Mike Benz

All the social media companies were completely...

under this pressure, and there was no one willing to break the alliance.

You had Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, who was being threatened by the federal government in terms of Facebook's bottom line.

Jack Dorsey was totally

YouTube was an avid censor in that regard.

And so in 2022, a number of things happened that began to really change the turf of this.

So first, there was this scandal with the Disinformation Governance Board.

I don't know if folks remember this.

This was this Ministry of Truth, is what people were calling it, at the Department of Homeland Security.

They made the mistake for once in their lives of publicly calling it what it actually was.

When the Disinformation Governance Board happened in April 2022, it was the first time that Republicans in Congress leapt to life and said, oh my God, there's a government censorship agency.

It's the Ministry of Truth.

What they didn't know is that the Ministry of Truth had already existed within DHS for three years before that.

it was just given a much more boring, mundane name.

It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

But what they did is they said that because their mission is critical infrastructure security,

and elections are critical infrastructure, and COVID deals with public health and public health is critical infrastructure, any tweets that contain misinformation about elections or about COVID or about any number of sensitive policy issues were a cyber threat actor, were a cyber attack on critical infrastructure.

And so DHS had this giant web apparatus to censor First Amendment protected speech using a cybersecurity predicate.

But at the time,

That was almost too fantastical for people to believe.