The status of Stanford University’s controversial Internet Observatory, a research group accused of participating in social media censorship, appears unclear after recent conflicting reports about its future.
A recent report by the tech newsletter Platformer suggested the observatory may be closing after several key staffers, including founding director Alex Stamos, left or did not have their contracts renewed.
Other news outlets reported the observatory was “collaps[ing] under pressure,” being “wound down” and “closing.” Some popular social media posts suggested it was being permanently “shut down.”
However, the university contradicted those reports in a recent statement on the observatory’s website.
“Stanford has not shut down or dismantled SIO as a result of outside pressure,” it stated. “SIO does, however, face funding challenges as its founding grants will soon be exhausted. As a result, SIO continues to actively seek support for its research and teaching programs under new leadership.”
SIO will continue its “critical work” through the “publication of the Journal of Online Trust & Safety, the Trust & Safety Research Conference, and the Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium,” it stated.
Furthermore, the observatory’s staff will be conducting research on “misinformation” during the 2024 election, according to the statement.
The observatory is a non-partisan, on-campus political research group that focuses on the misuse of social media, including issues related to elections and COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, according to its website.
But it has faced criticism for its role in a joint project called the Election Integrity Partnership with the University of Washington during the 2020 and 2022 elections. Its purpose was to “defend our elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment.” However, reports allege the universities frequently collaborated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in order to censor what they viewed as “misinformation” online.
According to the Stanford’s recent statement, its SIO project will continue under new leadership. It also stated “Stanford remains deeply concerned” about congressional and legal efforts to “undermine” the legitimacy of “much needed academic research” at universities across the country.
University spokesperson Mara Vandlik directed The College Fix to the statement in an email Wednesday in response to multiple inquiries about the observatory’s future. Vandlik did not respond to a follow-up email asking for more details about the observatory’s 2024 election research and the online censorship accusations.
Meanwhile, a receptionist at the university president’s office told The Fix on Wednesday to send its questions via email, but the office did not respond to the email.
Matt Taibbi, who has written extensively about online censorship as the publisher of Racket News, said he would not be “too quick to celebrate” if the Stanford Internet Observatory truly is closing.
“Rumors persist that even more aggressive EIP-type programs are in development for use in this cycle, perhaps not under Stanford’s roof, but somewhere, using some of the same personnel and making use of support from deep-pocketed funders of anti-disinformation programs,” he wrote in a recent article on his substack.
Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project and former chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, said he also thinks censorship problems are more wide-spread.
“College campuses are the central battlefield for Americans’ freedom to speak their mind. A culture of censorship is pervasive at college campuses, and there’s no reason to believe this was an isolated incident,” he told The Fix in a statement via email this week.
According to a Real Clear Investigations report, the Election Integrity Partnership “surveilled hundreds of millions of social media posts and collected from the cooperating government and non-governmental entities that it calls its ‘stakeholders.’” According to the report, this could be a potential violation of “social media platforms’ policies concerning election speech.”
Team members of the partnership would “highlight a piece of offending social media content, or narrative consisting of many offending posts, by creating a ticket, and share it with other relevant participants by tagging them,” according to the report.
This would then prompt social media companies to take action by “removing the content outright, reducing its spread, or ‘informing’ users about dubious posts by slapping corrective or contextualizing labels on them,” the report states.
During the 2020 election cycle, “EIP generated a total of 639 tickets, covering some 4,784 unique URLs … disproportionately related to the delegitimization of election results,” according to the report.
Platforms such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook responded to tagged tickets at a response rate of 75 percent or higher; the platforms “labeled, removed, or soft-blocked” 35 percent of the URLs shared through EIP, the report states.
Taibbi wrote the EIP scheme occurred on as many as 10 different platforms, including Twitter, now known as X. However, Stanford has outright denied its actions of “switchboarding” and “censorship,” he wrote.
According to Taibbi, Stanford also wrongly claimed the Election Integrity Partnership did not “receive direct requests from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to eliminate or censor tweets” and “did not make recommendations to the platforms about what actions they should take.”
According to Taibbi, a U.S. House committee investigation, led by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, found 75 instances of the EIP ticketing system specifically using the words “recommendation” or “we recommend.”
“Imagine the arrogance of denying that one makes concrete recommendations while sitting on a pile of documents doing exactly that,” Taibbi wrote.
“As for not receiving direct requests to eliminate or censor tweets,” he wrote, “a combination of emails Jordan’s team dug up and documents we ourselves either had in the Twitter Files or obtained via FOIA made it clear that the EIP’s labyrinthine reporting system was designed so the government could deny it originated complaints, while EIP could deny it received complaints from the government.”
Moreover, Taibbi wrote EIP’s opinion on removing content had a large effect on whether a social media platform decided to remove the content.
The EIP even allegedly “chastised sites like YouTube that expressed hesitancy about removing ‘misleading’ content,” according to Taibbi.
Additionally, the observatory is being sued. One case accuses the university of “conspiracy” with the federal government to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users, The Fix reported.
