If you know anything about Techdirt, you know we’re big fans of the EFF and its decades of advocacy for digital rights and the open internet. Recently, the organization went through a big change in the form of a new executive director: legal expert and long-time leader in the space Nicole Ozer. On this week’s episode, Nicole joins the podcast to talk about her new role and what’s coming next for the EFF.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

So when the whole narrative of the “censorship industrial complex” came about, you’d think that I would have been on board, having called out years of efforts by politicians to pressure companies into removing certain speech along with a moral panic about “disinformation.”

But, reality matters. And that’s why, when stories started popping up about a vast collaboration between tech companies and governments to “censor” people based on ideological viewpoints, I looked at the details — and it was basically all bullshit.

The reality is that there are efforts at spreading disinformation and propaganda. And while I’m skeptical about how powerful or successful those can be… ironically, the one example that has caused me to reconsider my position is the success of the blatant lie about the “censorship industrial complex.”

Type Investigations and the MIT Tech Review teamed up to put together a deeply researched article highlighting how a group of bullshit peddling right-wing influencers basically invented the entire concept of the “censorship industrial complex” and were able to mainstream it across the right-wing mediasphere, deep into the Trump White House, and are likely a big part of the reason Elon Musk focused on killing USAID in his early days at DOGE. It’s quite a report. The key thing, though, is that a bunch of motivated propagandists took any effort at making internet websites safer… and insisted that they were about censorship. And then they would put together conspiracy cork boards insisting that these efforts were really controlled by the government.

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. 

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. 

At the center of it all is a dude named Mike Benz, who was outed as a racist internet troll who spent years pushing the “great replacement theory” and screaming about “white genocide,” who reinvented himself from a low level Trump staffer in Housing and Urban Development into a self-styled “cyber expert” in the State Department who claimed he had inside knowledge on the whole “censorship industrial complex.” The reality is that Benz worked in the State Department for just a few months after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and already had a history of insisting that basic trust & safety work — including fact checking, let alone limiting or banning someone for violating a site’s terms of service — was “censorship.”

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.”

Benz spent much of the Biden administration trying to convince everyone of this vast censorship industrial complex. Notably, just days before this Type Investigations piece came out, Renee DiResta (who Benz and others falsely insist was a key player in this mythical censorship industrial complex) published a recording and transcript of the Twitter Spaces where a very credulous Matt Taibbi fell for Benz’s bullshit, leading to years of Taibbi spewing complete nonsense about the so-called “Twitter Files.”

Benz did not mention that he was appointed to this portfolio in November 2020. The Trump administration ended on January 20, 2021. His State Department tenure lasted roughly two months…over the holidays.

Taibbi bit immediately. He told Benz he’d sent him a DM, adding: “I’m very anxious to talk to you in a longer setting if that’s possible.” Benz, he said, “could probably be invaluable” to a huge project he was launching to map the same world.

Benz continued listing his bona fides: there was no close second with his knowledge, he said. He had delivered “eight or nine congressional briefings,” spoken with “four or five senators,” and briefed House and Senate committees. If Taibbi would talk to him privately, Benz said, he could describe “every single individual, institution, the chronology, the pretexts that were used, all of the dirty little tricks that were done each step of the way.”

“I can tell you literally everything,” he said.

“That’s great,” Taibbi replied.

As this new report points out, once Benz reached Taibbi (and via him, Michael Shellenberger), combined with Rep. Jim Jordan, you had a closed loop of utter bullshit, with each of them egging the others into deeper conspiracy theories on a foundation of confirmation bias and not bothering to check.

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.”

And it’s one thing if the damage to this were just about disinformation research. All that effort absolutely kneecapped the ability of the US to deal with foreign misinformation (and it’s mildly amusing watching MAGA folks now freaking out about how the US is so bad at responding to foreign influence campaigns, when they’re the reason that we destroyed our capacity). But as the Type Investigations article shows, the machinery Benz had spent two years building was also a big part of why Elon Musk shut down USAID, likely leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Benz deserves some of the credit for that apparently:

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 exchanged tweets and threads about censorship and other conspiracy theories for years.

Oh, and it should be mentioned that Marco Rubio hired Benz to spend his time sorting through what’s left of USAID to try to justify his bullshit claims, just as Musk had Taibbi and Shellenberger sniff through Twitter’s internal docs in the hopes that they would craft a narrative to support his prejudices.

The incredible bit to me here is that in both the Twitter Files nonsense and with the US government, Musk was always in a position where he could look at the source documents and details himself. He could speak to actual experts. Instead, he took the kook conspiracy theories from nonsense peddlers, assumed they were true because they fed into what he wanted to believe, and ran with them — with every bit of available evidence saying he was just swallowing propaganda.

The article also details the plumbing: how a small, heavily interconnected — and largely commonly funded — slice of the right-wing media ecosystem pumped these ideas back and forth until they looked like consensus:

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. 

As the article also notes, all of these jackasses pushing nonsense about a non-existent censorship industrial complex have basically all been either entirely silent or — worse — have effectively cheered on examples of the Trump administration actively censoring speech of critics. But, as free speech expert David Kaye mentions in that article, it seems like the claims about the censorship industrial complex is all fluff and nonsense to distract from the very real censorship of the Trump administration:

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.  

And as the article points out, Benz is 100% on board with using the government to stifle speech. Just so long as it’s the speech of his ideological foes.

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.”

There’s much more in the article (also available at MIT Tech Review), and you should read it — not because you need convincing that Mike Benz is full of shit, but because bits of this conspiracy theory have leaked well outside of MAGA world. I still regularly run into perfectly reasonable non-MAGA people who believe some version of “the Biden administration worked with social media to silence conservatives.” It didn’t. But the story was told loudly enough, for long enough, by enough people who had a financial and/or political interest in telling it, that it became accepted wisdom among many.

And look at where it landed. The State Department shut down the office that tracked foreign influence operations, and Rubio announced it in a friendly video chat with the guy who spent a decade inventing the reason to shut it down. Rubio then banned five Europeans from entering the United States for the crime of advocating for content moderation rules he doesn’t like — calling them “agents of the censorship-industrial complex” — until a judge blocked it as “likely viewpoint discriminatory.” The State Department launched a website, freedom.gov, whose entire purpose is to relitigate other countries’ moderation decisions. And, of course, you have the Trump FCC chair going after broadcasters for airing jokes about the president and for platforming Democratic candidates.

Every one of those is actual censorship. Every one is the government using state power to punish speech it dislikes. None of those are a trust & safety team enforcing violations of its terms of service on its own private property.

So it was a disinformation campaign so successful that it kneecapped our ability to fight disinformation campaigns. That would be bad enough on its own. But the more lasting damage is that the censorship-industrial complex Benz spent a decade describing didn’t exist when he started describing it. But it exists now, and it’s controlled by Marco Rubio, Elon Musk… and Mike Benz.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

While ICE continues to engage in violent acts and the administration scrambles to cover for their actions, immigration officers are undermining prosecutions targeting the victims of their violent actions because they can’t stop lying.

And while this seems to be a long shot, maybe we’ll see at least one ICE officer convicted for their criminal acts. It’s not just the jurisdiction issues that lower these odds. And that’s if you just limit it to state vs. federal. In this case, one of Trump’s favorite targets is requesting assistance from one of Trump’s most loyal supporters.

A Minnesota prosecutor is asking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to authorize the extradition of a federal officer who shot and injured an immigrant in Minneapolis in January.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a letter to Abbott that his sign-off is the “final step” in transferring Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Christian Castro to Minnesota to face state criminal charges.

As long as Trump remains in office, I can’t see Greg Abbott doing the right thing and turning over an ICE agent his state actually arrested using a warrant issued by Minnesota law enforcement.

Castro is facing multiple criminal assault charges for firing into a home and wounding Julio Sosa-Celis. This happened in January, only a few days before immigration officers murdered Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti just four days apart.

The DHS immediately responded with lies that were disproven shortly thereafter.

In the immediate wake of the shooting of Mr. Sosa-Celis, federal officials defended the agents, saying they had been attacked with a broom and shovel. Kristi Noem, who was then the secretary of homeland security, described it as “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.” Within days, Mr. Sosa-Celis and a housemate, Alfredo A. Aljorna, who was also from Venezuela and involved in the confrontation, were charged with federal felonies.

But aspects of the government’s account soon began to unravel. The charges against both men were dropped, and federal officials said they were instead investigating the agents. Video footage of the incident obtained by The New York Times did not show a sustained attack with a shovel and more broadly contradicted the agent’s claim of a roughly three-minute beating. 

So far, so ICE. But the charges managed to stick, even though the FBI locked state officials out of the investigation almost immediately. More amazingly, Texas law enforcement actually arrested an ICE officer on a Minnesota warrant.

The wheel of justice, etc. But anything going forward depends on a lot of things that don’t work in Minnesota’s favor. First, the Supremacy Clause is a tough hurdle since it can easily block state prosecutors from bringing cases against federal officers. Then there’s the ICE officer himself, who has refused to voluntarily comply with extradition requests. Finally, there’s a man who’s as corrupt as Trump himself — one who’s certainly not going to “export” a jailed ICE cop, especially not to the People’s Republic of Minnesota. But here’s hoping Governor Greg Abbott decides an ICE officer with a Mexican-sounding last name can get out there and “take one for the team.”

They’ve also leaked word to Semafor, likely in part to boost Musk’s sagging and disastrous IPO, that Musk’s companies are on the hunt for spectrum allowing them to offer wireless phone service in more dense, urban markets (since Starlink LEO satellite lacks the capacity for that):

“SpaceX, which is trying to fill a hole in its airwaves crucial for a full-service wireless network, has been hunting for spectrum that works well in cities and dense areas, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is considering buying competitors to acquire the spectrum or competing at a government auction set for next year, the people said.”

There have been some rumblings that Musk Corp could try to acquire T-Mobile, which they’re already partnering with on a hybrid LEO satellite and cellular phone offering that lets you use Starlink in remote areas for calls and cellular when in more dense locations.

One of several problems for Musk is his highly-fraudulent IPO is cratering, adding additional financial pressure to the mix. Massive acquisitions, which you’d probably need to do this effectively, are costly, debt-riddled, notoriously time-consuming and resource intensive.

SpaceX’s IPO promised that Starlink would quickly jump from 10 million current subscribers to 300 million or more in very short order. That’s pretty much impossible with just Starlink (despite some delusional numbers being tossed around by Jason Calacanis and friends). Even if you acquired T-Mobile (142.6 million subscribers) it would take years and a ton of good luck to get anywhere close.

Telecom is also a massively cash-intensive business to jump into. Spectrum, tower leases, backhaul is all annoying, complicated, pricey, and time consuming to get right. Assuming 100% competency you’d be talking years before any sort of meaningful traction, by which time they could be facing less Musk-friendly regulators at the FCC.

Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast also just inherently loathe competition, and can be quite formidable when they join forces to box out any new competitors. The highway of telecom history is littered with corpses of folks who believed they could break through the monopolistic, government-coddled logjam (Dish Network being just the latest). As is the highway of very deep-pocketed companies trying to offer their own smartphones (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft).

You’ve also got other companies like Amazon considering similar phone networks. Musk’s companies, especially Starlink, also are notorious for refusing to have competent customer service, something they’d need to excel at to disrupt cellular and gain fast market share. And this is all while Musk continues to show signs of massive instability as he dedicates the majority of his time to being a bizarre and unhinged egomaniacal racist on his personal propaganda website.

Though Musk does have some things in his favor. Like an army of cultists who’ll praise his barely available and expensive phone service no matter how clumsy or half-completed any network build is. People in the extended Roganverse already think the costly and congested Starlink network is akin to magic, and the marketing hype surrounding a Musk phone would be utterly deafening.

That doesn’t naturally equate to success in competently challenging some of America’s biggest and most politically powerful monopolies in brick-and-mortar reality, though.

Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions from a Senate committee more than 100 times on July 29, 2026.

The Republican-led hearing – convened to scrutinize Fauci’s management of the pandemic and the origins of COVID-19 – was the latest chapter in a political story that began in 2020, when uncertainty, fear and frustration with the government became entangled with conspiracy theories.

In the past six years, some of these theories have emerged from the margins of the internet and made their way into Republican politics, the MAGA movement, anti-vaccine communities and even white-nationalist extremist networks.

Conspiracy theories do not simply explain events, they identify villains – and Fauci has become one of the most popular in this particular story.

In the years since the pandemic, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and others have accused Fauci of many things, but the central conspiracy accusation is that Fauci helped enable the COVID-19 pandemic through U.S.-funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, and then participated in a coordinated government-scientific cover-up, misleading Congress to conceal that connection and suppress the laboratory-leak explanation. Paul, a Republican, has repeatedly called for Fauci’s prosecution.

In January 2025, President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon covering potential federal offenses related to his government service since 2014. Fauci had not been charged with a crime, but critics portrayed the pardon as evidence that he had something to hide. Fauci has denied claims of wrongdoing and has testified multiple times before Congress.

The Fauci conspiracy is much bigger than Rand Paul, though. Paul may be its most persistent congressional promoter, but it’s been amplified by a wider network of Republican lawmakers. Several Republican members of Congress, such as Rep. Steve Scalise, Rep. James Comer and former Rep. Brad Wenstrup, among others, have advanced versions of the Fauci/COVID-origin narrative. House Republicans formally investigated these claims for two years, while members repeatedly accused Fauci of suppressing the lab-leak theory and misleading the public.

That investigation ultimately endorsed a central claim of the conspiracy narrative: the House GOP’s COVID-19 investigation concluded the virus most likely leaked from a Wuhan lab, that Fauci helped shape a scientific paper dismissing that theory, and that he privately testified the “six feet apart” guidance “sort of just appeared” – though these are the conclusions of a partisan committee, not an independent inquiry, and Fauci and Democratic members have disputed them.

I’m an associate professor of sociology and criminology, and my scholarship focuses on far-right networks and digital radicalization – the exact ecosystem where these conspiracy theories have taken root and spread. My research on how these movements evolve online and intersect with political activists and extremist networks was directly relevant to tracing how COVID-origin claims moved from fringe communities into mainstream political discourse.

Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment, which he and his lawyer explained not only as a basic constitutional right but also a strategy to avoid the possibility that Paul might try to prosecute him for lying to Congress based on anything he might say, may be politically explosive and provide his opponents with another talking point. But, in my assessment, the spectacle says more about what happens when conspiracy theories become embedded in political institutions than it does about the origins of COVID-19.

From uncertainty to conspiracy

COVID-19 created the conditions in which conspiracy theories flourish: enormous uncertainty, frightening consequences, rapidly changing information and distrust of institutions.

People wanted explanations. Why did the virus appear in Wuhan? Why did recommendations about masks change? How were vaccines developed so quickly?

These questions were legitimate. Problems emerged when those questions became connected to a predetermined conclusion: Powerful people either created the pandemic or concealed the connection to the lab in Wuhan.

A 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute illustrates how widespread one version of this thinking was. About 4 in 10 Americans – 39% – agreed that the coronavirus had been intentionally developed by scientists in a laboratory. Among QAnon believers – a sprawling conspiracy theory claiming that a cabal of powerful elites, often portrayed as child-trafficking Satanists, controls government and society and that Donald Trump was secretly fighting it – the figure was dramatically higher, at 85%. The same survey found that people who embraced anti-elite and anti-expert attitudes were more likely to accept coronavirus conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy thinking is rarely isolated. For example, a person who comes to believe that public health officials are secretly manipulating information may be more receptive to claims that vaccines contain hidden dangers. Someone who distrusts pharmaceutical companies may be more receptive to claims that the pandemic was engineered for profit. Someone who believes powerful elites routinely operate in secret may be more receptive to broader conspiracy narratives such as QAnon.

These beliefs can reinforce one another, creating a broader worldview in which institutions, experts and government officials are presumed to be acting deceptively.

The Fauci conspiracy

Because Fauci was highly visible during the pandemic, advising presidents and appearing on television, he quickly became associated with government efforts to control the spread of the virus.

For some Republicans and MAGA activists, and others who distrust the government and scientific institutions, Fauci came to represent lockdowns, masks, vaccines and government mandates.

Anti-vaccine activists incorporated him into broader narratives about pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies. Conspiracists took the story further, portraying Fauci as part of a secret effort to conceal the origins of COVID-19. Extremists connected these claims to older ideas about government tyranny, social control and corrupt elites.

The result was a feedback loop.

Claims were generated in online communities, repeated by political figures and amplified by media personalities, who injected these talking points back into supporters’ social media feeds. The repetition made the claims feel increasingly familiar – and familiarity can be mistaken for evidence.

The lab-leak question is not the same as a conspiracy theory

Asking whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged through either zoonotic spillover, which is when a virus jumps from animals to people, or through a laboratory-related incident is not inherently a conspiracy theory. Scientists and governments have legitimate reasons to investigate the origins of a pandemic.

The World Health Organization’s independent scientific advisory group reported in 2025 that much of the information needed to fully evaluate the competing hypotheses had not been provided by China. It concluded that the available evidence suggests spillover but maintained that the laboratory-leak hypothesis could not be ruled out.

There is, however, a distinction between investigating whether a laboratory accident might have occurred and claiming that scientists created a virus and intentionally released it. That distinction is important in returning to Fauci and the claims raised at the July 29 hearing: Were lawmakers investigating the possibility of an accidental laboratory release, or were they advancing the more conspiratorial idea that scientists deliberately created and released the virus?

The Republican-led House subcommittee argued that U.S. government–funded research may have contributed to the pandemic.

The investigation did not establish that the virus was intentionally manufactured or released.

Today, the scientific question of where SARS-CoV-2 originated remains unresolved. But conspiracy theories can transform the absence of evidence into evidence of concealment.

From fringe theory to political reality

The most consequential feature of conspiracy theories may be their ability to move from one group to another.

A claim can begin in an obscure online community and spread through social media to become a political weapon.

The Fauci hearing demonstrates the culmination of that process. These claims have moved into the formal machinery of government, where they are being amplified by elected officials and federal agencies. A theory’s credibility can increase simply because someone with greater institutional authority has repeated it.

That may be the most important question surrounding Fauci’s hearing: What happens when conspiracy theories acquire the authority of the government?

Art Jipson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton

Now that SpaceX is a public company, he has to report some of that revenue, though it’s all merged and buried in footnotes. But there’s enough info in there to show that advertising revenue is way, way below what it was when he took over the site. And it’s shrinking.

In the 10-Q, all of X’s revenue is now (misleadingly) labeled “AI” revenue, but even then the reporting has to admit ad revenue took a big hit, dropping $160 million compared to the first half of 2025 (which was already way, way, way lower than when Elon took over the site), going from $870 million in 2025 to $710 million in the first half of 2026. The company tries to claim that this decrease in ad revenue is because they “transitioned to a new advertising platform which impacted ad sales for a short period of time.” Which is a curious explanation, given that on the analyst call, CFO Bret Johnsen credited that very same “overhauled” ad-tech platform for the very slight quarter-over-quarter uptick in ad revenue. The same overhaul apparently both tanked the business and rescued it, depending on which direction the number was moving.

And even the claim that the overhaul increased ad revenue is suspicious given that if you compare the 2nd quarter from last year to this year… ad revenue dropped from $426 million to $367 million, year over year. Some overhaul.

I kinda think that if your transition to a new ad platform decreases ad sales by $160 million, someone fucked up badly somewhere. Especially when it’s a nearly 20% year-over-year drop.

Let’s break all this down: In the second quarter of 2022, the last full quarter before Elon took over, Twitter brought in $1.08 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million. That’s $713 million a quarter, gone. Elon has wiped out two-thirds of Twitter’s ad business over the exact period in which he promised investors he’d nearly triple it.

And it’s not for lack of trying. Over the past year X has made a ton of experiments and revamps to improve the experience (though the main person in charge of all that, just left). I’d argue that the company was just rebuilding all of the stuff Elon killed after first taking over the company, but none of it has brought advertisers back.

Turns out that telling advertisers to go fuck themselves… and then suing other advertisers for not advertising… doesn’t make anyone want to advertise with you.

Still, it seems like someone should be pointing out how far off the mark Elon has been. He promised twelve billion dollars in ad revenue within the next year. That’s three billion a quarter. X just did $367 million — about an eighth of the pace, and shrinking. You can talk all you want about his rockets and robots, he’s not magically going to grow ad revenue 700% in the next 18 months.

So, tell me again how Elon is a business genius?

Former Olympian David Hearn got rung up first on federal vandalism charges. Then he got un-rung, once the DOJ told the court Doug Burgum’s Interior Department had basically lied to it about the most likely causes of the peeling sealant and algae swarms that embarrassed the president into pressing criminal charges and threatening journalists.

The crux of dismissal motion by the DOJ was this:

[I]t was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn…

Despite the insult of being lied to by a fellow member of the federal government, the DOJ could only bring itself to move for a dismissal without prejudice, which means the administration can always take another swing at Hearn and the other Reflecting Pool defendants.

The good news is that everyone facing criminal charges for supposedly “vandalizing” the botched, hasty pool repair job is now off the hook… at least for now.

Court records now show that prosecutors are dropping the charges against the three other defendants – Justin Carreno, Cameron Thiers and Sophie Dennison-Gibby – who were all accused of destruction of property with a value of less than $1,000.

The bad news is everything else. Ever since the first dismissal, both Donald Trump and DOI Secretary have done little more than bash Pirro for actually doing her damn job and claiming (again, without evidence) that the Reflecting Pool was vandalized, rather than just mishandled by a.) one of Trump’s donors/pool guys and b.) a company that had never been awarded a federal contract before.

For what it’s worth, it seems Pirro did confront Trump and Burgum about their wild antifa-vandalism-whatever-the-fuck assertions. Pirro did the right thing and — according to this report — did it well.

Mr. Trump raged against Ms. Pirro in private on Monday. Then he raged a little to reporters. Rumors she would be fired burbled through West Wing. Then he raged a little bit more before hosting a high-drama, face-to-face meeting with Ms. Pirro at the White House worthy of two decorated veterans of confrontational reality TV.

Mr. Burgum had been invited too, so Ms. Pirro came prepared. She entered the White House from the West Executive driveway in a bright red blazer that matched her fight-back mood, schlepping a white box containing evidence, plus a black box with documents, on wheels.

This confrontation seemed to have gone as well as it possibly could. According to NYT sources, Pirro made a solid case that Burgum had concocted a vandalism cover story to conceal his contribution to the Reflecting Pool embarrassment. This is as good as it gets when it comes to Trump:

Mr. Trump seemed considerably less angry by day’s end, the person said.

It didn’t last long. In addition to the insults he handed out immediately following the Hearn dismissal, Trump had this to say in the days following the White House meeting with Pirro:

“U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro should re-visit her hastily made decision,” ​Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

[…]

Trump, who has ​repeatedly alleged that vandals damaged the pool, has sharply ​criticized Pirro for dropping the case, saying this week that she had “choked” under pressure from a judge and “folded like an ​umbrella.”

And, as is par for the course for Trump, he’s also attacked the judge handling the case (who did nothing more than respect the government’s dismissal motion) and disparage the work done by the pool crews he so recently defended as so far above reproach that any issues with the pool whatsoever could only be due to malicious acts of vandalism.

If this were a normal presidency and a normal timeline, I’d say something pithy like “it’s all over but the desperate flailing.” But it isn’t, so any pithiness is immediately undercut by the realization that “desperate flailing” is MAGA GOP SOP, and with this party in power, it can always be converted into actual punishment of Trump’s perceived enemies.

Trump can never be wrong, so he’s back on his vandalism bullshit.

President Trump on Saturday posted photos of alleged vandalism to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool amid a push for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, to revisit a recent decision to drop charges related to the pool.

Late Saturday, the president posted two photos of what appeared to be graffiti and some peeling of the coating of the pool. Both photos were labeled with the word “Vandalism.”

Just imagine the dumbest, weakest, vaguest, conspiracy theory-ist shit you’ve ever seen. Now, lower your expectations.

These are pictures taken of something somewhere. One is labeled “RIP,” which is hardly instructive since we can’t tell what this is or what relevance this peeling has to do with anything. Even if we are to immediately believe (or even recognize) these to be photos of the Reflecting Pool and its lining, there’s nothing in here that immediately suggests malicious damage, rather than what’s already on the record: a hasty application job done by under-qualified people working under severe time constraints and somehow still managing to go millions of dollars over budget.

These are the sort of things you bring to the attention of the contractor performing the work, not the sort of thing you use to support criminal charges. It’s one thing to see a shattered window and a heavy object nearby. It’s quite another to see some peeling weather stripping around the sill and claiming your house has been vandalized.

This government is nearly as dangerous as it is stupid. But that’s only because its stupidity is unparalleled. The most venal president in history is seeing the end results of his willingness to allow his loyalty to be purchased. It’s the worst form of kleptocracy: one that’s fully bought into the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

The second part of that trial, focused on remedies beyond the monetary judgment the jury already awarded the state, concluded last week. Almost all of the headlines are talking about the additional $567 million the judge ordered the company to pay above and beyond the $375 million in civil penalties the jury already awarded. Those funds are supposed to be used to help pay for the supposed “harms” of Meta’s properties to New Mexico kids. But that is probably the least interesting part of the ruling.

What’s way scarier is that the judge then makes a bunch of design decisions, telling Meta how its products need to work. Admittedly, many of the changes are ones Meta itself suggested (some of which it has already made). But this is exactly the kind of thing that I was worried about when the first verdict came down. Once we’re in a world where a judge gets to make product decisions, bad things are going to happen. Judges are not product designers. Judges are not trust & safety experts. Judges are not child safety experts. They do not understand how all these things work together. They do not understand the tradeoffs of their decisions.

Judges simply shouldn’t be in the business of determining the proper user interface for software. Indeed, I’d deem it to be an example of compelled speech and (in cases of banning certain features) suppression of speech.

In the ruling, the judge now says that Meta will need to limit the amount of time children can spend on the app (which means mandating age verification of every user), that the number of “likes” on photos on kids’ accounts must be hidden, and then some compelled “warnings” about the supposed harms of social media. All of this is problematic.

Again, even if you hate Facebook and think it’s harmful and you trust this judge, do you trust all judges out there to get this right? Do you think that some of the Trump appointed judges should be able to decide what features certain apps should have? We’ve already seen some judges who think that any trust & safety/content moderation operation is harmful. And we’ve seen judges on the flip side who think that not taking down certain speech is equally harmful. Letting individual judges determine how products are designed is a disaster waiting to happen.

As we’ve discussed for years, there is scant evidence that social media (and Facebook’s apps in particular, as they’re the most studied) are inherently harmful to kids. Many, many, many researchers have tried to find such evidence and tend to come up empty. It would be one thing for the judge in this case, Bryan Biedscheid, to just ignore all of that, but he doesn’t. He more or less admits it, highlighting the various claims from both sides in the case… and then just declares which side he thinks is more credible. But a different judge might find otherwise. Which is a big part of the problem here.

If all the science agreed, this would, perhaps, be an easier call. But the vast majority of the science disagrees with Biedscheid’s feelings here.

He starts out by citing the Surgeon General’s report from 2023, but reads it to say a lot more than it actually does:

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a public advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health” (“2023 Advisory”) which “calls attention to the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health.” [Pl. Ex. 03193 at 3] As the 2023 Advisory notes, “[a] Surgeon General’s Advisory is a public statement that calls the American people’s attention to an urgent public health issue,” and such advisories “are reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” [Pl. Ex. 03193 at 3] The 2023 Advisory states that “[u]p to 95% of youth ages 13-17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use social media ‘almost constantly.’” [Pl. Ex. 03193 at 4] The 2023 Advisory also notes that “nearly 40% of children ages 8-12 use social media.” [Pl. Ex. 03193 at 4]

Importantly, the 2023 Advisory reports that features designed to maximize engagement can harm children by encouraging problematic use and behaviors. The 2023 Advisory provides that:

[e]xcessive and problematic use of social media can harm children and adolescents by disrupting important healthy behaviors. Social media platforms are often designed to maximize user engagement, which has the potential to encourage excessive use and behavioral dysregulation. Push notifications, autoplay, infinite scroll, quantifying and displaying popularity (i.e., “likes”), and algorithms that leverage user data to serve content recommendations are some examples of these features that maximize engagement.

But that proves nothing. Note even the hedging language here. It says that excessive or problematic use can harm children… but doesn’t say how often that occurs. It says that those features have “the potential to encourage excessive use” but makes no findings on whether they actually do or how frequently they do.

Indeed, as we keep pointing out, where the evidence actually takes us is that a very small percentage of kids cannot handle unsupervised, unlimited social media. Most of the studies appear to put it at less than 5%. And, much of the research seems to suggest that any causal connection is in the other direction. That kids who are not getting the mental health support they need then turn to social media and use it excessively, rather than the social media causing the problems.

Also, the judge completely leaves out that the same Surgeon General report talks about how incredibly helpful social media is for many kids. He does mention elsewhere other studies showing that social media has benefits… but then forgets all about it.

The evidence in this case demonstrates that social media has many benefits, such as helping people connect with friends and family. [See, e.g., 2-27-26 Tr. 7225:11-14 (Cain); 2-19-26 Tr. 4904:1-11 (Coyle); Def. Ex. 01045 at 93] It also helps members of marginalized communities form and build online communities based on connections and shared interests, especially when members of those communities might not have access to supportive or even safe communities offline. [2-12-26 Tr. 2452:22-25 (Boyle); 3-11-26 Tr. 10882:22-10883:16 (Otaru)] It is also a source of news, educational content, and entertainment. [Def. Ex. 01045 at 93] Meta’s services in particular help small businesses grow by allowing them to reach more customers.

In other words, the issue is not about social media inherently. And any solution across the board is a terrible idea. Instead, we should be making efforts to identify which kids are actually at risk and helping them. Not just universally declaring which features are good and which are bad.

Unfortunately, that’s what the judge does here, effectively appointing himself the product manager for Meta’s social media products and saying that despite the conflicting evidence, he’s convinced that Meta’s products are designed to be harmful to children:

Based on the evidence in the record, the Court finds that Meta implemented platform features that were designed to optimize engagement, and that these features were and are harmful to teenagers. [See, e.g. 2-17-26 Tr. 3573:15-17, 3581:15-3582:16 (Narayanan) (outlining how Meta’s algorithm uses engagement-maximizing recommendation algorithms); 2-23-26 Tr. 5468:22-5470:15 (Lembke) (describing how children are “uniquely vulnerable” to harm on social media because their brains are still developing)]

But… optimizing engagement is what every cultural product does. Many novels I read end each chapter on a cliffhanger, and sometimes that gets me to stay up late at night as I need to know what happens next. That’s harmful to my sleep. And it’s a design decision from the author/publisher to end chapters like that. But I think we all recognize that it would be a massive First Amendment problem if we told publishers that they couldn’t end chapters on cliffhangers, saying that they “optimize engagement” and therefore are “harmful.”

Basically, the court decides that the experts the state put on the stand were more credible than the experts Meta put on the stand. But just the fact that there’s so little agreement about what the science actually says here, and no study that has shown causality, should give the judge pause. Instead, because one witness claimed a causal relationship, he accepts that as fact.

It would be nice if the judge showed a bit of humility here, but instead seems to assume that based on a few witnesses at the trial he can redesign Facebook and Instagram.

The judge, who had previously rejected Meta’s Section 230 defense, admits that he can’t do anything regarding actual content on the app, because that would likely violate both 230 and the First Amendment:

This decision does not seek to close or demolish Meta’s platforms, enjoin specific advertising or content (which the Court is also mindful is protected by the First Amendment and 47 U.S.C. Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA)), or require Meta to cure causally disconnected harms. Rather, this decision seeks to address existing harms created by Meta’s platforms and to prevent future harm to children and future burdens on New Mexico, in general, that would otherwise be caused by Meta’s platforms. It is this Court’s conclusion that Meta is a cause of and has substantially contributed to a public nuisance in New Mexico, and is required to abate that public nuisance to the extent of its contributions.

But Judge Biedscheid still appoints himself the new product manager for safety for Meta’s products for other features. He establishes that Meta’s social media product features represent a “public nuisance” to kids in New Mexico, and they must abate the harm of that public nuisance. First, it tells Meta that it needs to implement age verification, though it admits that it’s somewhat limited by federal law (COPPA) in how much it can require:

Age verification is the key to making Meta’s platforms safe for adolescents because there must be substantial certainty about whether a user is: (a) over 13 years of age, thus old enough to use the platforms; and, (b) over 18 years of age, so that adolescent protective restrictions on use should be removed and restrictions on the ability to connect with adolescents must be put in place. Without substantial certainty, there will be adults communicating with adolescents by claiming a false younger age and tweens communicating with teens and adults by claiming a false older age.

But… most experts don’t think that’s true. Indeed, many experts have made it clear that age verification introduces all sorts of new risks and dangers. The letter linked there (from 438 experts) was even brought up during this phase of the trial, but was dismissed as being by experts who were out of touch by New Mexico’s experts (and, apparently, the judge).

And it’s this kind of thing that feels so problematic about this. The science isn’t even remotely settled here, and there are credible experts warning that these solutions will actually do way more harm than good for children’s safety. Shouldn’t that be important too?

What if these changes demanded by the judge actually do more harm?

Then what? Do we get to sue the state of New Mexico for being a public nuisance? Or sue Judge Biedscheid? Nowhere in this order is any sort of humility or acknowledgement that he has no idea the actual impact of these changes. There is no plan to go back and look and check to see if they are working. Or if they’re causing more harm. If Meta makes these changes and the rate of youth depression or suicide increases next year, then what? Whom do we get to sue? Who “abates” that public nuisance?

And then there are other features that Product Manager Biedscheid decides Meta can no longer offer to kids (as determined by the age verification tools he’s requiring them to use):

Meta shall eliminate push notifications on its platforms for known or estimated accounts belonging to users under 18 years of age: (a) from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM (i.e., hours when the vast majority of children are sleeping or should be asleep) on all days; and, (b) from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM (i.e., typical school hours) during the academic year, excluding weekends. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Meta may make exclusions to this rule for messaging from connected users and for urgent, targeted messages, such as for security or hazard alerts

Meta shall hide, as a default setting for all accounts where the user is under 18 years of age, all “like counts” that Meta appends to content. Meta may only allow an override of the default setting when a parent or guardian gives the user under 18 years of age their permission to change the default setting.

Meta shall implement a mandatory usage time limit for accounts belonging to users under 18 years of age. Meta shall restrict the usage of all such users to not more than 90 hours of use per month cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram.

Do we know if any of this will help kids? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Will the court go back and revisit this if this magically doesn’t help kids mental health struggles? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The court also mandates a bunch of compelled speech that the Zauderer standard says it has no business compelling. But the judge doesn’t seem to much care:

Meta shall provide information screens on Facebook and Instagram to be displayed to all new users under 18 years of age once a day that explain one or more of the following: (a) an aspect of safe platform use best practices; (b) available tools to address inappropriate content and behavior; (c) the concept of rabbit holing and ways to reset the algorithm to address the issue; and, (d) tools to avoid problematic use, such as nudges, self-imposed limits and other tools. These screens shall be displayed for the first 30 days that a new user under 18 years of age joins a platform, similar to Meta’s presentation of new users under 18 years of age with Pristine Pool content. The screens shall be submitted to the State for its review, possible edits, and approval.

Meta shall fund, design, and implement an educational campaign in New Mexico, prepared in collaboration with and with the approval of the State, that publicizes: (a) risks associated with platform use; (b) safety tools and best practices to address those risks; (c) parental controls; (d) problematic content and behavior reporting tools; (d) risks associated with online bullying and features that help victims address it; and, (e) reporting mechanisms for accounts belonging to users under 13 years of age. This campaign shall also provide schools with ready-made materials, also prepared in collaboration with and with the approval of the State, that set forth information on these topics to be distributed as desired by the State.

It’s entirely possible that those are good ideas. But we should all be worried about judges ordering internet companies what they must tell their users. Remember, we’ve seen other attempts to do this — such as the law in Texas that tried to force adult content sites to warn people that porn was dangerous. And those were thrown out as unconstitutional.

But how do you distinguish these warnings from the anti-porn disclosure warnings pushed by the far right? The point is that the state isn’t supposed to be in the business of requiring warnings on inherently speech related products. Especially when there is no agreed upon scientific basis for the claims.

About the only good thing in the ruling is that the judge neglects to take the state up on its worst suggestion: banning end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp or Facebook. But even that is only partially good, because he orders Meta not to turn end-to-end encryption back on for Instagram. As you’ll recall, back in May, Instagram turned off end-to-end encryption, claiming that no one was using it. Privacy advocates have asked the company to turn it back on, but if this ruling stands, that won’t be allowed. The judge’s rationale is basically that (1) WhatsApp doesn’t have the other “addictive” features he dislikes and (2) kids don’t use Facebook anyway, so only Instagram is the problem:

The Court does not adopt Plaintiff’s requests for a prohibition on end-to-end encryption (“E2EE”) for the following reasons. Meta has already ceased offering E2EE on its Instagram platform, and the Court orders that such cessation of E2EE on Instagram remain in place during the Abatement Period. Regarding Facebook, the Court does not agree with ending E2EE on this platform. Facebook has few adolescent users in New Mexico, and the Court only has jurisdiction over New Mexico accounts. Therefore, in light of the benefits E2EE may offer in many other markets outside of New Mexico, and the limited use of E2EE by adolescents on Facebook in New Mexico, the Court does not impose a prohibition on E2EE in relation to Facebook.

But, again, on what scientific basis is this decision made? It all feels like vibes.

It’s also weird because a few paragraphs later, the judge admits that the benefits of end-to-end encryption outweigh the harms… but only on WhatsApp? On Instagram it’s the opposite? Why?

To the extent that WhatsApp’s E2EE poses a risk to adolescents, that risk is outweighed by the benefits that E2EE offers to address privacy concerns of New Mexicans and other populations.

He also admits that while he might like to force Meta to turn off autoplay, infinite scroll, and content recommendations, he (correctly) worries that those (since they’re so directly tied to third party content and editorial decision making) could implicate both Section 230 and the First Amendment:

Of the above-mentioned design features, autoplay, infinite scroll and algorithmic content recommendations are most closely tied to content presentation because they directly impact the manner in which users are presented with third-party postings and advertising. As a result, autoplay, infinite scroll, and algorithmic content are features with clear Section 230 and First Amendment implications.

The evidence and argument at trial also showed that autoplay, infinite scroll, and algorithmic content recommendations are used widely in the industry. Therefore, in light of the broader market in which Meta operates and given the absence of Meta’s competitors in this litigation, restrictions imposed on Meta’s offering of the aforementioned features could harm the viability of Meta and its platforms.

In contrast, push notifications and “like counts” are least connected with platform content. Indeed, push notifications occur in many instances even when the user is not directly interacting with the “pushing” application on their device. Additionally, “like counts” are merely a feature created and offered by Meta to principally track and motivate user feedback, all without altering the underlying published content.

As with Age Assurance, while the Court agrees with the State that autoplay, infinite scroll, “like counts,” and algorithmic recommendations combine to facilitate addictive or problematic behaviors in adolescent users, the Court does not see an equitable abatement method: (a) that impacts only Meta, rather than imposing restrictions industry-wide; and, (b) that respects the protections of the First Amendment and Section 230.

The simple fact is that all of this is one judge issuing orders regarding how a massive company with billions of users needs to be designed. And, yes, he’s trying to keep the platform safe but he’s making these decisions based on his feelings about what will work, and he’s no expert. And there’s nothing in there considering what happens if these changes actually make things worse, as they absolutely could do.

Within Meta, I’m quite sure they measure every little change. They check to see what works and what doesn’t. And when things don’t work, they adjust. Frequently. They have KPIs to meet and regular reviews. If something goes wrong they roll stuff back re-evaluate. They run A/B tests. They explore each decision, and they have to continually justify the decisions they make.

As their new product manager, Judge Biedscheid has none of that. He gets to declare from on high what changes Meta must make to their product, and… that’s it. The design decisions are his. But the responsibility isn’t. If teen mental health in New Mexico doesn’t improve — or if it gets worse — there’s no plan to review. There’s no rolling it back. There’s no A/B testing. Judge Biedscheid is off on another case.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.