from the fact-checking-is-still-not-censorship dept
Fact-checking is not censorship. Asking a publication to correct
factual errors is not censorship. Pointing out that someone’s book
contains demonstrably false claims is not censorship. None of this
should require explanation. And yet here we are, because author Jacob
Siegel has decided that Renee DiResta requesting corrections to false statements he made about her
— in his book and in reviews of his book — constitutes some kind of
sinister suppression campaign. He’s gone as far as writing an article at
The Free Press (which I have no intention of linking to and giving more
traffic) publicly accusing her of plotting to censor a review of his
book published in The Baffler. He spent a morning on Twitter calling her
“a figure connected to the US government” (she’s not) who “pressure[d] a
publication to remove its review of my book” (she didn’t).
This is all, to put it plainly, absolute nonsense. But it’s a
specific strain of “free speech absolutist” nonsense that we keep seeing
over and over again. And I say that as someone who has spent decades
fighting for free speech, but is pretty damn sick of these free speech
tourists, pretending to support free speech when they’re really just
trying to protect themselves and their friends from social consequences
for saying something stupid, or just something blatantly false.
We’ve seen this playbook before. Six years ago, a group of prominent intellectuals published what became known as the “Harper’s Letter,”
ostensibly warning of a rising tide of censorship and illiberalism
supposedly threatening free expression. But when you actually looked at
the cases they cited, what you mostly found was… people criticizing them
(or their friends). Sometimes sharply. Sometimes even unfairly. But the
“intolerance” they described was just other people exercising their own
free speech to push back on ideas they disagreed with. As we noted at the time,
the whole thing amounted to famous people with massive platforms, and
little self-awareness, using those very platforms to complain about
being silenced.
But the Harper’s Letter crowd, for all their hand-wringing, were at
least mostly operating in the realm of opinion and social consequences.
They didn’t like that people disagreed with them loudly. Fair enough. It
was thin-skinned and cringey, but mostly harmless. Siegel is doing
something worse, because he made demonstrable factual errors in his
book. Rather than owning them, he’s accusing the person he published
false information about of censorship for having the temerity to ask for corrections.
If asking for a correction to a false factual claim counts as
censorship, the word has been stretched so far that it no longer means
anything. Which is probably the point. The more the term gets diluted,
the easier it is to weaponize against anyone who challenges you on the
facts.
Some background: Siegel published a book called The Information State,
which is basically a book-length expansion of his 2023 Tablet essay
about what he and a small group of MAGA-leaning grifters call the
“censorship industrial complex.” One of his main arguments centers on
the Election Integrity Partnership, an academic research project DiResta
worked on during the 2020 election. Siegel’s book says the EIP
“classified 21,897,364 tweets” as “misinformation incidents,” and he
places this number in a context carefully designed to make readers
believe the project flagged 22 million tweets to platforms for removal.
As DiResta explains:
A couple of pages before the number appears, Siegel spends a some
time on a character sketch establishing me as dishonest. Then he
describes me as leading “the Election Integrity Partnership, at the time
perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and
censorship initiative in existence.” He then writes that “over a hundred
employees in the EIP network maintained nearly round-the-clock coverage
of social media” and sent “alerts and takedown requests” that platforms
responded to in under an hour. Immediately after that operational
framing — the censorious leader, round-the-clock monitoring, the
takedown requests, the rapid platform response — he drops the 22 million
number: the EIP “reported collecting more than 859 million tweets for
analysis and classifying 21,897,364 tweets on ‘tickets’ as unique
‘misinformation incidents’ just between August 15 and December 12,
2020.”
Read in sequence, the clear implication is that this was the
scale of the “censorship operation”: a hundred people working around the
clock flagged 22 million tweets to platforms, which obediently took
them down within the hour. That is how people on Twitter are reading it,
too.
That is not what happened.
What actually happened, as we’ve covered in detail before,
is that the 22 million figure comes from a post-election academic
analysis of how viral election narratives spread across social media — a
research dataset, not a list of items flagged for removal. During the
actual election, EIP flagged roughly 4,800 URLs total, including 2,890
tweets, to platforms for possible policy violations like impersonating
poll workers. As DiResta notes:
Of those, approximately 65 percent received no platform action
whatsoever, about 25 percent were labeled, and ~10 percent were removed —
by the platforms, under their own policies. No government agency
directed or funded any of it. Those are the real numbers. A few hundred
tweets came down. This is in the public record, in our publications, in
amicus briefs, in legal filings, and in congressional testimony. Every
flagging ‘ticket’ we sent to a platform was turned over to Jim Jordan’s
Weaponization Subcommittee under subpoena. Even Jordan’s deeply partisan
report does not attempt to substantiate the “22 million” framing —
because it can’t be substantiated, because it isn’t true.
Because this point apparently can’t be stated enough: the EIP flagged
fewer than 3,000 total tweets, essentially asking Twitter: “hey, does
this violate your rules?” Many of those reports actually came from local
election officials worried about disinformation — things like false
information about where and when to vote — who figured that a
coordinated flag from a research partnership might get more attention
than a single complaint.
But what EIP did was really no different than what ANYONE could do by
seeing a piece of content on social media and clicking the
ever-available “report” button. I’ll note (because I just checked) even X
(the supposed, but not really, free speech platform) still lets anyone
report any content, and among the categories you can report content for
is… “civic integrity.”
In the case of EIP, it submitted fewer than 5,000 such URLs across
multiple platforms and the platforms DID NOTHING in response to the
majority of them, finding that they did not, in fact, violate any
policies. While they took action on 35%, most of those were “labeling”
(i.e., providing more speech) and only 10% involved
removals (and most of the ones that were removed involved blatant
election disinformation, such as telling people to vote in places that
had no polling place).
That’s just a few hundred tweets removed, decided by the private companies based on their own decisions.
The 22 million number, which Matt Taibbi and others pushed for many
months was what EIP wrote about months later, when they wrote a report
about how misinformation spread. It was not content they asked to be
removed. It was not content they alerted platforms to. It was just what
their (months later) after report reviewed on the platform, trying to
show how misinformation spread.
Siegel, apparently, knows all of this. DiResta claims she told him in person before he
published. He published the misleading framing anyway. That’s on him.
If that leads others to repeat that false information and later being
asked for a correction, that is 100% on Siegel for failing to do his own
homework and choosing to publish information he was told, point blank,
was false.
So when reviews of his book repeated the 22 million number as if it
described the scale of active censorship — because Siegel’s book is
designed to make readers draw exactly that conclusion — DiResta
contacted three separate publications and asked for corrections. This is
the most normal thing a person can do when they’ve been written about
inaccurately. It happens every day across every type of journalism. It
is, in the most basic sense, counterspeech. “Hey, you published this
thing, it got some important facts wrong, here’s what they are, and why
they’re wrong. Can you issue a correction?”
In no definition of “censorship” is that censorship.
Of the three publications DiResta alerted that they were repeating
false statements, there were three very different responses: The
Brownstone Institute did nothing. The Free Beacon issued a correction.
The Baffler pulled their review entirely. As DiResta makes clear:
To be unambiguously clear, I did not ask The Baffler to pull their review. I asked for a correction. The fact that they pulled it, though, made Siegel lose his mind.
That last part is key. DiResta asked for a correction. The Baffler,
after reviewing the evidence, independently decided to pull the review —
presumably because the errors were significant enough that a simple
correction wouldn’t suffice. That was the publication’s editorial
decision. But Siegel treated it as proof that DiResta was running a censorship operation against him.
He falsely accused her of pressuring a publication to remove its review
in his Free Press article. On X, he went even further and dropped the
“pressuring” qualifier and just flatly accused her of being behind the
decision.
Siegel was wrong about the supposed “censorship operation” DiResta
supposedly ran during the 2020 election. And now he’s wrong about the
“censorship operation” he thinks she’s running against his book now.
Is he ever right about anything?
And the Free Press ran this without anything resembling proper
fact-checking. When DiResta asked Bari Weiss’s (and now CBS’s) the Free
Press how Siegel’s blatantly false claims made it through editorial
review, the answer was remarkable:
When I asked The Free Press how Siegel’s theory made it through
fact-checking, they told me that Siegel emailing me to demand my
correspondence with The Baffler, The Free Beacon, and The Brownstone
Institute was the factcheck.
So to be clear: the “fact-check” on an article accusing someone of
orchestrating censorship consisted of the accuser sending his target a
hostile email demanding she turn over her correspondence. I know that
fact checking is a dead art, but that’s not how fact checking works. For
a publication that built its brand on being a corrective to mainstream
media sloppiness, it’s embarrassing.
DiResta describes the trap Siegel has constructed:
Siegel’s article is designed so that every possible response
feeds his narrative. If I stay quiet, the lies ossify. If I ask for
corrections, that’s “suppression.” As I push back publicly here, watch,
I’ll become an ‘unhinged woman.’ If a publication independently decides
his claims don’t hold up, that’s my fault too.
This is the core of the problem, and it extends well beyond Siegel. This specific rhetorical move has been gaining traction
for years: the redefinition of “censorship” to include any form of
factual challenge, correction, or even disagreement. We saw it when the NY Post declared that fact-checking was censorship. We’ve seen it when people accused social media of “censorship” for merely adding more speech to a discussion.
And the accusation does double duty as marketing. Every correction
request becomes a news hook. Every pushback becomes evidence of the
conspiracy described in the book. The victimhood is the
product. It drives sales, generates sympathetic coverage in friendly
outlets, and turns the factual question — was the book accurate? — into a
secondary concern.
DiResta puts it well:
The allegations that I’m debunking here are load-bearing walls in
Siegel’s book. If 22 million tweets weren’t flagged — and they weren’t —
then “perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and
censorship initiative in existence” shrinks to an academic project in
which researchers tagged a few thousand URLs to private platforms, most
of which they ignored. That’s why Siegel is so angry. It’s not that I’m
“censoring” him. It’s that I was never a government-puppet “censor” at
all.
Pull out the load-bearing claims and the whole structure collapses.
When the structure is a sweeping conspiracy theory about a “censorship
industrial complex,” the author has every incentive to make sure nobody
pulls those claims out. Reframing factual corrections as censorship is
how you protect a weak foundation — it turns your biggest vulnerability
into your biggest rhetorical asset.
Free speech means Siegel can publish his book. He did! It’s out
there, for sale, being reviewed, being discussed. Free speech means
DiResta can point out that the book contains factually false claims
about her. She did that too. Free speech means publications can decide
whether to correct, retract, or stand by reviews based on their own
editorial judgment. The Baffler made its call. The Free Beacon made a
different one.
None of this is censorship. It is the system working as intended. The
proverbial “marketplace of ideas” that free speech advocates claim to
champion depends on people being able to challenge false claims without
being accused of suppression. If “censorship” means “someone publicly
disagreed with me and a publication decided my claims didn’t hold up,”
then the concept has been gutted.
Siegel published a book making grand claims about a censorship
machine. The subject of those claims had the receipts proving those
claims false. She asked for corrections through entirely normal
channels. One publication issued a correction, one did nothing, and one
pulled its review entirely. Siegel’s response was to accuse her
of censorship — from his perch at a well-funded publication, with a
book on the market and an audience on X hanging on his every word.
Rather than being gagged, he’s simply being corrected. The fact that
he can’t tell the difference — or, more likely, that he can tell the
difference and has decided that pretending otherwise is more profitable —
tells you everything you need to know about how seriously to take his
claims.
Filed Under: censorship industrial complex, fact checking, jacob siegel, renee diresta
