“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 widely regarded 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.”)
