To the editors:
On March 31, The Free Press published an article by Jacob Siegel accusing “people” of trying to “censor” his book reviews. Your email newsletter to subscribers led with this story, calling it a “surreal” case in which a review of his book was “purged” from the magazine The Baffler after “a person mentioned in the text requested a correction.” Yet based on an email I received from the man who wrote the review in The Baffler, it was he who requested his own review be pulled—undermining the premise of the essay and the promotional email.
I was that person who requested a correction, and thus was falsely maligned for supposedly pursuing “censorship.” I requested a correction—only a correction—because Siegel’s book, The Information State, makes allegations about me and my work that appear to have led multiple reviewers to draw strikingly similar erroneous conclusions. A correction request in response to error is not censorship—it is counterspeech. Issuing a warranted correction is ethical journalism. The Washington Free Beacon, for example, issued a correction on the review published about the book, in line with its editorial standards. The Baffler chose to remove its review.
Siegel’s article implies that I was involved in The Baffler’s editorial decision to pull the review. I was not; it is my understanding that the reviewer himself asked that his review be taken down. This understanding is based on a private email which I did not feel comfortable forwarding to Siegel in response to the list of questions he emailed me, giving me 90 minutes to respond. I am disclosing this now only because Siegel’s public account in The Free Press unfairly shifted responsibility for the decision onto me, and I believe it’s important to correct the record: There was no plot to censor his book review.
Yet Siegel posted on X that “a figure connected to the U.S. government [pressured] a publication to remove its review of my book,” and the review was “censored the next day . . .apparently at the behest of Renée DiResta.”
The claims in his X posts are false. They’ve likely helped Siegel sell some books, at my expense. His promotion of his theory, and essay, certainly generated attacks. While it is true that I did “did not deny asking The Baffler to pull its review” in response to Siegel’s list of questions, I denied it repeatedly on social media, by phone, and via email to Free Press editors. No independent fact-checker contacted me before publication. (The essay now includes the following update as a parenthetical: “After publication, DiResta told The Free Press that she did not ask The Baffler to pull the review, but rather only requested a correction.”)
Siegel implies in his article that my fact-check requests are unwarranted, too. I’ve misinterpreted what he wrote, he suggests. I want to address that claim here as well, so readers understand what I requested be corrected.
Siegel spends multiple pages in his book building a character sketch of me as someone who “came to lead” what he calls “perhaps the largest censorship initiative in existence.” He is referring to my work with the Election Integrity Project, a nonpartisan coalition that tracked and occasionally flagged election rumors to platforms during the 2020 election. It was a project narrowly scoped to claims that sought to either mislead people about where or how to vote, or that tried to preemptively delegitimize the election results. He then describes the work that this supposed massive censorship machine did, leveraging innuendo strategically: Over a hundred EIP employees supposedly maintained round-the-clock coverage monitoring social media platforms, sending takedown requests that platforms acted on within the hour. In the next sentence, he drops a statistic: EIP “classified 21,897,364 tweets” as “misinformation incidents.”
Read in sequence, the implication is that this was the scale of some “censorship” operation. Some reviewers, and readers on X, have processed it that way, writing that EIP flagged or censored 22 million tweets. That never happened. Hence my correction requests.
Siegel knows that the 22 million figure actually describes a postelection dataset of the most viral rumors of the 2020 cycle. It was not a count of items flagged to platforms at all; that count was 4,800 URLs, including 2,890 tweets. Platforms ignored 65 percent of those, and removed approximately 10 percent. The rest were mostly labeled. I explained this to Siegel personally. Somehow, the smaller number and enforcement stats didn’t make it into the book.
In his Free Press article, Siegel argues he never said the EIP censored or flagged 22 million tweets. If so, he should have welcomed—or initiated—corrections in The Baffler’s, the Free Beacon’s, and the Brownstone Institute’s reviews himself. He should also have Henry Holt, his publisher, fix the manuscript. But the problem is, the number supports the “mass censorship” conspiracy theory. This is Schrödinger’s statistic: large enough to support claims of a massive censorship operation as innuendo, but something totally innocent when one presses for details.
The question discerning readers should ask is: If you knew EIP never flagged nor censored 22 million tweets, what exactly justifies calling EIP “perhaps the largest censorship initiative in existence”?
Siegel appears angry that the real person behind his fictionalized character is pushing back against errors and innuendo. So, he’s constructed a narrative in which corrective action is recast as proof of the conspiracy he alleges. If I ask for fixes, I am “suppressing” his work. If a publication—or a reviewer—independently decides the claims don’t hold up, that is the information state at work.
This is not a defense of free speech. It is immunity from scrutiny.
