Renee DiResta writes in her new book:
* when attorney – turned – speechwriter Michael Benz set his sights on convincing American conservatives that a vast collusion operation had deprived Donald Trump of his rightful victory in 2020…
Despite his social media boasting, Benz hadn’t actually “run cyber” at State. He’d been the deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs for approximately three months, 2 following a year as a speechwriter for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. But no matter — after leaving government, Benz simply created an email address, reserved a domain name, and embarked upon a new career as a former cybersecurity expert.
The man whose prior attributable online presence had been scrubbed down to little more than a Pepe – the – frog – throw – pillow Pinterest pinboard was now the head of what he called the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) — and also, seemingly, its sole employee. He reinvented himself as “mikebenzcyber” on social media and set about proclaiming that he was going to expose the crime of the century.
The goal of the FFO, Benz wrote in a convoluted blog post, was to expose a vast collusion operation that he claimed had transpired between the government, academia, media, and tech companies. There had been a plot, he alleged, to create a “social media censorship bureau” that “targeted” the speech of millions of Americans — particularly those on the populist right.
At the center of this plot — the keeper of an “AI censorship death star superweapon” — was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). And the Darth Vader figure in his Death Star analogy? That was me.
In Benz’s bespoke reality, the EIP, in cahoots with the Department of Homeland Security, his old employer the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Big Tech, had colluded to censor tens of millions of tweets — twenty – two million to be precise — during our 2020 election work. In his more bombastic media appearances, the number ballooned to hundreds of millions, or even billions , of posts that we’d supposedly gotten nuked from the internet via some sort of shadowy special access to “internal systems” of government and tech. Government actors had supposedly told us, via these secret systems, what needed be suppressed, and we had supposedly passed their demands on to Big Tech companies. This effort, Benz claimed, had prevented people from seeing entire narratives during the 2020 election. We had “pre – censored discussion that predicted the possibility of election fraud.”
If this sounds like word salad served up by someone in a tinfoil hat, that’s because it is. Benz’s theories were remarkable primarily for how utterly wrong they were. When we saw his early posts targeting EIP’s work in August 2022, we laughed. His “source” for this list of crazy allegations was something we’d written ourselves: a 292 – page final report describing our work, released publicly in March 2021, widely covered by the media and posted publicly to our website for a year and a half before he “discovered” it. 4
But accuracy wasn’t Benz’s objective; storytelling was. He was picking out random phrases and numbers from within our report’s pages and reassembling them into a sordid spy thriller. Driving this drama was a compelling trope: the Man (or Woman) Behind the Curtain, secretly steering world events unbeknownst to the powerless targets. Benz’s long “exposés” were the alternate history of a fantasy world. They included a specific set of villains: real people, reduced to avatars whose lives could be mined for further plot points to generate maximum outrage, engagement, and revenue. His followers and subscribers could enjoy the equivalent of a multiseason drama. But unlike with Star Wars or Game of Thrones , the audience could actually inhabit the universe, helping harass the villain online and off.Benz confidently presented his fantasy as fact and himself as the hero, drawing heavily on the Whistleblower trope to sell it. In some right – wing media interviews, Benz postured as an ex – government insider who’d seen terrible abuses in his (very short) tenure at State; in others, he was a concerned citizen who had been “investigating” the rise of a vast censorship apparatus for nearly a decade ; in still others he was a diplomat offended on behalf of supposedly silenced global populist leaders (like India’s president Modi) 5 or a chess champion who had seen the board several positions out and deduced that an “AI censorship death star superweapon” was about to destroy the First Amendment in America.
Those of us who had worked on EIP noticed his sustained effort to get attention, but the attempt to retcon our very public work into some secret conspiracy screamed “crank,” and we thought that no reasonable person would take it seriously.
We were wrong.
One challenge of refuting conspiracy theory propaganda is that its authors often present their claims in what’s known as a Gish gallop : a litany of allegations so numerous that the target is temporarily paralyzed, unable to decide what to respond to first. It takes an extraordinary amount of time to address them point by point, since some are based on twisted or decontextualized grains of truth. And so it was with Benz.
The Election Integrity Partnership work that Benz refashioned into a plot had taken place in 2020, when the government bureaucracies were run by Trump appointees. In Benz’s alternate universe, the government had been in the tank for Joe Biden. There was no “secret access” to “internal systems” or data portals. The 2020 EIP effort and 2021 Virality Project had no government funding, although Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington did subsequently receive a National Science Foundation grant to study rapid responses to rumors in late 2021 — a grain of truth that Benz twisted to label us “government – funded censors” and imply that we had been rewarded for helping Biden win. 7 The soon – to – be – infamous “22 million tweets” statistic he bandied about had nothing to do with anything getting “censored” — it was a figure from a table in our report, calculated well after Election Day, that tallied the number of tweets discussing the prominent election rumors we’d studied. This simple act of addition was refashioned into evidence of a plot in his alternate reality.
Online cranks are a dime a dozen. But it quickly became clear that the Foundation for Freedom Online was linked to a broader network of right – wing advocacy organizations with ties to a small group of congressional partisans. The FFO’s website footer, later removed, described it as “a project of Empower Oversight,” 8 an effort started by a longtime Republican combatant who’d previously wondered if Senator Joe McCarthy — he of the 1950s Red Scare hysteria — had gotten a bad rap. 9 Empower Oversight primarily worked to procure “whistle – blowers” for congressional hearings, 10 and FFO came to serve as the primary source for the now growing chorus of right – wing media and legislative rumblings about censorship. Benz had a limited understanding of the “cyber” topics he presented himself as an expert in, but with the backing of a partisan machine, he was able to step into the role of spokesperson for the grievance and was rewarded with glowing profiles that bolstered his credibility.
And so, an absurd alternate history, overwhelmingly sourced to one man, proliferated. Far Right outlets, influencers, and media – of – one figures were thrilled to give Benz’s claims airtime: Some people on the internet are saying that Stanford censored tens of millions of YOUR tweets! Some people are saying Stanford rebooted a CIA mind control project! 12 Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and John Solomon eagerly had Benz on as a guest. Narrative laundering began — a very old propaganda strategy in which claims attributed to a seemingly authoritative source appear in one small outlet, then propagate across a daisy chain of ideologically aligned outlets, each citing the last. It goes something like this: Outlet B repeats a baseless claim, but attributes it to A — “Outlet A is reporting that the Election Integrity Partnership…” Outlet B is just reporting on the reporting, after all. Outlet C can then cite Outlet B, and so on. Very few readers will take the time to look at the original source material if they trust the outlet restating the claim. The repetition, meanwhile, gives the impression that the story is important and ensures it remains on the audience’s mind.
But today narrative laundering across propaganda rags is only half the ballgame. There’s also the social media rumor mill. Indeed, several of the “repeat spreader” influencers described in EIP’s report — the pivotal figures who’d repeatedly helped election rumors go wildly viral — shared the coverage of Benz’s claims. They reframed our work summarizing their demonstrated massive reach as preemptively targeting them, suppressing them , and alleged that we were motivated by anticonservative bias. These allegations, of course, went viral.
As the lies spread, they ignited harassment from the influencers’ fans. People who were turned into villains in this alternate history were battered with outrage, abuse, and sometimes threats. Meanwhile, growing interest from partisan politicians was setting the stage for harassment from another entity: the political machine. This was not accidental; Benz’s avowed goal, very plainly stated on his blog, was to have a congressional committee “armed with subpoena power” investigate the villains he described in his reports.
There’s a term for the kind of material the FFO produced and the network boosted: bullshit.
* Benz’s cosplay as a cybersecurity whistle – blower would have real – world consequences for me and my colleagues. That’s because even the people in the world best – equipped to understand the mechanics of these Kafkaesque claims have a difficult time refuting them. It takes an order of magnitude more effort to debunk bullshit than it does to produce it. 16
* After right – wing media had picked up Benz’s bullshit for several weeks in a row, we put up a detailed post on the Election Integrity Partnership’s blog, on October 5, 2022, patiently explaining what he’d gotten wrong. 17 But the outlets that covered the crank theory were undeterred.
* It did not matter to Jack Posobiec (or to Mike Benz) what the cost of their lies was for the people they targeted and smeared. What mattered was keeping fans engaged, aggrieved, and subscribed.
* Benz, who’d been trying to make Taibbi notice him for weeks, seized the opportunity, effusively praising Taibbi’s work for a long, embarrassing moment before letting the audience know that it was actually he, Benz, who had “all of the missing pieces of the puzzle” detailing the evil cabal purportedly censoring right – wing speech.
“I can tell you literally everything,” Benz told Taibbi, promising him that he would have “superpowers” at the end of the conversation. In a rambling monologue, Benz breathlessly recounted the alternate history he’d so painstakingly crafted. He fixated on me: I was the puppet master of this vast cabal, with “special privileged access” to “DHS’ 24/7 cyber mission control” and “DHS FBI powers.” My supposed powers came with a secret deputization authorizing me to censor “22 million tweets,” he burbled, dropping the twisted statistic he’d harped on for months on his blog. Then he ran through the laundry list of conspiracy theories he’d been feeding right – wing media. Basking in the audience attention, he enthusiastically upped the number of posts we’d somehow censored to hundreds of millions. “Wow,” Taibbi solemnly replied, as if he were Bob Woodward speaking to Deep Throat in an underground DC parking lot.
“This is a scale of censorship the world has never experienced before!” Benz exclaimed.
A few days later, on March 9, 2023, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified in a public hearing before Jim Jordan and his Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Under oath, and in chaotic written testimony, the two witnesses regurgitated Benz’s claims — the nonsense about “millions of tweets” and targeting of conservatives, my supposed “undisclosed CIA ties,” and all the rest of the bullshit, now entered into the congressional record as if they’d uncovered it while sleuthing through Twitter’s files.
The appearance made Benz’s dream of congressional hearings before a committee with subpoena power — the stated goal in his first blog post — come true.* Four months after that panel in England, Benz was the subject of a damning exposé by NBC News. He had, as I mentioned earlier, erased nearly all of his social media profiles before starting his “foundation” — a move that suggested he perhaps had something to hide. Indeed, an October 2023 news story revealed that Benz had “a secret history as an alt – right persona” known as “Frame Game.” 92 Frame Game had run an anonymous YouTube channel called “Frame Game Radio” where he ranted about “white genocide” in the United States, a purported Jewish cabal, his desire to set up a “White Mother Fertility Fund,” and the IQs of racial minorities. He posted similar content to Twitter and Gab. When caught by NBC, he declared that his secret past persona had been an effort to deradicalize anti – Semites (an excuse that his past social media contacts, including prominent neo – Nazi Richard Spencer, publicly mocked). 93 However, Frame Game/Mike Benz’s past posts still lingered in some corners of the web, where his own words spoke for him: “If I, a Jew, a member of the Tribe, Hebrew Schooled, can read Mein Kampf & think ‘holy shit, Hitler actually had some decent points.’ Then NO ONE is safe from hating you once they find out who is behind the White genocide happening all over the world.”
