Corrections Are Censorship: Jacob Siegel’s Latest Fiction

Jacob Siegel misleads readers in his new book. When I asked for corrections, he cried censorship in The Free Press—writing as accuser, investigator, and fact-checker all in one. A lie-machine exposé.

Jacob Siegel published a book last week called The Information State. It is a sweeping grand theory of how a deep state censorship machine was assembled to control American public opinion. It’s really just an expansion of his Tablet essay on the “censorship industrial complex” from 2023, in which he declared Frame Game Mike Benz a State Department “whistleblower” and echoed the allegations of the Twitter Files; if you read that, you’ve read the book. This is actually the problem: tons of evidence has come out since, in the courts and in Congress, and Siegel chose to ignore it and just repeat the same allegations. It’s since come out that Benz worked at State Department for two months, but no matter…same sources as scaffolding, etc.

In the book, Siegel insinuates the usual bullshit: I ran a wing of this censorship complex out of the Stanford Internet Observatory, I may be a secret CIA agent, etc. There’s a lot of guilt-by-association and straight-up errors. He describes a project I worked on as possibly the largest censorship initiative in existence.

Siegel’s book relies on innuendo, and then he pretends to be shocked when readers fall for the innuendo; that game is what we’re going to break down here. His reviewers keep doing what he wants them to do: reading between the lines and coming to (false) conclusions. The problem is that his fictional character — me — has leapt from the page, and dared to request factchecks over this, from three publications. After they’ve looked over the evidence, pubs have issued corrections in line with their editorial standards. The Brownstone Institute did nothing. The Free Beacon Issued a correction. The Baffler pulled their review.

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. He wrote an article in The Free Press accusing me of plotting to censor his review. He spent all morning on Twitter calling me a “figure connected to the US government” who “pressure[d] a publication to remove its review of my book”.

This is a combination of crazy bitch shit and standard right-wing media marketing: allege victimhood at the hands of some made-up tyrannical left to drive up sales. It would be funny if it weren’t defamatory. It’s frankly amazing that TFP ran this bullshit without a factcheck, but we’ll get to that.

Let me tell you what actually happened.

What the book gets wrong

Siegel’s book says that the Election Integrity Partnership — a research project I worked on during the 2020 election — “classified 21,897,364 tweets” as “misinformation incidents.” But he places this number in context carefully designed to make readers believe that our project flagged 22 million tweets to platforms for “censorship” during the election. It works. Reviewer after reviewer have written that as fact.

Here’s how he does it:

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.

The 22 million figure comes from our post-election analysis. After the election was over, we identified the most viral election narratives — Sharpiegate, Dominion voting machines, etc — for an academic analysis. That data was used in a public report and peer-reviewed research. It was not a count of items flagged for platforms during the election, and Siegel knows this because I explained it to him in person before he published.

What actually happened during the 2020 election: our student research teams (“employees”) flagged roughly 4,800 URLs total, including 2,890 tweets, to platforms for possible policy violations such as impersonating poll workers. 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. Also, while we’re correcting things, I did not lead EIP, I was on maternity leave for the first six weeks; Alex Stamos was its lead, a fact Siegel’s own source — the Weaponization Subcommittee report — gets right. (Update 4/16: Siegel has latched on to this sentence to complain that I was indeed “a leader” of EIP. Yes, I absolutely was and am very proud of that! But here is what he says in his book: “That is where she came to lead the Election Integrity Partnership, at the time perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence.” “The largest and most impactful of them was a CISA offshoot called the Election Integrity Partnership led by Renée DiResta, the New Knowledge veteran.” “Renée DiResta started a new initiative, still under the auspices of the Stanford Internet Observatory, called the Virality Project.” Those accusations are in the singular, as part of the villain persona he sought to create - and they’re not accurate. His retreat to “a leader” is a motte-and-bailey.)

In his Free Press article accusing me of censoring him by trying to correct these “mistakes,” Siegel defends the 22 million number by quoting our report’s description of the research dataset. He seems to think this proves his point, but it proves mine. The passage describes a data collection methodology, not items flagged to platforms. Yet somehow, his reviewers think the 22 million stat, as he presents it in the book, is evidence of mass censorship! Why is he mad that I would want that corrected? Why isn’t he out there correcting it himself, as the author of something so unclear? Why did he not put the other stats in his book?

More importantly: what was the mass censorship EIP committed, if we all agree that the mass-flagging didn’t happen?

I plan to write about the incentives powering this kind of dishonesty in an upcoming article in The Free Press, which I certainly hope they will publish, since they just ran an article where a man who falsely accused me of being a mass censor, subsequently falsely accused me of pressuring media to get his review revoked! 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.

Here’s the email Siegel sent me, so you can see it for yourself. Again: a man who defamed me in his book sent me this accusatory email, and somehow this interrogation was also to be its own factcheck.

I never would have guessed that this was the factcheck, so I sent back a comment, which Siegel stripped down to one sentence:

In response, Siegel wrote: “When I contacted DiResta by email, she did not deny asking The Baffler to pull its review of my book.” On Twitter, he just straight-up accused me of being behind the plot.

I’ve since sent The Free Press editors a comment and evidence that I do, in fact, deny asking The Baffler to pull its review, and this is not actually a matter of debate. It would be nice if they did the ethical thing to update that, now that I’ve communicated with a neutral party who can actually serve as a fact-checker, and not my slippery accuser.

It’s not “censorship” — it’s counterspeech

Siegel said false things about me. I pushed back — that’s counterspeech. His fictitious character hopped off the page and defended herself in real life, reasonable people found the pushback to be honest and accurate, and he couldn’t cope.

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.

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.