How Constitutional Liberties Moved Into Hidden Algorithms | Jacob Siegel
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
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Summary
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There are few people who understand the machinery behind modern disinformation and censorship better than Jacob Siegel. He’s a special features editor at Tablet Magazine and author of the new book “The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control.”
In this episode, we trace the origins of modern information control, from President Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda office during World War I and President Barack Obama’s “whole-of-society” framework, to the policing of information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He breaks down how government agencies, major tech platforms, and large nonprofits can work together behind the scenes to control who gets to speak and who does not, and what ideas are expressed and which are obscured.
“If you can control the information, you can control the society,” Siegel said. And the digital age makes this possible to a degree never reached before, he added.
So, how has this transformed our society and our liberties?
“The principles of the constitutional order, the principles of the liberal nation state have begun to be profoundly eroded by this new kind of information-based political regime,” Siegel said.
“Those rights are relocated into the digital code, so the question of who can speak, who can express their ideas, is no longer clearly defined and delimited by these print-era documents. Now it becomes a question of who controls the digital code.”
According to Siegel, the transition to the digital era has resulted in a vast “sweeping away of previously existing local organizations [and] civic organizations.” And more recently, we have been witnessing, whether we are aware of it or not, what he calls the “vast acceleration of the erasure of core remnants of civil society.”
So how do we navigate this new digital arena, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What does it mean to ensure that people get the right information |
| 0:04.0 | other than to be the one who dictates what information it is that they receive? |
| 0:09.0 | There are few people who understand the machinery behind disinformation |
| 0:13.0 | and modern censorship better than Jacob Siegel. |
| 0:16.0 | He's the special features editor at Tablet Magazine. |
| 0:20.0 | People need to understand that the birth of the digital age is going to be an unbelievably volatile and disruptive event that could last for another century and perhaps even longer. |
| 0:35.6 | His recent book is titled The Information State, Politics in the |
| 0:40.0 | Age of Total Control. The problem with these organizations is that while they have the |
| 0:44.8 | appearance of neutral civic organizations, they're actually highly partisan and integral to this |
| 0:52.5 | ruling party coordination. |
| 0:55.6 | This is really astonishing. |
| 1:03.6 | The more freedom people are incentivized to give away by the promise of convenience, |
| 1:13.6 | optimization, automation of wealth, the more likely they are to see the remaining freedom has diminished in value. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellock. |
| 1:16.6 | Jacob Siegel, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. |
| 1:21.6 | Yeah, and it's great to be back with you. |
| 1:23.6 | Let's start here. |
| 1:25.6 | So you describe a whole-of-soci society approach that fused government, tech platforms, |
| 1:32.3 | NGOs, academia, into a permanent, well, quasi-permanent disinformation fighting apparatus. |
| 1:41.3 | How did something that started as essentially counterterrorism efforts, |
| 1:47.0 | you argue, turn into something like this? |
| 1:51.0 | So this concept of the whole of society actually begins in the world of developmental organizations |
| 1:58.0 | like the United Nations, where it's used to refer to kind of breakneck |
... |
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