰富的创作者，这些内容随后被右翼媒体和播客采纳，并最终传到了美国权力的最高层。他的工作促成了国会——并最终是总统——的行动，并引起了关注和……