University says initiative will proceed studies on 2024 vote ‘ misinformation’ ,
The position of Stanford University’s questionable Internet Observatory, a study group accused of participating in social media repression, appears vague after new conflicting information about its potential.
The centre may be closing after some key staff members, including foundation producer Alex Stamos, left or did not have their arrangements renewed, according to a recent report from the technical publication Platformer.
Other news outlets reported the observatory was” collaps]ing ] under pressure”, being “wound down” and” closing”. It was being forever” opened down,” according to some well-known social media posts.
However, the school contradicted those accounts in a new speech on the observatory’s website.
” Stanford has never shut down or dismantled SIO as a result of outside force”, it stated. “SIO does, nonetheless, face funding problems as its founding offers will soon be exhausted. So, under new leadership, SIO continues to earnestly seek funding for its research and teaching plans.
SIO will remain 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.
However, the observatory’s employees will be conducting research on “misinformation” during the 2024 vote, according to the statement.
The centre is a non-partisan, on-campus social study group that focuses on the use of social advertising, including issues related to elections and COVID-19 vaccine propaganda, according to its site.
However, it has received criticism for its involvement in the University of Washington’s participation in a joint project called the Election Integrity Partnership during the elections of 2020 and 2022. Its goal was to “defend our elections against those who seek to derail them by exploiting flaws 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.
In response to numerous inquiries regarding the observatory’s future, university spokesman Mara Vandlik sent an email to The College Fix on Wednesday. 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.
As publisher of Racket News, Matt Taibbi has written extensively about online censorship, and he said he would not be” too quick to celebrate” if the Stanford Internet Observatory were to come true.
” 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, the founder and president of the Article III Project and former chief counsel for Chuck Grassley’s confirmation of his position, added that he believes censorship issues are more prevalent.
College campuses are the main battlefields for Americans ‘ right to voice their opinions. There is no reason to believe this was an isolated incident, he told The Fix in a statement via email this week.” A culture of censorship is pervasive on college campuses, and there’s no reason to believe this was an isolated incident.
MORE: Universities receive$ 3 million from the government after assisting in the government’s censorship of election integrity stories
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 a report from Real Clear Investigations. This could be a potential violation of” social media platforms ‘ policies regarding election speech,” according to the report.
According to the report, 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.”
Social media companies would respond by “removing the content outright, reducing its spread, or “informing” users about dubious posts by putting corrective or contextualizing labels on them,” according to the report.
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 falsely claimed Stanford that 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 conceit of denying that one can make strong recommendations while perched on a stack of documents, Taibi wrote.
According to him,” 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.”” As opposed to not receiving direct requests to eliminate or censor tweets,” he wrote.
Additionally, Taibbi wrote that EIP’s opinion on removing content had a significant impact on whether a social media platform chose to remove the content.
According to Taibi, the EIP even allegedly” chastised” websites like YouTube that” expressed reluctance to remove’misleading’ content.”
Additionally, the observatory is being sued. According to The Fix, one case involves a university’s” conspiracy” with the federal government that violates the First Amendment.
MORE: Homeland Security is at the center of thousands of election social media posts.
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