Nicholas Clairmont’s review of Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control (“Tyranny Through Technology,” March 29, 2026) calls it “careful and specific” and “unimpeachably sourced.” I am one of the book’s caricatured villains and I want to address the sourcing and specificity directly.
The heart of Siegel’s “mass censorship” narrative, mentioned in Clairmont’s review, is that the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) “classified almost 22 million posts as ‘misinformation incidents,'” in what Siegel calls “the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence.” In the book, Siegel positions this statistic immediately after innuendo about armies of Stanford students flagging tweets to platforms. The implication, which readers and reviewers have fallen for, is that 22 million tweets were sent to platforms. This is false. The facts of the matter, laid out in reports, court filings, congressional testimonies, and tens of thousands of documents released following congressional subpoenas, undercut this wild story completely. They’ve been in the public record for years; any investigative journalist, fact-checker, or ethical author would have acknowledged them. Siegel did not—even though I also personally explained them to him.
During the 2020 election, EIP, not taking any direction from government and with no enforcement ability, flagged roughly 4,800 URLs to platforms, including 2,890 tweets. Sixty-five percent of these were ignored, approximately 25 percent were labeled, and 10 percent were removed. In the end, a few hundred flagged posts were removed by platforms for violating their terms—a far cry from 22 million, and nothing resembling mass censorship.
After the election, we built a dataset of 22 million tweets referencing the election’s most viral rumors. Mike Benz, a figure who worked at the State Department for approximately two months yet whom Siegel called a “whistleblower,” twisted this statistic in a 2022 blog post, claiming that the data gathered postelection represented censorship demands or flags during the election as part of some “Biden censorship regime.” This is nonsense.
Clairmont originally wrote that EIP had “passed almost 22 million ‘takedown requests’ for specific posts to social media companies via a ‘ticket’ system that saw tech platforms responding, on average, in under an hour”—an understandable mistake to make, because that is how Siegel’s positioning framed it. The correction, unfortunately, doesn’t change the errors in Siegel’s book, or how much his thesis relies on the misrepresented number.
The 22 million tweet fabrication isn’t the only problem. Siegel’s claims trace back to the same closed loop of sources. Siegel cites Matt Taibbi, who cites Mike Benz. The Weaponization Subcommittee cites both. Siegel cites the Subcommittee. To a reader it could look like deep research and convergent evidence, but the reality is that it’s recursive footnotes citing a small echo chamber.
Factual errors compound the sourcing problems, and they are not random. In an effort to make me the singular face of “mass censorship,” Siegel attempted to smear me through guilt-by-association, even when the associations were factually wrong. He wrote that I led EIP, but I was on maternity leave for the first six weeks of the project; one of Siegel’s own primary sources, the House Weaponization Subcommittee report, correctly identifies my colleague Alex Stamos as EIP’s creator and lead.
Dates are wrong in the book. People are placed at institutions where they never worked; he puts Meghan Markle on a commission that was actually joined by Prince Harry. Every error goes in the same direction and every mistake inflates the claimed conspiracy, elevates Siegel’s villains, and burnishes his heroes. This is not journalism, it’s ideological argument dressed as investigation. When I reached out, publicly, to three reviewers to correct mistakes about my work, Siegel accused me of “censorship.”
Clairmont credits Siegel with producing a serious structural account of how information power actually works. I share the belief that those questions deserve serious treatment—the relationships between government, NGOs, and platform moderation are genuinely worth scrutinizing; I’ve written about them for years. But Siegel’s book doesn’t do this, it asserts a predetermined conclusion intended to be maximally sensational to an ideological audience—it retrofits suggestive evidence, discards what doesn’t fit, and fabricates what’s missing.
Readers who want to understand how information power works in the digital age deserve an account rooted in what actually occurred. The Information State is not that book.
Renee DiResta is the author of the book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.
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