Trump’s Censorship Campaign Draws on Decades of Infrastructure Built by Big Tech
“It’s a chilling feeling,” Tariq explains to me. “Here at Yale, immigration authorities have revoked at least four students’ visas so far.”
Tariq Khan is an interdisciplinary historian and lecturer at Yale University. “A lot of students are scared,” he explains. “I have international students in my classes. They’re really worried that their visas might be revoked. The Trump administration’s strategy has been to create uncertainty and fear. They want to traumatize people and put people in a state of anxiety.”
Tariq has lost his own job due to budgeting uncertainty provoked by the Trump administration’s funding cuts, but has been hired temporarily in another department for the next academic year. “I teach exactly the things the MAGA far right doesn’t want, relating to race and class and gender.”
Trump has sent ultimatums to Columbia and Harvard; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is revoking visas and hunting down students for protesting genocide; and Elon Musk’s DOGE team has created lists of prohibited words that federal agencies and funding recipients are forced to abide by.
As sudden as the onslaught may feel, the right has been developing these tactics and infrastructures over the last two decades, creating the necessary balance to coordinate between neo-Nazis in the streets, far right trolls on the internet, tech billionaires and conservative policymakers.
Scholars Targeted for Harassment by the Right
In 2005, Yale University denied tenure to David Graeber, a renowned anthropologist as well as a widely read anarchist author who would go on to help organize Occupy Wall Street. He and others allege the decision was politically motivated. Despite a stellar academic record, he was unable to find further employment with any American university.
In 2007, right-wing activist Alan Dershowitz spearheaded a smear campaign to block Norman Finkelstein from receiving tenure at DePaul University. Dershowitz was a Harvard law professor who would go on to defend Trump, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Finkelstein, the target of the smear campaign, is the son of Holocaust survivors and a fierce critic of Israeli apartheid. His department voted overwhelmingly in favor of his tenure, but university leadership blocked it. They did the same to Mehrene Larudee, another Jewish professor critical of the Israeli occupation.
In 2014, the respected Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita had his professorship abruptly cancelled by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) following pressure from “major donors.” He subsequently found himself unemployable by any university in the U.S.
Salaita — who is best known for his books on anti-Arab racism and on similarities between Palestinian and Native American experiences — warned at the time that “the University’s decision has farther reaching implications.” His words proved prophetic.
The far right became emboldened during the first Trump administration. In 2018, at the University of Illinois, an “alt-right” group stepped up their censorship campaign so much that faculty members compared them to an occupying army. Tariq Khan, then a grad student at UIUC, was forced to leave his studies and his job after a racist and Islamophobic harassment campaign culminated with right-wingers showing up outside his house and threatening his family, including his three young children.
Nazis in the Streets
The full dimensions of the right-wing onslaught, however, cannot be perceived if we focus solely on the universities or any other institution. The right is pursuing an aggressive reorganization of our society, and that requires not only a change in discourse but also an accelerated capacity for action in pursuit of their agenda. The right-wingers are not satisfied with mainstreaming racism and anti-immigrant bigotry and pushing the Democrats into increasingly extreme pro-deportation stances. They realized that more dramatic repression was necessary to achieve their goal, given the fact that spontaneous popular uprisings can block the ability of the government to deport people, as occurred in 2017.
And since 2016, when the risk-taking and organizing of anarchists and other antifascists stopped the neo-Nazi rampage in Charlottesville, right-wingers have mostly been losing in the streets. In order to exert the kind of power they crave, they would need to move porously between institutions and outside of them, to capture institutions or destroy them.
How could they build up a capacity for coordination without any clear game plan, with little centralization or unity across the right, and with a Republican Party characterized only by opportunism and obsequiousness?
Eventually, the right’s critical victories came in the virtual space of social media, a toxic terrain that advantages alienation over solidarity, where tech billionaires enjoy an almost absolute power to shape the landscape and federal prosecutors have substantial latitude to punish or censor those they deem enemies of the state.
Even on the left, few will acknowledge that the ability to coordinate punitive action between government and extrajudicial forces in pursuit of a conservative agenda emerged in campaigns of repression against autonomous sex workers.
Sex Workers and Anarchists on the Front Lines
To better understand how the criminalization of sex workers was a key part of the right-wing drive to violently reorganize society, I reach out to Red, an organizer with The Support Ho(s)e Collective, a countrywide collective that organizes support “for all sex workers through political education and public agitation.” Our conversation begins with a shared understanding that the internet offered an important space for many sex workers — a space that enabled workers to screen clients and share information about those who had acted harmfully or disrespectfully in the past, and also a space that created many more opportunities for sex workers to work without bosses, allowing them to keep all or most of their money. In describing the online repression that sex workers have faced in the past two decades, Red enumerates the raids, prosecutions and policy changes that occurred in 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2015, each time leading to the loss of access to a site that enabled sex workers to find some measure of safety, community and autonomy. Things got significantly worse in 2018, the year SESTA/FOSTA was updated into a single law to ramp up prosecution and persecution of sex workers. Conflating sex work with sex trafficking, SESTA/FOSTA was supported by Republicans and many Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, and the law was justified with much of the same rhetoric being used to target trans women today: politicians and pundits said it was needed to protect women and to protect children.
“Sex workers have always been at the forefront of social and liberation movements,” Red tells me. “However, our movements toward decrim, harm reduction, unionization and anti-stigma campaigns often go unsupported by the broader Left.” Specifically, Red calls out “carceral feminists” (including trans-exclusionary radical feminists and sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists) “who were willing to dox us, call cops on us, out us in community organizing meetings, raise money for law enforcement exit programs. … It felt like a soul-killing.”
Similarly, there were failures on the left to mobilize in protection of those most targeted when the far right pushed some of the most visible anarchists and other antifascists off social media.
A site administrator for the anarchist news site It’s Going Down was part of the anarchist media community that was targeted by a broad spectrum of right-wing forces, from far right trolls like Andy Ngo to tech billionaires like Elon Musk.
The site administrator, who asked to be identified by the pseudonym of Tom to protect himself against retaliation from both far right paramilitaries and Justice Department subpoenas, tells me: “We had over 100,000 subscribers” in 2020. He adds that CrimethInc, another anarchist news site, “had similar numbers.” He said taken together, the two sites had “higher degrees of engagement and reach than other accounts of our size.”
In 2020, It’s Going Down and CrimethInc were the largest anarchist sites on Facebook and Twitter and were serving as important bulwarks against accelerating fascist discourses on the web.
“The difference between mainstream media and us is that we would say things that were more militant, more radical, but we were both doing reporting and commentary,” Tom told me. “We’re writing cited articles, putting out podcasts, interviewing people from all over the world.”
Social media companies were facing a public image crisis with the unchecked spread of misinformation by the far right. In response, Facebook decided to equate fascists and antifascists by spinning the situation as a question of “balance.” Facebook leadership brought in Joel Kaplan, then their vice president of Global Public Policy. Tom notes that Kaplan “came from the rightwing think tank world in DC.” At Facebook, he made a name for himself by fighting to allow racist content and the mass dissemination of fake news, since banning such content would disproportionately hurt conservatives.
“When Facebook was under a bunch of pressure to ban the militias and Proud Boy groups, Kaplan made the argument that they needed to ban us and CrimethInc under the pretense that we were also armed groups, when we are actually publishing collectives” Tom explains.
In 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now known as X) and immediately reinstated tens of thousands of fascist and white supremacist accounts while banning CrimethInc, It’s Going Down and other antifascist accounts like the John Brown Gun Club. Musk branded himself a “free speech absolutist,” and mainstream media like The New York Times helped spread this inaccurate moniker.
According to Tom, mainstream media at the time were still taking Musk at face value, but “in radical tech and hacker circles the narrative was that Musk had bought Twitter to shape political discourse in the same way that the Hearsts used newspapers in the early 20th century.” He adds: “What Musk does is curating content so that certain types of things surface. Getting rid of us was part of that.”
Social justice-oriented media sites like Truthout and The Intercept reported with alarm about the purging of the anarchist sites, as did some corporate media.
Indeed, many professional journalists “got furious about it,” noting that “the idea that we would face retaliation for doing media was a violation of basic journalistic principles,” Tom says.
However, without a strong movement in the streets, reporting on censorship wasn’t enough to stop the purging of these anarchist news sites. Facebook and X quickly became megaphones and recruitment centers for the most harmful far right ideologies. Moderators stood back as far right accounts grew larger and larger, making death threats, celebrating acts of genocide, spreading misinformation and coordinating campaigns of censorship.
Pro-Israel Censorship Deepens
More recent assaults by the far right have shown greater agility and mobilizing power than its past efforts — these days, the right is acting quickly to simultaneously censor critics, capture or silence institutions of power, spread oppressive ideologies and enable real world harm.
The right’s campaigns against the professors Lara Sheehi and Rupa Marya are illustrative. In both cases, a smattering of right-wing online accounts and well-funded pressure groups generated a spectacle of outrage and controversy, accusing the professors of discrimination and antisemitism. Then corporate media outlets and politicians disseminated the accusations further. People on the right treated the accusations as fact, and people in the liberal center treated them as credible allegations, despite an absence of evidence or thorough reports debunking the accusations. Universities have colluded with these campaigns either by taking disciplinary action against the person being targeted, or by failing to protect their employees from harassment and slander, and giving “legitimacy to prejudicial, frivolous, and defamatory claims.”
Lara Sheehi is a queer Lebanese Arab scholar as well as a decolonial and trans-affirming clinical psychologist. In the fall of 2022, she was a professor at George Washington University (GWU) when a student made a claim of antisemitism against her. She was “cleared by her program and the dean,” but that was only the beginning.
She describes to me how she has been subjected to “a massive right-wing smear campaign, with racist hate mail, death threats, threats of bodily harm, sexual assault and deportation” and celebrations of genocide sent to her address, personal and public emails, and social media accounts.
“Things reached a fever pitch when Fox News picked up the story, publishing a hit piece on me pairing my face with Islamic Jihad,” Sheehi says. “Every time a hit piece like this was published, there would be an uptick in hate mail.”
After over a year of intense harassment that resulted in stalking, the cancellation of multiple speaking events, and police interrogations when coming back from international travel, she left the university. In January 2025, the Department of Education exonerated Sheehi of any discriminatory acts, but the campaign of censorship and retaliation — a campaign in support of Israel’s ongoing genocide — had already won.
Rupa Marya, an anticolonial author and professor of medicine, was targeted after raising a question of medical ethics: should medical schools admit possible war criminals with no vetting? In September 2024, UCSF suspended her after a lengthy campaign of harassment, and she now faces possible job loss. Multiple other nurses and physicians at UCSF have been suspended or prevented from giving lectures after mentioning the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which includes the deliberate targeting of Palestinian health care workers and hospitals.
Incidentally, the University of California’s top donor is the right-wing Helen Diller Family Foundation; the Diller family owns a major real estate company responsible for gentrifying San Francisco and supports illegal Israeli settlements that commit ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.
What Rupa describes is systematic censorship and complicity across the medical profession:
White people are using Title VI protection to silence people of color speaking out against a genocide. Physicians have abdicated their professional moral duties and ethical responsibilities to give cover for the most egregious expressions of racism. They state I’m ‘unprofessional’ and unable to tolerate a difference of opinion. When it comes to genocide, to physicians being tortured and children being burned alive in hospital beds with the support of our taxes, they are right.
Politicians like Scott Wiener, organizations like Canary Mission that spread dossiers targeting activists (oftentimes with distorted facts) to mobilize right-wing trolls, propaganda organizations funded by the Israeli government like StandWithUs, and a dense web of investment and endowments force institutions putatively centered on education and on health care into complicity in genocide. When those institutions and the media treat spurious accusations as potentially credible, they help push the Overton Window to the right.
Simultaneously, movements that try to build the kind of collective power capable of creating an effective change are repressed. GWU “falsely accused” Palestinian students and supporters “of committing crimes,” subjected them to disproportionate investigations by campus police and subjected them to “months-long disciplinary processes for infractions” they had not committed, according to a complaint filed by Palestine Legal.
Sam — a student from Indiana University, who also asked to be given a pseudonym for this article — describes to me the coordinated repression of the pro-Palestine encampments of 2024: Right-wing Zionist groups doxxed student participants; new laws and policies restricted the right to assemble and protest; counterprotesters shouted insults, blasted loud music and interrupted a Shabbat ceremony; and on two occasions in April 2024 “militarized state troopers in riot gear took down the encampments, maced students and arrested 56 protesters, including students, faculty and community members,” Sam recalls.
We can see the same pattern of complicity between police and paramilitaries across the country. In January 2024 at Columbia, counterprotesters (allegedly including former IDF soldiers) attacked a solidarity encampment with noxious chemicals, hospitalizing eight students. The same counterprotesters showed up to cheer on city police as they evicted the encampment and arrested around a hundred students in April, and the university administration participated in the repression by suspending two anti-occupation groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. At UCLA on April 30, 2024, a Zionist mob attacked a pro-Palestine encampment, beating people with poles and spraying them with bear mace, injuring 150 and sending at least 25 to the emergency room. All the while, police stood by and watched. Two days later, cops attacked the protest with rubber bullets, arresting 110 people and evicting the encampment.
Though the use of this machinery of repression is currently particularly glaring in the crackdown against the movement against the genocide in Gaza, the right is also using this same machinery to attack trans people, immigrants, pregnant people, Black people, anti-capitalists and anti-fascists.
The far right went through a long process of trial and error to build up the power necessary to aggressively reshape U.S. society. When right-wing forces were unable to effectively mobilize in the streets due to fierce resistance, the internet — and social media in particular — became their staging ground. Their dominance was aided by right-wing tech billionaires like Elon Musk and right-wing policymakers like Joel Kaplan, and ensured by the opportunism and acquiescence of unscrupulous tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
“Every capitulation and act of appeasement only emboldens them more,” Tariq Khan concludes. “The only thing that will stop them is resistance.”