Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews 10/31/25 Mike Benz on How the Censorship Complex Works
Nov 7, 2025
Mike Benz, founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online and an expert on the censorship industrial complex, dives deep into how government, corporations, and NGOs collude to shape public understanding. He discusses the influence of foreign powers and the political ramifications of censorship in the U.S., particularly during the Trump era. Benz also highlights how universities serve state agendas and explores the role of organizations like Indivisible in orchestrating protests. His insights into the intertwining of funding, policy, and free speech are thought-provoking and timely.
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Four-Part Censorship Ecosystem
- The censorship industrial complex is a four-part ecosystem of government, corporations, nonprofits, and media working in concert to control information.
- They use these overlapping levers to evade constitutional limits and manufacture public consensus.
Whole‑Of‑Society As Statecraft
- Full-spectrum mobilization (whole-of-society) is used for major foreign-policy objectives, not just censorship.
- War, regime change, and information control all use the same coordinated stakeholder model.
USAID's Deep Media Funding Example
- Mike Benz cites USAID funding of 90% of Ukrainian media and 110 outlets in Moldova as examples of media capture.
- He links such sponsorship to editorial favors and access tradeoffs with government actors.
