Piercing the Propaganda

An object example from CDAF fellow Dr. Mary Anne Franks

One of the many challenges in the ongoing battle to protect democratic institutions and processes - like higher education and academic freedom - is the fundamentally dishonest and propagandistic framing around what in other times would be worthy issues of debate.

One example is the so-called “censorship industrial complex,” a right-wing trope that contends that social media companies and Democratic Party office holders conspired to silence conservative voices. While debates over content moderation and government regulation of speech are important, even necessary, this framing does little to advance these debates.

And yet, Republicans in control of Congress are busy advancing these conspiracist beliefs through hearings to which they invite speakers willing to parrot the party line. Thankfully, at least for now, the minority party retains the right to invite speakers of their own in order to counter these pernicious and false narratives.

Dr. Mary Anne Franks, the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington Law School and a CDAF fellow was recently invited to give her testimony at one of these hearings, and she took advantage of the opportunity to puncture this false narrative and show how the current Trump Administration is, perhaps, the greatest threat to free speech in our nation’s history.

In refusing to accept the fundamentally dishonest framing of the “censorship industrial complex,” Dr. Franks provided a perfect example on how to turn the false framing around and make a forceful argument for freedom from government interference with speech.

In addition to her work at Georgetown and as a CDAF fellow, Dr. Franks is the author of Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment. She was gracious enough to answer my questions about how these systems work and her approach to fighting back in the belly of the beast.

As you’ll see in the Q&A, standing up and testifying in these contexts does not come without cost, as it now inevitably is coupled with truly vile harassment campaigns designed to silence dissent.

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John Warner: I’m curious about the behind the scenes aspect of this kind of thing. How does one get selected to deliver testimony like this, and how does it feel when you are asked, particularly knowing that committees right now are controlled by extreme partisans?

Mary Anne Franks: When the majority party calls a committee or subcommittee hearing, both the chair of that committee and the “ranking member” from the minority party prepare lists of potential witnesses (the minority party gets fewer witnesses, usually 1-2 to the majority’s 3-4). In my experience, staff for the chair and ranking member then reach out to the individuals on the list to discuss their expertise on the subject of the hearing, interest in testifying, and availability. The chair and ranking member issue formal letters of invitation to the majority and minority witnesses once there is agreement about which witnesses will be called. 

I’ve been invited to testify for multiple Congressional hearings, most often by Democrats but also by Republicans, on subjects such as the First Amendment, online abuse and exploitation, and tech industry liability. I tend to accept most invitations unless I am physically unable to attend, even when I think the motivation for the hearing is in bad faith or the framing of the topic is poorly informed. I view these invitations as opportunities to provide expertise and guidance to the lawmakers who genuinely do care about the subjects at issue and to help educate the general public.

JW: The subject/title of the hearing is “The Censorship Industrial Complex,” which is not an actual thing, but instead a bit of political gaslighting and conspiracy theorizing that imagines a massive conspiracy that silenced conservative voices on social media, in higher ed, and elsewhere. In a way, it’s hard to take seriously if you’re acquainted with objective reality, but the forum sort of requires you to take it seriously. At the same time, you clearly went in wanting to puncture the B.S. bubble. How did you think about and work through this challenge?

MAF: This is actually the second time I have been asked to testify about the “censorship industrial complex.” I was the minority (Democrat) witness last June for a House of Representatives Small Business Committee Hearing titled “Under the Microscope: Examining the Censorship-Industrial Complex and its Impact on American Small Businesses.” That hearing hit just about all the same tired talking points that you heard in the Senate hearing, which are the same talking points that Republicans have trotted out in at least half a dozen other hearings on the same topic. My approach to last year’s hearing was similar to my approach to this one: to counter the grotesque distortions of First Amendment doctrine by the perpetrators of the “censorship industrial complex” hoax. I expected that my analysis would be displeasing to the Republican committee members, and, indeed, some of them worked themselves into quite a fury over it.

So I was expecting hostility from Republicans in this hearing as well, especially given my intention to use my testimony not only to debunk the “censorship industrial complex” conspiracy theory, but to highlight how it is being used to distract from and justify the Trump administration’s actual assault on free speech. 

JW: You had some co-panelists, a couple of whom spread the manure thick and fast. Are you conscious of your response to these statements while they’re speaking, or is it not possible to keep a poker face while listening to that stuff?

MAF: I’ve heard these talking points recycled by the same people so many times that it’s hard to feel anything other than contempt for their shameless, depthless grift. It’s not just the bad faith and the blatant lies that are so tedious; it’s the sheer whininess of the people endlessly bleating about how they’re being silenced from their prime-time spots on Fox News, their op-eds in the Atlantic, their interviews in the New York Times, and their seats at Congressional witness tables. Complaining about being censored can be quite lucrative for those with very little to say.

JW: In your statement, you marshal a combination of legal frameworks and facts on the ground, and I recommend that people read (or watch) the whole thing because it’s a very satisfying experience, but what’s the bullet point version of the bad faith that underlies this trope?

MAF: The gist of the “censorship industrial complex” hoax is that the Biden administration, nonprofit organizations, and social media platforms all worked together to suppress conservative speech by characterizing it as “misinformation,” and that the silencing effects of this censorship continue to be felt by right-wing media, politicians, and other figures. According to the purveyors of this hoax, any misinformation research, news ratings systems, advertising brand management, or content moderation decisions that negatively impact conservative speakers are “censorship.” The goal of this hoax is to invert the First Amendment: if misinformation research is “censorship,” then suppressing that research becomes “free speech.”

But this gets the First Amendment completely backwards. The First Amendment protects the right of private actors—including private universities, non-governmental organizations, and businesses—to ignore, criticize, or refuse to associate with speech they do not agree with. It protects the government’s own rights of free speech, including the right to prefer certain viewpoints and to communicate those preferences through persuasion, encouragement, and funding.

All the things the hoaxers complain of – academic research into misinformation and propaganda; tools that help businesses decide how to spend their advertising budgets; efforts (including government-funded ones) to inform the public about false, fraudulent, harmful, extremist, harassing, or exploitative content—are forms of speech protected by the First Amendment. People can dislike or disagree with that speech (and many conservatives do, loudly); that is also speech protected by the First Amendment. But calling on the government to suppress and punish that speech because conservatives don’t like it is censorship.

Censorship is when the government purges books, words, and concepts that it does not like, including concepts such as misinformation. Censorship is when the government threatens people with the loss of employment, lawsuits, violence, jail, or deportation for their speech. Censorship is when the government tries to force universities, law firms, or businesses to adopt its preferred viewpoint, or to punish judges, lawmakers, journalists, religious leaders, teachers, or students for dissent or criticism of the government.

The Trump-Musk regime is currently engaging in every one of these forms of censorship. The fact that not a single pearl-clutching critic of the supposed “censorship industrial complex” so much as acknowledged this actual, ongoing, governmental assault on the First Amendment should make clear, once and for all, that the “censorship industrial complex” is a cynical hoax intended to distract and defraud the American people.

JW: Rather than engage with the substance of your testimony, Senators Kennedy and Blackburn chose to read aloud quotes from social media posts and scholarship you’ve written about topics unrelated to the subject matter of the hearing in an attempt to portray you as a “provocative,” “angry” partisan and elitist. The questions seemed designed to create outrage bait for far-right media, and indeed many of those clips quickly went viral on sites like YouTube and X.  As a consequence, you’ve received a deluge of harassing social media posts, emails, calls, and letters, some of it extremely graphic and violent. Is this something you’ve experienced before, and how do you deal with it?

MAF: It's certainly not the first time something I wrote or said has triggered a hate avalanche. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who claim to love free speech get awfully upset when they hear speech they don’t like. And racists and misogynists tend to get very, very upset about being called racists and misogynists. As we say in Arkansas, hit dogs holler. But this round of fury has been particularly ugly – lots of very graphic fantasies about all the rape and murder and torture that I apparently deserve for being a woman who says things that a sitting member of Congress finds “provocative.” The sheer fury that people can whip themselves into after listening to two out-of-context minutes of a Senate hearing is certainly disturbing. 

Almost more disturbing than the rage, though, is the shocking lack of comprehension about the most basic details of what the hearing was about and why I was there. People wrote that I had no business being a judge (!), that I should resign my government position (!), and that it was my obligation to answer the Senators’ questions because I was on trial (!). I’m a teacher by nature as well as by profession, and almost nothing grieves me more than confident ignorance. I understand that most people do not know much about Senate hearings or what it means to be a voluntary expert witness for one, but I do not understand the failure to try to learn this basic information before firing off a furious, error-filled screed. I often wonder how much conflict could be avoided if people were a bit less prone to rage and a bit more prone to curiosity. 

JW: One of the things that drives me bonkers about how some higher ed institutions are responding to these sorts of obvious bad faith tropes is that they often grant some portion of the original premise before trying to pivot to their preferred framing, but this seems hugely ineffective because you’ve allowed their framing to stand. I think we saw this in how some institutional leaders responded to bad-faith questioning by Congress last year. We’re seeing it in how some institutions seem to be trying to turtle-up and let the federal assault on higher ed pass over them. In your testimony, you refused to grant any ground to the claims. Can you help us understand why this is good both rhetorically in the moment but also in terms of long-term strategy?

MAF: We should know this from history: appeasement doesn’t work. The tyrant is never satisfied with what you give him; he will always demand more. Just look at Columbia. President Minouche Shafik groveled before Congressional inquisitors pretending to care about anti-Semitism back in 2024, eagerly throwing her own faculty and students under the bus in the process, and she was still pushed out. And even though Columbia brutally cracked down on antiwar protesters and fired and investigated faculty for their political views, it was still at the top of Trump’s target list once he took office. And then Columbia responded to his threat to take away millions in funding if it didn’t comply with his blatantly unconstitutional demands by caving almost immediately. Not only did that fail to earn them any assurances about their funding, but Columbia is now facing the prospect of being subjected to direct federal oversight.

It is wrong for an academic institution to defend itself by surrendering the things that make it worth defending. It is also futile. If surrender will not save you, why not stand and fight?¹

JW: In the end, the obvious truth is that this administration is a nearly unprecedented threat to free speech, using the power of the state to literally silence and punish dissent. There’s nothing even remotely comparable since the McCarthy Red Scare era, is there?

MAF: There truly isn’t. And I would say that this is an even more dangerous time than the Red Scare era, not only because the current cult of Trump far exceeds the influence of Senator McCarthy in his day but also because we are operating in a hopelessly polluted information ecosystem, deprived of the guardrails of an independent and effective media. That is essential to the lockstep irrationality, cruelty, and cowardice among Trump’s followers - there is little hope for shared humanity in the absence of a shared reality.

JW: We’re both part of an organization that’s trying to do what we can to rally around the cause of shoring up democracy by protecting the right for scholars to teach and research and for students to learn, but I think we all get that this work is not sufficient by itself to meet the moment. Where do you find hope? What should we, collectively, be doing?

MAF: It’s the hardest question, isn’t it? I’ve always considered myself very lucky to be in the teaching profession, and I still do even in this dark time. My goal has been to teach my students both what the law is and what it could be, to emphasize that law is a product of human choices and that we can always choose differently. It’s existentially challenging to try to teach law in a time of lawlessness, and even more so when law students’ lives and livelihoods are being directly threatened. All of education is under attack by the Trump regime, but students are among the most vulnerable and the most vilified. It would be understandable if they succumbed to collective paralysis and despair, but I have seen the opposite happen. Students have been organizing, questioning, writing, and strategizing; they are standing up for themselves and for their peers, working together to find large and small ways to name and to fight the injustices unfolding around them. They give me hope that the law can and will be remade with more justice and more peace.

We need to collectively resist the Trump regime’s efforts to intimidate and domesticate educational institutions and their communities. We need to loudly and unequivocally defend the right to read, think, and study free of government interference. We need to keep saying what is true, over and over, against the fascist flood of lies designed to divide and disorient us.  We must have no more patience for euphemisms or false equivalences or propaganda terms. We need to get comfortable calling things what they are: fascism, censorship, white male supremacy, racism, misogyny – all the words that Trump and his lackeys cannot bear to hear. Accurately describing reality, everywhere and every way we can, is essential to maintaining our sanity, our solidarity, and our power.

The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. 

1. This Q&A was conducted prior to Harvard University’s decision to resist the Trump Administration’s attempts to coerce compliance by withholding federal funds. We now have an object counter-example to the choice Columbia made.