Alex Stamos, former director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, during testimony to Congress in 2014. The research team led by Stamos came under fire from Republicans, who claimed their research amounted to censorship.
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The Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent research group at Stanford University that studies how social media platforms are misused, has lost its top leadership and faces an uncertain future amid a sustained right-wing campaign that aims to study lies on the Internet.
SIO’s founding director, Alex Stamos, left his post in November. In recent weeks, the university did not renew the contract of Renée DiResta, the group’s research manager, along with other employees. The remaining staff have been told to look for other jobs, according to tech newsletter Platformer, which first reported the news.
SIO was founded five years ago as an interdisciplinary program that examines some of the sharpest issues raised by the proliferation of the Internet, including how social networks like Instagram are used to exploit children and spread false and misleading information about elections. . and vaccines.
But in the past year, the work of researchers at SIO and other institutions that study viral hoaxes and their impact on democracy have become the focus of scrutiny from Republicans in the courts and in Congress, who claim their work amounts to censorship.
The Election Integrity Partnership, a joint SIO project run with the University of Washington to track false and misleading information about the 2020 and 2022 elections, became the focus of conspiracy theories that it was a front for the government to suppress speech that he didn’t like. . (The EIP website was updated in recent weeks to say it “will not run in the 2024 or future elections.”)
As a result, researchers at Stanford, UW and other institutions have been hit with lawsuits, inundated with subpoenas and requests for documents, and subjected to online harassment and attacks.
That has added up to millions of dollars in legal fees and significant amounts of time responding to congressional questions and lawsuits, which researchers say has been a distraction from their core work. Washington Post reported on Friday that the SIO has struggled to raise money to continue funding its work in an increasingly hostile climate.
In response to news of the SIO’s withdrawal, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has led efforts to discredit the researchers through his chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee, tweeted on X on Friday: “Free speech wins again!” and accused the SIO of being part of the “censorship regime”.
Stanford University took issue with the idea that the SIO is being dismantled.
“SIO’s important work continues under new leadership, including its critical work on child safety and other online harm, its publication of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, the Trust and Safety Research Conference and the Consortium of Teaching Trust and Security.” university spokesman Dee Mostofi said in a statement. “Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, that chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much-needed academic research — both at Stanford and around the world.”
SIO staff, including Stamos and DiResta, have been targeted by the Jordanian Subcommittee on Armaments of the Federal Government, which alleges that government agencies, technology companies and academics colluded to unconstitutionally shut down conservative speech — an allegation that the accused parties deny it. In addition, Stamos and DiResta are named in an ongoing private lawsuit filed by America First Legal, an organization run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
The SIO and other academic research groups were also initially named in a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana making similar allegations of collusion. The researchers have since been removed from that case, which the Supreme Court is expected to rule on in the coming weeks.
“The politically motivated attacks on our research on elections and vaccines have no merit, and the efforts of partisan House committee chairs to suppress research protected by the First Amendment is a prime example of government weaponization,” Stamos and DiResta said in the a first statement. given Platformer.
“We are grateful to Stanford for defending our work, including before the US Supreme Court, and we are confident that the court system will ultimately act to protect our speech and the speech of other academics,” they wrote. “We hope that Stanford will be willing to support the rest of the SIO team and serve as a safe house for future research into how the Internet is being used to inflict harm against individuals and our democracy.”
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