GOD COMPLEX: New Film Digs Into Origins Of Censorship Industrial Complex

In the digital age, censorship is the central tool of authoritarianism.

Sadly, that became the story in the United States, where an unholy alliance of government, social media platforms, and corporations conspired to control what information reached the American public.

That’s the story laid out in God Complex, a new documentary from Big Picture Originals that sheds light on the extent to which the censorship machine took hold of society.

The film, set to premiere on Thursday night, features testimony from experts such as Mike Benz, one of the leading crusaders against censorship, top journalists like John Solomon and Peter Schweizer, and Xi Van Fleet, who warns of the parallels between our current moment and the censorship effort in Mao’s China.

The film traces the beginning of the censorship effort to President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, in which he won by dominating social media and the digital space in a way that had never been seen before in politics. The response to his triumph was to control information in a way that had never been attempted before, by creating labels like “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

Those labels, the same labels used by despots like Joseph Stalin, would be leveled against political commentators and news outlets — including The Daily Wire — to control information. It was irresponsible, for example, to let Americans hear information about COVID-19 that may have been counter to what the government wanted them to believe. Or to let Big Tech companies serve Americans with news stories from outlets that were challenging these government narratives.

The Daily Wire has been at the forefront of the fight against what Benz calls the Censorship Industrial Complex. On many fronts, that complex is being torn down — at least temporarily.

In the wake of the 2024 election, Facebook announced that it would end all its censorship practices, which were pushed on it by the Biden administration and were leveled against The Daily Wire harder than anyone.

“In 2021, our impressions from my personal page, which was likely the most prominent page on Facebook, went from a whopping one billion impressions a month to less than 100 million impressions a month — a 90% reduction in impressions in reach,” Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro explained this year. “That was a deliberate move by Facebook to crush political content on the platform in 2021.”

YouTube, which not only suppressed videos but also kicked many off its platform entirely for misinformation, said it would no longer censor conservatives. Like Facebook, it said it was pressured to do so by the Biden administration. Twitter’s censorship became so bad that billionaire Elon Musk had to buy the platform and rebrand it as X.

The censorship regime also extended into the advertising industry, which colluded to keep ad dollars away from companies spreading so-called disinformation. It created the label “brand safety” and used it as another way to control speech.

Shapiro testified about the practice before Congress, and now that effort is on its deathbed as well.

The film argues that the book on the censorship industrial complex will never be closed. We are always one election away from another round of backdoor censorship attempts. We didn’t know Facebook was being pushed to censor conservatives, it’s worth mentioning, until years after it happened.

“Once you get into the business of having a government tell people what they can’t say, there’s almost never a case where that turns back,” Mike Benz said in an interview after the premiere.

The film premieres at 8 p.m. on Thursday.