Happy Friday! It's August 7, 2026, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you'll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.
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In this morning's edition, we're looking at Dutch regulators keeping FSD data secret, and Honda outsourcing to Tata. We'll also look at Volkswagen's dreams of an American pickup, and Toyota's earthquake fallout.
1st Gear: Tesla says FSD safety data is a trade secret, and Dutch regulators bought it
Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images
Dutch regulators recently approved Tesla's FSD software for use on the roads of the Netherlands, but they're not telling the Dutch people why they made that approval. As it turns out, that's at Tesla's behest — the company has been pressuring those regulators to keep any and all information secret. From Reuters:
Aug 6 (Reuters) – Four months ago, the Netherlands approved Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system and has since then advocated for its adoption across the EU.
But Dutch road regulator RDW won't tell the public why it concluded the driver-assistance system is safe or how it evaluated the technology, which for years has faced regulatory investigations and lawsuits over FSD-involved crashes in the United States.
Releasing such details would violate Tesla's commercial secrets, the regulator told Reuters, echoing the automaker's own demands on the regulator for confidentiality. Since late 2024, Tesla has pressed RDW to keep documentation about the FSD safety review secret, according to previously unreported email correspondence between the Dutch regulator and Tesla, obtained by Reuters through a public-records request.
Tesla has called FSD approval key to boosting sales in Europe, where it's trying to regain market share lost in recent years and faces fierce competition from Chinese EVs.
It's tough to agree that independent third-party tests of software could ever be considered trade secrets of that software's developer — assuming Dutch regulators did in fact do independent third-party testing and didn't just take Tesla's word that everything is cool and good — but I'm no Dutch attorney.
2nd Gear: Honda's newest platform will be designed by Tata
Domagoj/Getty Images
Honda has traditionally been an automaker that does things itself, rather than outsourcing development to subcontractors. That all stands to change, as the company has asked Tata to develop its latest car platform — not just a single vehicle, but a platform meant to underpin gas, hybrid, and electric cars. From Bloomberg:
Honda Motor Co. has outsourced development of a new vehicle program to Tata Technologies Ltd., people familiar with the matter said, the first time the automaker is entrusting an Indian engineering services firm with building an end-to-end platform to help cut costs.
This platform is expected to support multiple car models, the people said, asking not to be identified as the details are private. It is intended to accommodate conventional fossil fuel-powered models as well as electrified powertrains for hybrids and electric vehicles, the people added. They did not specify the markets where these Tata-engineered vehicles might be sold.
The farming out of this crucial function marks a departure for Honda, which has typically kept development of core vehicle platforms largely in-house or within its established supplier network. It comes as the Japanese automaker overhauls its product roadmap after reporting its first annual loss since its founding in 1948, shelving several planned electric vehicle programs and accelerating cost-cutting efforts.
There's a desperation in the car market right now, with every automaker looking to slash costs so the bones. Will this affect Honda's reputation? Who can say — it'll all depend on whether the car Tata develops for Honda is any good.
3rd Gear: Volkswagen wants to bring a pickup to the U.S.
Miro Vrlik Photography/Shutterstock
Volkswagen wants to boost its profits in the U.S., and there's an easy way to do that: Give us a truck. So, the company wants to introduce a U.S.-built truck to its lineup, and it wants to do it within just a few years. From Reuters:
BERLIN, Aug 7 (Reuters) – German auto group Volkswagen plans to overhaul its U.S. strategy with new management and a revised product offering, including a new pickup truck, a company source told Reuters on Friday.
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Thomas Schaefer, head of the Volkswagen brand, sees growth opportunities in pick-up trucks and large SUVs – both high-margin vehicles in strong demand in the U.S. – which the Wolfsburg-based group does not currently offer.
The source said the goal is to bring the first pick-up truck to market before the end of the decade. The vehicle is to be built in the U.S.
Do the right thing Volkswagen. Bring the Tarok to the U.S., and you will be reincarnated as a lotus flower.
4th Gear: Typhoon after earthquake forced Toyota to pause 17 production lines
Anton Pentegov/Shutterstock
Toyota just got itself back up and running after Japan's latest terrible earthquake, and now the company's been forced to close its doors again. This time, a typhoon is to blame, and it's impacted models across Toyota's lineup. From Automotive News:
TOKYO – Natural disaster has struck again at Toyota, with a typhoon forcing the carmaker to close plants across Japan on Aug. 7, just a day after it restored auto output in the wake of a deadly earthquake.
As the storm approached, Toyota Motor Corp. suspended 17 lines across nine of its 14 assembly plants in Japan, for both shifts, due to disruption in maritime shipping, spokesman Nobu Sunaga said.
The latest suspensions affect the Corolla, Camry, Prius, RAV4, and the sedan, sport and crossover variants of the Crown series, as well as the bZ and C-HR electric utility vehicles.
Also impacted are the Land Cruiser 300 and Land Cruiser 70.
For Lexus, the offline factories also make the Lexus RZ and LBX crossovers and LX SUV.
Toyota really just can't catch a break, huh?
Reverse: Rescuers really wanted the podkova onboard
Getting the sailors back was a bonus.
The Fuel Up
AAA
The downward trend is not only continuing, but seems to be accelerating. Surely this will continue when the war inevitably escalates after market hours close. Plan for the Weekend Wars, indeed.
On The Radio - The Mountain Goats - 'Song for Layne Staley'
Happy new Goats day! I'm already liking this one. %!s()
Fortnite's popular Pokémon-like Sprites are sticking around, developer Epic Games has confirmed, as it begins teasing a new gaming-themed season expected to feature crossovers with Sonic the Hedgehog, Persona and Tetris.
Sprites arrived in force at the beginning of Fortnite's current season, introducing a growing menagerie of cute creatures you collect, trade, and level up to increase their power. The addition has been hugely successful and created a community of Sprite-obsessed fans who have contributed to a notable boost in Fortnite's player count.
It's a welcome surprise, then, to see that Sprites are now confirmed as sticking around for next season — and a whole new generation of them are on the way. In a community blog, Epic Games has promised new powers, quality-of-life improvements based on player feedback, and "new ways to discover Sprites in (and out of) your games. Mysterious!
In a signal that Sprites are being treated as an important part of Fortnite going forward, Epic Games is launching a new Sprite Garden experience where collected Sprites can be showcased — both those from Season 3, and Gen 2 Sprites from Season 4. You'll even be able to visit friends' Sprite Gardens, too.
Season 4 will also finally see the addition of five community-designed Sprites, created as part of a player contest that saw more than 20,000 entries. These will include the Bullet Sprite (ammo boxes grant more ammo), Honey Sprite (sends a swarm of bees at enemies who attack you), Pond Sprite (increases swim speed and jump height) and X-Ray Sprite (reveals players through walls). My favorite, though, is the cute raccoon-like Dumpster Dive Sprite (gather loot from jumping into dumpsters).
What else will next season bring? Sneaky dataminers have already spotted the suggestion of in-game posters expected to pop up across Fortnite's map later this month, teasing collaborations with Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man and Persona.
"Break the rules. Change the game," Epic has teased of Chapter 7 Season 4: Override, confirming its launch is set for August 20. Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has also now offered his customary teaser word for the incoming season: "Hackers."
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.
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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.
“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. 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.
“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?”
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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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.”
The origins of discontent
Every conspiracy theory is sustained by a unique blend of grievances and shadowy actors, but at their core, they’re shockingly similar. They often start with a few devoted believers operating on the periphery. They claim to uncover hidden truths about people in power. They offer order and meaning for believers, creating or affirming group identities. And the most successful ones contain a grain of truth.
This also describes “the best propaganda campaigns,” according to David Millar, a longtime US intelligence official who spent years at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute teaching future diplomats how to recognize such agitprop. “They’re seldom just complete lies,” Millar says. “They’re usually taking something out of proportion or amplifying something that actually happened into something that didn’t.”
That’s the case with the idea of censorship that targets the right online. In 2016, an anonymous former employee of Facebook claimed that the site was suppressing conservative news in its “trending topics” section. The company scrambled to reassure conservatives that this was not the case—but still axed its human editors. Not long after, in the wake of Russian influence operations in the 2016 US presidential election and the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, social media platforms amped up their content moderation efforts in order to filter out foreign disinformation. In doing so, they also ended up banning some conservative voices, often for violating platform policies against false information.
To right-leaning internet users, the posts and accounts flagged as problematic or false “sure sounded like stuff that agreed with [their] belief system,” says Dannagal Young, director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication. “Russia had done their homework so well that the kinds of things that were … generated by Russian propagandists were not that distinct from things people in the States would say.”
It was a messy moment in our collective digital life. Never before had anyone and everyone been given a megaphone to instantly broadcast to a global audience, for better and worse. These new powers prompted difficult questions about how that content should be policed, and by whom—if at all. What should happen if, say, a foreign intelligence service impersonated people en masse on social media to manipulate citizens? What if someone—anyone—said something provocative, hateful, or meant to incite violence? Or something that didn’t directly call for violence but could provoke it nonetheless? The pressure on social media companies to act was immense.
The pandemic became a “pivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives... feeling like, This isn’t right. Not everyone’s getting censored, just us.”
-Dannagal Young, political communications scholar
And more or less in real time, tech companies—as well as government bureaucrats, researchers, and journalists—had to chart a path for which there was no map. A new field grew to help inform and even make decisions on what qualified as “misinformation” and “disinformation,” though there wasn’t a clear definition of either term (nor of “censorship”). As a result of this work, platforms have taken steps over the past decade to shield users from fake news, conspiracy theories, and covert foreign influence. In doing so, they sometimes went too far—as some tech leaders have since argued. Alternative services and platforms sprang up, intending to create spaces free of “censorship” (by which they meant content moderation); Parler, Gab, and others tended to cater to right-leaning voices. They themselves were later kicked off Apple’s and Google’s app stores or banned by hosting and payment services.
High-profile narratives—like the claims that Twitter “shadow-banned” conservatives in 2018 and suppressed news about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020—have consistently kept alive the notion of conservative-targeting censorship. And online influencers like Benz have been able to twist what happened to tear down entire sections of the US government and silence individuals they disagree with.
The covid-19 pandemic in particular proved an ideal breeding ground for the censorship narrative. As trust in institutions plummeted, and harmful rumors about the crisis proliferated online, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube adjudicated what qualified as covid-related misinformation (including claims regarding the pandemic’s origins), took down posts, and banned prominent vaccine deniers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—sometimes with the encouragement of parts of the federal government.
The pandemic became a “pivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives,” says Young. They were “feeling like, This isn’t right. Not everyone’s getting censored, just us.”
Following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol (itself driven by false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen), social media companies took more aggressive measures, including banning the president from their platforms, citing his potential to incite more violence. To Trump’s allies and supporters, however, his removal only encouraged the idea that a network of actors was working behind the scenes to censor their voices—and keep the president from retaining power.
“It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass-censor virtually every narrative that he was putting out, that he lost,” Benz later told Joe Rogan on his podcast. This was proof, Benz concluded, of the dark power of censorship.
In April 2022, the digital chatter about government censorship found a real-world villain. The Biden administration had announced the formation of a Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate DHS’s efforts on this front; it would be led by Nina Jankowicz, who had cut her teeth countering Russian propaganda in Eastern Europe.
But the rollout was clumsy; and for the far right, the group’s ominous-sounding name and the scant details about what it would actually do made it the ultimate evidence of government censorship by another name. As the Washington Postreported, Fox News devoted 70% of its news segments to coverage of Jankowicz or the board in the week after its announcement, with Sean Hannity describing her as “one of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of disinformation in the entire country.” Beattie, the Trump official who later shut down R/FIMI, called her “Biden’s new minister of truth,” while Benz claimed she was a “registered agent for the British crown.” She became the target of an all-out harassment campaign—and multiple death threats.
Jankowicz was also named in a lawsuit against government agencies and officials that alleged “open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.” Benz submitted a legal brief in support of the case.
The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2024, but by that time Jankowicz was long gone—she resigned just three weeks after the task force launched, citing “vile personal attacks and physical threats.” The group never met.
In February 2023 Margot Cleveland, a contributor to the conservative outlet The Federalist, gave right-wing perceptions of these events their now familiar framing in an article titled “How Trump Derangement Gave Birth to the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
“The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a ‘Disinformation Board,’ but a more insidious ‘Censorship Complex’ already exists and is growing at an alarming speed,” Cleveland wrote. “Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation—and thus the country and the world.”
According to our analysis of social media posts, Cleveland’s article was shared by 168 accounts, marking the first time that something about the censorship-industrial complex was shared by so many different people. Its popularity showed that people were ready to gravitate toward the CIC framing, Cleveland told us in an interview. “It’s definitely catchy,” she says. “People understand what it means, given that the military-industrial complex has … been in existence since the 1950s.”
Just a few weeks later, the idea jumped toward mainstream recognition.
Musk, then the new owner of Twitter, had given internal company documents to two journalists, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, with the goal of exposing how Twitter and the Biden administration had supposedly colluded to censor conservative voices.
What they found was widelyregarded to fall substantially short of a conspiracy against the right—but on March 9, 2023, the pair appeared before Congress to discuss the results of their “Twitter Files” inquiry at a hearing convened by Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican. Shellenberger’s 68-page testimony laid out what he claimed was a vast network of government agencies and contractors that allegedly censored Americans through “blacklists of disfavored people”—“pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.” Shellenberger shared his testimony on Twitter, where it was viewed more than 2.7 million times, our analysis shows. A video of Taibbi’s testimony was viewed 4.3 million times, while a tweet sharing it got 40 million views. (As a point of comparison, in 2023 the average post on X received just 1,200 views, according to the data company Metricool.)
"We were, like, proverbially touching the elephant."
Mike Shellenberger
We found that these were among the most viral tweets to date about the “censorship industry” or the “censorship-industrial complex.” Overall, we identified nearly 30,000 tweets about these ideas between September 2011, when “censorship industry” first popped up on Twitter, and March 2026. The clear peak came in March 2023, at the time of the Twitter Files hearing.
In an email, Taibbi said he has regularly defended censored figures on the left as well as the right and does not believe censorship to be “a conservative-liberal issue.” “Though the behavior we saw at Twitter in, say, 2020 was slanted against conservative content in the United States, we saw these techniques applied to both left and right around the world,” he said. Shellenberger, Jordan, Beattie, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
While these social media posts had a wide reach, our analysis shows that the ideas related to the CIC were primarily driven by a small handful of individuals. Of the 13,475 Twitter/X accounts that we found to have posted or reposted CIC-related content in that same time frame, 71% did so just once.
Even among the conspiracy theory’s top proponents, however, Benz stands out in terms of output. Our analysis shows that by March 2026 he’d posted on X about the “censorship industry” or “censorship-industrial complex” more than 440 times since opening an account in December 2022, after Musk’s purchase of the platform; this was far more than anyone else whose accounts we analyzed during the same period, including Taibbi, Shellenberger, or Beattie. When we added other variations of the word “censor,” that figure jumped to over 2,200 times.
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.”
The amplifiers
To understand Benz’s role in crafting and promoting the CIC narrative, MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations examined thousands of his tweets, public statements, podcasts, and reports since 2015, including those from now-deleted accounts—the most comprehensive collection of Benz’s work assembled to date. We found that his interest in censorship dates back to the early days of this fight—to at least 2016, when he was a corporate lawyer living in Brooklyn.
This was when, as NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny later revealed, he began posting content online under a pseudonym, Frame Game. “Frame Game Radio” published across a number of platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, and Gab—mixing white identitarian and antisemitic views (though Benz identifies as Jewish) with alt-right-aligned complaints about the “diversity industry” and censorship. (In a lengthy rebuttal on X to the 2023 NBC News story, Benz claimed that Frame Game was a “project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews,” to which he “contributed in a very limited manner.” He also stated, “Let me be clear: I am extremely proud of this.”)
Frame Game’s content spoke positively about Hitler’s Mein Kampf, warned of “white genocide,” and claimed that “censorship is almost exclusively a Jewish phenomenon.” For a few months, the account ran a never-before-reported campaign for a “White Mother Fertility Fund,” which promised to donate 20% of the channel’s revenue to a mother nominated by listeners.
"Censorship" became a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation.
This kind of content earned Frame Game the praise of the white nationalist publication Counter-Currents, which described the anonymous figure in May 2018 as “a rising star” and a “pro-white and Judeo-critical online activist”—noting that the Twitter account was “followed by everyone from Steve Sailer to David Duke” (references, respectively, to a columnist for the white nationalist website VDare and the former KKK Grand Wizard).
Another preoccupation was the supposed suppression of conservative speech. In hours-long videos, Frame Game used “censorship” as a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation—going as far as to apply it to any kind of “critique” at all. The account was particularly incensed by the deplatforming of Alex Jones in 2018, which it called the “Pearl Harbor event of free speech.”
Online censorship was a “keystone issue,” the channel said in 2018, affecting the right’s ability to achieve any of its other goals: “You have to fix that, or else you can’t advocate for anything else effectively.”
Frame Game ceased posting that same year, when Benz started working as a speechwriter at the Department of Housing and Urban Development before joining Stephen Miller’s speechwriting team at the White House.
Then, in November 2020, Benz moved to the State Department, briefly serving in the first Trump administration’s final months as deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. He has said this short-term experience gave him firsthand knowledge of how the censorship machine works: “All things related to the internet connected to US foreign policy were under my purview,” Benz told Shellenberger in a podcast in March 2023. “I got to see the inner nucleus of how Big Government and Big Tech have so completely fused together in relatively seamless ways.”
It also helped set up Benz’s post-Trump career. In April 2022, he launched the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), which describes itself as a “free speech watchdog” dedicated to championing “digital freedom around the world.” Though it calls itself a “foundation,” FFO is not registered as a nonprofit and has just a few contributors. But it quickly became an active part of a bigger web of new Trump-aligned organizations—and in their eyes, even benign initiatives could be evidence for the machinations of the censorship-industrial complex. FFO has published critical reports claiming that efforts to promote media literacy, brand safety campaigns, and nonprofit journalism, including the work of the investigative organization Bellingcat, were all hidden forms of censorship, and labeling as suspect anyone affiliated with a government agency. (One of the authors of this article previously worked in international development in Afghanistan, on a State Department grant and USAID sub-grant, while two of the authors previously collaborated with Bellingcat.)
"Its implications for politics are really scary, because it makes conversation and debate virtually impossible."
Political scientist Michael Barkun
One of FFO’s targets was a relatively obscure educational game called Cat Park. Created in 2022 with funding from the State Department’s GEC, Cat Park was designed to “build resistance to disinformation and promote digital media literacy” for kids ages 15 and up, according to its official description.
In the game, players fuel opposition to a city-funded cat park by creating emotionally charged headlines and memes, and by manipulating images with AI. Then, halfway through, they learn that the campaign against the park was the brainchild of a billionaire with plans to buy the designated land for cheap once the outrage dissuaded the city from building it. At this point, players must use what they have learned about creating effective propaganda to counter their own disinformation.
By 2024, only around 100,000 people had played the game, according to Martijn Gussekloo, a cofounder of the Dutch design agency that helped develop it—far fewer than the numbers that played similar online games the agency had worked on to highlight the issue of disinformation. “As far as I’m aware,” he says, “there were no political goals at all.”
Nevertheless, FFO published a report—based on materials obtained by America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit started by Stephen Miller—claiming that Cat Park was part of the State Department’s effort to “subliminally train young people to associate social media posts alleging government corruption as being ‘fake news.’” The sinister interpretation was picked up by conservative media outlets like Just the News, which quoted Benz. That article was in turn picked up by Russia’s RT News, which also frequently quoted Benz.
It remained a relatively obscure, niche idea, but it didn’t need huge reach to set the stage for official government action. In 2023, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, citing FFO’s reports, demanded that the State Department turn over documents about its efforts to fight disinformation—efforts including Cat Park. By the end of the next year, Congress voted to defund the GEC, and news outlets like Fox News used Cat Park to illustrate the nefariousness of this work. It was the culmination of a conspiracy theory that had jumped from the fringes of the online right to more mainstream and high-profile outlets and later into the halls of power.
Though this dynamic is not unique to the CIC narrative, we found that it has played out again and again with numerous targets, from the early attacks on the Disinformation Governance Board to the subsequent shutdown of other disinformation-focused research organizations, like the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Election Integrity Partnership, and later of government agencies like R/FIMI.
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.
At the same time, IAF indirectly supported FFO and Benz personally, donating millions of dollars to conservative organizations that acted as the biggest financial sponsors of his work. In 2023 and 2024, the only years that he appears directly in any nonprofits’ financial documents, Benz was paid $530,000 from one organization alone.
In an email, Solomon defended the accuracy of his reporting for The Hill and said that while he had helped to come up with the idea for IAF, he isn’t part of the group’s official leadership and doesn’t have a hand in issuing grants. He also noted that he was an early adopter of the “censorship-industrial complex” framing, having used the term as far back as 2021.
“There are no conspiracy theories about federally encouraged censorship,” Solomon said. “It happened.”
The CIC narratives circulating on the right-wing internet and podcasts repeatedly helped propel offline action, through both private lawsuits and congressional investigations. Musk’s X was especially litigious, suing at least three organizations that reported on or advocated against hate speech on the platform. (Those suits have since been dismissed.) Then, once Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2023, a new subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government,” chaired by Jordan, launched various investigations into the people and organizations that Benz, Taibbi, Shellenberger, Musk, and other proponents of the CIC theory had singled out.
“Receiving a subpoena for your documents is absolutely overwhelming,” says Clare Melford, executive director of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based nonprofit that assesses levels of disinformation on websites and was the focus of a congressional investigation starting inApril 2023. “It can be financially crippling—and that’s the point.”
Benz reflected on the impact of the right-wing internet during a symposium in April 2024 at the Heritage Foundation, which had published Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the second Trump administration, the previous year. While he credited Jordan and other members of Congress for fighting against the censorship-industrial complex, he argued that lawmakers had taken up the cause “because everyone’s already talking about it.”
“The number one thing is: Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it,” Benz said. It’s a mantra he seems to have taken to heart: Our analysis found he mentioned variations of the word “censorship,” on average, once every three and a half minutes in his YouTube videos.
“Don’t underestimate,” Benz said at the Heritage Foundation, “the power of one small voice accumulated over millions to do a lot of damage to this system.”
The damage
The effects of this war on censorship became even more profound when the new administration took office the following year. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which accused the Biden administration of having “trampled” on Americans’ free-speech rights.
This laid the foundation for administration decisions ending millions of dollars in support for disinformation- and misinformation-focused research and shutting down numerous government agencies—all in the name of fighting censorship. One of the highest-profile examples was the dismantling of USAID, which has resulted in devastating cuts to programs designed to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS, improve maternal health, and provide food aid around the world. Administration figures claimed loudly that the agency wasted federal dollars and that its values were misaligned with US interests, but perhaps less well known is how false ideas about censorship played a critical part in its demise.
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 exchangedtweets and threads about censorship and other conspiracy theories for years.
In February 2025, Andrew Natsios, a Republican who had led USAID under President George W. Bush, tried to defend the agency against Benz’s conspiracy theories and other charges. During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, asked Natsios about a slide Benz had shared on social media that supposedly illustrated how the military could work with USAID and other agencies to incite riots, “destabilize nations,” and craft strategic “disinformation campaigns.”
“What Benz told you is nonsense,” Natsios declared. Though he tried repeatedly to explain that the slide wasn’t made by USAID and therefore couldn’t represent its views, Luna remained unconvinced. After the hearing, she turned to X to thank Benz for exposing the censorship-industrial complex. “USAID is about as swampy as it gets,” she wrote. Benz responded with the American flag emoji.
“I was astonished by the whole hearing,” Natsios told MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations, his frustration still evident. To defend the agency, he had made numerous media appearances, including interviews on Fox News and 60 Minutes, and reached out to Rogan’s podcast. But the damage had already been done; by the end of March, the administration formally notified Congress that USAID would be shut down.
“They moved so rapidly,” Natsios says, “we couldn’t succeed.”
The narrative of a censorship-industrial complex is also reshaping the United States’ relationships with other countries, including ostensible allies. For instance, the White House’s latest national security strategy, released in November, argues that Europe is facing the “prospect of civilizational erasure”—partly because of the “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”
And the European Union’s 2022 Digital Services Act, which placed guardrails on online platforms, has become a key flashpoint in the transatlantic relationship, with Benz calling it the European Union’s “flagship online censorship law.”
The EU regulation requires social media companies to remove content that violates national laws of member countries, including laws about hate speech and disinformation. But for Benz and his allies, the DSA aimed to achieve not accountability but an exportable censorship architecture. Because global tech platforms typically standardize their content moderation policies, “US tech companies would be forced to apply similar censorship measures at home,” Benz wrote in the conservative outlet Townhall in May 2022.
Vice President JD Vance later picked up this theme in a high-profile speech in Munich in February 2025, warning that free speech in Europe was “in retreat.” Just a week later, Trump issued executive orders indicating that he would consider tariffs in retaliation for “any act, policy, or practice in the European Union,” like the DSA, that worked to “undermine free speech or foster censorship.” Last summer, Rubio instructed diplomats to lobby directly against it.
Internally, however, at least one effort to find evidence of censorship turned up little. Last spring, Vance tasked a team at the State Department with gathering examples of incidents in which social media platforms had censored speech on the continent. A former official who received the request told us that Vance wasn’t interested in “the imprisonment of human rights activists for speaking [out], or journalists, or academics” in Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, or Russia—issues the department already tracked. Instead, the staffer says, Vance “wanted to focus on an extremely narrow set of posts related to far-right ideology, things related to abortion,” and even coverage of his own Munich speech. Vance directed the investigators to focus on Germany, France, Ireland, and the UK—all US allies where the administration has recently expressed support for far-right parties and politicians.
The team followed Vance’s directive, but instead of a “vast conspiracy,” the former official says, it found fewer than 10 instances of content that had been removed from X, all related to ongoing law enforcement investigations into violent extremism.
A spokesperson for Vance’s office declined to comment but pointed to previous remarks denying that he had ordered such a report. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
And the administration hasn’t let up. After the European Commission issued a €120 million fine to X last December, the State Department announced that five Europeans who had advocated for tougher content moderation regulation through the DSA and other mechanisms would be banned from entering the US. Rubio called these individuals, including the GDI’s Melford, “agents of the censorship-industrial complex.” (A judge has since blocked the government from enforcing these bans as litigation continues, calling them “likely viewpoint discriminatory.”)
The fight for truth
The war on supposed censorship continued to intensify over the first half of this year. In February the State Department announced a new web portal, freedom.gov, which will enable people abroad—especially Europeans—to view hate speech, foreign propaganda, and other online content that had been banned by their own governments. The same month, Jordan and his staff on the House Judiciary Committee put out a second report on European censorship, naming additional organizations that they allege were involved. And former R/FIMI staffers continue to worry that the release of a long-teased “transparency initiative” from Beattie, who shut down the office, could reveal sensitive information about individuals and organizations abroad who have put themselves at risk to fight propaganda from China and Russia.
Some of the key figures responsible for the CIC narrative from outside of government are now being rewarded with influential positions within it. “I’m like an octopus juggler right now,” Benz bragged in April 2025, shortly after his interview with Rubio about the demise of R/FIMI. The activities he referred to, he vaguely explained, included his work in the media, on policy matters, and on litigation, as well as with Congress. And that was even before he started working as a special government employee at what remains of USAID, now housed in the State Department, where he’s been reportedly investigating the wrongdoing that he has long alleged.
"The very thing that they are accusing people of—censoring—is something that they're now perpetuating."
Nina Jankowicz, disinformation scholar
In February, meanwhile, Beattie was appointed the State Department’s senior advisor for Brazil. And in May, the White House appointed John Solomon a special government employee focused on matters of “transparency.” (Solomon noted that it was an unpaid position.)
The State Department did not respond to broader questions about the CIC narrative and its effects on policy, the vice president’s directive to department employees to find censorship in Western Europe, or the status of Beattie’s transparency initiative. “Under Dr. Beattie's leadership … the Department made great strides in combating censorship groups,” a department official wrote in an email.
At the same time, the state-run digital influence campaigns that organizations like GEC were designed to fight are becoming more sophisticated. Over the course of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Iran has produced AI-generated propaganda—and, by manyaccounts, is winning the narrative war. Moscow has been working to inject Russian propaganda into the data sets used by US companies to train AI chatbots, increasing the likelihood that popular chatbots repeat Russian narratives. And the Chinese government has been recruiting its domestic AI companies to conduct state-aligned influence campaigns, according to an assessment from one US intelligence agency; the Trump administration has since dramatically downsized that office too.
Last summer, an AI-powered impostor pretending to be Rubio reached out to lawmakers and diplomats. “I was amused to learn that … at some point, Marco Rubio began to worry about deepfakes, and then it actually happened,” a former State staffer says. "And the people that were charged with working on it [at the department] were fired”—that is, they had been let go months earlier, alongside the rest of R/FIMI.
From a foreign policy standpoint, this is a “unilateral disarmament” by the United States, says former GEC head James Rubin—“leaving the information space open to America’s adversaries, especially China, Russia, and Iran.” The result is that everyone is more vulnerable to bad-faith actors online, often without being aware of the deception taking place.
MATTHIEU BOUREL
These threats are compounded by the way many tech companies have come to align with the Trump administration, a stance that critics say threatens the safety of their billions of users. Last January, Meta ended fact-checking on Facebook, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg stating in a video announcement that the company would “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world” that were “going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” Meta, X, and Google have also all paid tens of millions to settle lawsuits Trump brought for their decisions to remove his social media accounts after January 6. (Google declined to comment. Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.)
"Democracy is about the hearts and minds of the people. If you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default."
Mike Benz to an audience at the Heritage Foundation
Today, the CIC narrative is far larger than any single organization or individual. And that’s by design. Its proponents have constructed the battle much more broadly, as a sweeping defense of free speech. “If we were allowed to speak freely, millions and millions of people would hear a truth they simply could not resist,” Benz said back in his Frame Game days. “They would join this movement.”
It’s a movement that above all appears to be attacking “the nature of truth,” says Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University who has studied conspiracy theories for decades. “The implications for politics are really scary, because it makes conversation and debate virtually impossible. How can you talk to people if they believe that whatever you say is based upon some kind of set of falsehoods?”
Benz and his peers have expressed similar sentiments. In the fight over censorship, the sides are constantly flipping: The accusers become the accused, the victims become the victimizers, and so on.
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.
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.”
Eileen Guo is a senior reporter for features and investigations at MIT Technology Review. Gisela Perez de Acha is an open-source investigative reporter. Martin Sona is an open-source researcher with a background in applied social neuroscience. %!s()
John Waters turns 80 this year. Mosswood Meltdown, the gloriously disreputable Oakland punk festival he has hosted since its inception, turned 12.
Somehow, neither shows much interest in acting its age.
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Every July, a few thousand devotees descend on Mosswood Park for a weekend that feels equal parts punk festival, comedy show and a John Waters cabaret extravaganza. Waters emcees every act on both stages (this year’s lineup included Iggy Pop, Bikini Kill, Pavement and Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Ramones tribute band, The Return of Jackie and Judy), introducing them with the sort of filthy one-liners that have become as much a part of the weekend as the music itself. This year, for example, he anointed Pavement “the cock and balls of indie rock.”
Waters has become the festival’s unofficial patron saint. Standing behind increasingly absurd podiums — a fake game-show lectern one minute, an elegant dinner table with a dead rat as the centerpiece the next — he writes every introduction himself, testing material that often finds its way into his touring stage shows months later.
Between introductions, The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the Pope of Trash backstage to talk about turning 80, writing jokes every morning and why he’d still rather spend an evening in a dive bar than at the Folsom Street Fair.
Attendees at last month’s Mosswood Meltdown.
Julian Le Ballister, for The Hollywood Reporter
What’s the intersection between your shock factor and punk?
I think we were always punk, all my work from the very beginning. Even when hippies were peace and love, I made Multiple Maniacs, a film that glorified insane violence. I always made fun of whatever the liberal values were, because I’m a liberal, my audience is liberal, so we made fun of that. Those films were punk always, before there was such a thing. In Pink Flamingos, when they had that dyed blue and red hair, we had to bleach their hair out to white and then dye it with magic marker and India ink. Today your mother buys that color dye at the Rite Aid. And the only person who is the correct heir to the throne is Johnny Knoxville. The Jackass movies are the closest to Pink Flamingos, and the new one is worse. He’s now the filthiest person.
How do you continually evolve while keeping that signature shock?
That’s my job. Every day I think it up. I write every day in the morning, and I have to think up things, that’s my job. I have pads, I have notes, little joke files, like Bob Hope did. But I don’t have any writers; they all had twenty writers. I’ve never made a movie I didn’t write. I never would. So every day I just have to think of something. To do that, you have to read a lot. You want to be a director, go see every movie. You want to be a writer, read every newspaper, read.
You’re turning 80 this year. What accomplishment are you most proud of?
That I’ve been able to have this career, doing what I want, for sixty years. Hollywood’s been fair to me. I was always understood, I always had an audience. The critics who hated me, we used that, they helped me. Censors helped me. Everybody who tried to stop me was better than a press agent. Now the Academy gave me a museum show, that’s amazing to me. The National Registry picked Pink Flamingos. I always say, what was that screening, what did they say? They said, “the singing asshole.” Well, this would be perfect, we should give this the registry award. I don’t feel any kind of revenge, I’m just honored by it. I’m eighty years old, I’m still older than Iggy. And when William Burroughs died, that was the last person who used to always be older than me in the room.
John Waters hosting for his 12th year.
Julian Le Ballister, for The Hollywood Reporter
What do you think about the young generation of creators and risk-taking?
Well, they’re taking more risk. The new sexual revolution makes mine look tame. I keep telling them, we don’t know how to masturbate to them; you have to teach us. That’s a real thing we need to learn. Everything else is new that people have to accept. So I learn new things all the time. I talk punk dirty in my show today; later I give a whole spiel about new punk rock sex you should have. We’ll see if any of it catches on.
Does it encourage you when you see microbudget filmmakers suddenly breaking through?
I think it’s absolutely great. Before that I always said, what movie ever got a start on the internet? None, until a month ago, where two of them did and became the biggest hits, grossing $180 million. Now every Hollywood studio says, “Why can’t you make a movie for $30,000?” I’m mad at those directors, but I give them great credit. Be careful though, because the studio will hire them away and give them a hundred-million-dollar budget to make a comic book movie. It’ll fail, and their career will be over. It happens constantly.
How do you know when a joke works?
That’s my job, to make people laugh. If they don’t, it’s a terrible feeling. I haven’t had that happen in a long time. A lot of the stuff I say here will end up in my next show. I rewrite it once a year, part of this will become the Christmas show. So every joke I said here today, I’ve never said before. It’s a test.
Are you working on any film or series projects?
I had Liarmouth, my novel, it was optioned. I wrote the script, they loved it, Aubrey Plaza was going to star, but the budget was too expensive, so it didn’t happen. I have another movie, a children’s Christmas animation called Fruitcake, who knows, that’s fallen through a couple of times too. I have lots of books coming. I have more jobs than I’ve ever had in my life, so I’m not looking for a new one.
The Return of Jackie and Judy — a Ramones tribute band — before their set. From left: Toko Yasuda, Corin Tucker, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein.
Julian Le Ballister, for The Hollywood Reporter
Are we living in a more John Waters world than we used to?
Reality TV is the one thing I never watch, I have no interest, because they’re all hairhoppers, people I don’t want to ever know, much less care what their lives are like. I pitched one here, we could have one, “Housewives of Squatters,” or “Pickpockets at Burning Man.” That, I would watch. I don’t care how those people live, so I don’t watch it. Gore Vidal said the best thing about TV, he said, “I hate watching it, but I love being on it.” I don’t even know how to turn on my TV, I have three assistants, it’s so hard, I start crying. I miss tinfoil and rabbit ears. So to me, I like to read at night. You can’t watch much television and also read a good book. You can’t do both. I much prefer writing, I can memorize lines that I wrote way better than lines other people wrote.
Gay bar or punk bar?
Oh, punk bar. I’m much more at home there than at the Folsom Street Fair. I don’t have the outfits for the Folsom Street Fair, and leather looks stupid on young people, I think. The gay people I like would be here, they think gay culture is a little square, which it is. They have terrible music.
So I like gay people who can’t get along with other gay people. I like punks who can’t even get along with other punks. I love each minority that can’t fit in with their own minority, and then they hang out with all the other people who can’t fit in their minority, and those are my people. Those are the people who have given me this career for sixty years, and I thank them for it. They get younger and younger, I do recruit. It’s true, what they say.
Crowdsurfing at the Mosswood Meltdown
Julian Le Ballister, for The Hollywood Reporter
Jos Buttler says a conversation with England batting coach Marcus Trescothick helped him rediscover the form that took him past the all-time T20 run-scoring record.
The England wicketkeeper broke Kieron Pollard's mark of 14,803 as he recorded a 20-ball 51 for Manchester Super Giants on Wednesday - his third 50+ score in four innings.
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Buttler also hammered a 64-ball 131 in his most recent international outing, a T20 victory over India at Southampton last month, but struggled in the format's World Cup earlier this year, averaging 10.87 from eight matches as England went out in the semi-finals.
The 35-year-old said: "Marcus Trescothick said this to me, 'if you work on your technique, it allows your mind to free up'.
"A lot of time when people are out of form, it's like you've got to get out your own way. You're in your head, it's mental and you've got to lose that.
"Ultimately, I feel like I can't see the ball very well when I'm not playing well. So I was looking at the position I get to when the ball is coming out of the hand, and I worked back.
"I felt like my trigger movement was twisting as opposed to staying in line. I like to get into that position where I can see the ball really well, the angle of the bat second slip or third slip as opposed to pointing at the wicketkeeper.
"So once I'd made the technical stuff and was comfortable and happy with that, my mindset was much better."
Buttler is the second-highest run scorer in this season's Hundred with 277, behind only Sunrisers Leeds' Mitch Marsh with 290.
He also has the second-most sixes with 20, again behind Australian Marsh who has 23.
Former England opener Trescothick, meanwhile, will take interim charge of the Test side for the forthcoming series against Pakistan following Brendon McCullum's sacking.
"Sometimes, your technique can slip a little bit, in T20 cricket especially," added Buttler, who was speaking while promoting the ECB's Cricket Cities project, which provides opportunities to get active through cricket.
"But I think your game is always evolving and technique is always evolving a little bit. If I watch myself back now compared to when I was 25 there's differences.
"I do think Marcus was right, that it was a technical change that allowed my mind to be freer." %!s()
