I Wrote a Book About Censorship. Then People Tried to Censor It.
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Free Press
Posted: July 26th, 2026
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-wrote-a-book-about-censorship-then
Last week, I published a book called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. It describes how, as technology has advanced, American politics and government have been transformed by the shift in societal power from visible laws and institutions to opaque forms of digital and informational control. One of the consequences of this shift has been the ability of the government-tech alliance—what I call “the information state”—to carry out mass censorship online. This point was noted in a generally positive review of the book that ran on March 24 in a left-wing magazine called The Baffler. So I could only savor the irony when, less than a day later, the magazine purged the review from its website. In place of the purged piece is an editor’s note informing visitors that the magazine removed the review “after determining that it does not meet The Baffler’s fact-checking standards.” If a magazine publishes something that generates significant controversy ... the liberal thing to do is to publish a counterargument. To cite a “factchecking” error without elaborating what it is leaves the public even less informed than before. The book [describes how] smart and often decent people wound up being puppeteered by a vast technocratic apparatus for managing public opinion that had disastrous consequences. To them, the real censors are not the paragovernmental information regulators, but the authors whose books they disagree with.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship.
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