The Battle Over Free Speech: How the Disinformation Wars Transformed America’s Online Landscape

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 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 what many viewed as the violent overthrow of the U.S. 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 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 that 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.

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.”

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.

The Birth of a Movement

The roots of the current disinformation debate go back decades, but its modern iteration has a clear starting point: April 27th, 2022, when the Department of Homeland Security announced it was setting up a Disinformation Governance Board, with Nina Jankowicz as its head.

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

Jankowicz 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 related to national security. That meant deliberate operations targeting critical infrastructure, elections, and even migration.

No one at DHS 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 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. A TikTok she had recorded during Covid lockdowns, in which she sang about disinformation while riffing on the “Mary Poppins” song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” earned her 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. The Disinformation Governance Board was disbanded before it had ever met, and Jankowicz opted to resign.

The Twitter Files and the Rise of Matt Taibbi

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. With his antagonistic relationship with the liberal mainstream, Matt Taibbi was a perfect fit for the job.

For many years, Twitter had been accused of “shadow banning” conservative users. More recently, it had restricted links to a New York Post story reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. At the time, social networks had operated out of caution and the mistaken belief that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a disinformation operation.

Taibbi’s early reports from the Twitter Files, however, were underwhelming. One supposed bombshell was that Twitter received money from the FBI for cooperating with takedown demands. In reality, the payments were legally mandated compensation for cooperation with law enforcement requests for user data. Another story showed the Biden campaign asking for tweets containing nude photos of Hunter Biden to be deleted – tweets that violated Twitter’s policies on nonconsensual nudes.

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

Stanford and the Disinformation Research Community

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

To the anti-censorship crusaders, the Stanford Internet Observatory was essentially the hub of the censorship-industrial complex. DiResta was the lead author on an extensive report on the effects of disinformation on the 2020 election. Using access to Twitter’s data, her team identified around 22 million posts containing mis- or disinformation over the election period.

When independent journalist Michael Shellenberger began writing about the SIO, DiResta and her team quickly pulled together a line-by-line rebuttal document, running to dozens of pages. Stanford vetoed its publication, saying “Maybe it’ll blow over.”

“We study influence and propaganda,” DiResta recalls saying. “All we do is track viral narratives. This is going to be everywhere and they lied about us. My name is in that bullshit testimony 50 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 launched a lawsuit against the observatory. SIO won after a yearlong legal battle, but it cost millions in legal fees. Eventually, the Stanford Internet Observatory was effectively shuttered, as DiResta later revealed – despite Stanford’s attempt to deny this fact.

Expanding the Crusade Beyond U.S. Borders

By February 2025, Taibbi’s ambitions had expanded considerably. 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, 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. “There is no way to remove this rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.”

This expanded definition of “censorship” had real-world 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, which had received funding from USAID and Internews.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which operates primarily in Eastern Europe, also found itself under fire. OCCRP does the kind of ferocious watchdog journalism that might seem beyond reproach – it has won dozens of international journalism awards and helped trigger numerous prosecutions of corruption. Its publisher, Drew Sullivan, had to secure emergency funding and lay off 42 people – around a fifth of his staff.

Perhaps the most ironic victim was the Open Technology Fund, which funded anti-censorship and anti-surveillance efforts in China and other dictatorships. For a time, the US global war on censorship shuttered one of the government’s primary anti-censorship initiatives.

A New Era in the Information Landscape

Today, it’s Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Jordan that have the federal government and Big Tech on their side. Google’s parent, Alphabet, has joined the ranks of media owners settling with President Trump. 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 who reacted in ways they deemed unacceptable. State Department officials were reportedly told to check the resumes of H-1B applicants to see if they had worked in disinformation research, online safety, or fact-checking – and to reject those applications.

Jim Jordan was right. Four years ago, the fact-checkers and disinformation researchers were ascendant. But a combined effort of Jordan’s committee, the journalism of Taibbi and Shellenberger, and strategic lawsuits – mostly launched by Elon Musk – has systematically demolished that support.

The Department of Homeland Security, Stanford University, Meta, and others have all abandoned disinformation researchers, and sometimes even switched sides. When it comes to deciding what’s true and what isn’t, we’re increasingly on our own.

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 according to those on both sides of this conflict, it’s just getting started.