The State Department promised proof of a censorship conspiracy. The plan backfired. Highlight

The debacle may show that the half-decade of unproven censorship claims has exhausted their audience.

“The under secretary is yet again twisting decontextualized snippets of emails and long-public documents to try to propagate a conspiracy theory,” said Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University. As the former research manager for the Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta has long been a boogeyman of the censorship-industrial complex theory.

“The mass censorship claims were a hoax,” DiResta said.