Tablet Magazine editor Jacob Siegel joined the “Charlie Kirk Show” to discuss his new book: “The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control”

JACOB SIEGEL: The Information State is a new kind of political regime that rules not through the consent of the governed, the way we expect from a democracy, or through the formal procedures of law and constitutional procedure. Instead, it rules through control of digital code. It moves decision-making power from the recognizable centers we know from the framers’ intentions and the history of America, takes sovereignty and political decision-making power from there, and relocates it into the digital infrastructure. Debanking, mass information operations, mass censorship — these are the tools of the trade of what is not just an abuse of government power, but an entirely new kind of political regime we are watching be born now. … There really is a straight line from the massive expansion of surveillance powers after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was part of it, but also the social media and telecommunications companies were essentially turned into private surveillance units doing the work the government couldn’t do because it was unconstitutional. They were pulling all this data in, harvesting it through programs like PRISM (that we found out about through Edward Snowden), and turning the entire commercial side of the internet into a kind of mass dragnet. … What ended up happening as the war on terror started to wind down in its second decade is that the entire apparatus for counter-terrorism was redirected from targets abroad to targets at home. That huge machine of repression and surveillance started to be targeted against Americans inside the United States. First, by programs like the one called “Countering Extremism,” which were scouring the internet for behavior in the U.S. ostensibly tied to terrorism, and then finally through this new “Counter-Disinformation” establishment. Right now, there’s a new informational power coming into being which takes over and essentially governs through control of digital platforms—but we still have a constitution in the United States. There are still laws that prohibit spying on U.S. citizens. So the government is aware it can’t carry out all of these functions it might like to, so it outsources this work through NGOs and other cutouts it creates, establishing these convoluted institutional networks. This really kicked into high gear in 2016, with the creation of something called the “Global Engagement Center,” which Obama chartered right before he left office. It was really the premiere government-run counter-disinformation establishment. The way it worked in its own mission statement was not just to carry out actions on its own as a federal agency, it was to affect what it called a “whole-of-society effort,” the purpose of which was to align different powerful institutions that they called “stakeholder institutions,” across American society–media financial institutions, universities, etc.–and get all of them on the same page and bought into this new mandate, not only to counter foreign disinformation, but to counter an expanding laundry list of “bad” information. So “foreign disinformation” grew to “domestic misinformation,” which then came to include “mal-information,” which became an actual term they used in another government agency called CISA, under the Department of Homeland Security, which made part of its mission “monitoring the information for mal-information,” which referred to true, factually-correct statements that were perceived to cause harm. … Mal-information could include someone questioning the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines, climate change skepticism, opposition to the war in Ukraine, or opposition to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. All of these were on the list of issues that both the government agency CISA and related institutions working with them –like the “Election Integrity Partnership” and related NGOs. These were the kinds of narratives they were monitoring, in coordination with social media companies. It’s very hard to say exactly how many posts online were censored. I went to Washington and spoke with people who worked directly on this, and I didn’t get a single solid estimate from anybody. “In the millions” is all anyone could tell me. There were deliberate firewalls created between the social media companies and federal agencies. It was set up in such a way that they were trying to create a denial of liability for everyone involved. Some of it came out from the Twitter Files and other reporting, but just to give you an example of how it worked: If the Election Integrity Project informed the social media companies — Facebook, Twitter, Google– they were concerned about a particular narrative online, they didn’t need to tell Facebook or Twitter every post they wanted censored. The social media platform could dial it down on its own.

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