Alex Stamos, the former director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, during his congressional testimony in 2014. The research team led by Stamos came under fire from Republicans, who said the research involved censorship.
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The Stanford Internet Observatory, a key research group at Stanford University that studies how social media platforms are abused, has lost its top leader and faces an uncertain future amid a persistent right-wing campaign targeting the study of online fakery.
SIO’s founding director, Alex Stamos, left his post in November. In recent weeks, the university has not renewed the contract of Renée DiResta, the group’s research manager, along with other staff. The remaining staff have been told to find other jobs, according to technology newsletter Platformer, which first reported the news.
SIO was founded five years ago as a cross-disciplinary program that studies some of the most difficult problems caused by the proliferation of the internet, including the way social networks such as Instagram are used to exploit children and the spread of false and misleading information about elections. and vaccines.
But in the past year, the work of researchers at the SIO and other institutions that study the fakeness of the virus and its impact on democracy has been the focus of scrutiny by Republicans in the courts and in Congress, who have declared their work to be censorship.
The Election Integrity Partnership, a joint project the SIO is doing with the University of Washington to track down false and confusing information about the 2020 and 2022 elections, is the focus of conspiracy theories that the government is trying to suppress unpopular speech. . (The EIP website was updated in recent weeks to say that it “will not be used 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 document requests, and subjected to online harassment and attacks.
That added up to millions of dollars in legal fees and a significant amount of time to respond to congressional inquiries and lawsuits, which researchers say has become a distraction from their core work. Washington Post it is reported that SIO has been struggling to raise money to continue funding the work in an increasingly hostile climate.
In response to the news of the resignation of the SIO, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has led the effort to destroy the researcher through the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, posted on X on Friday: “Free speech wins again!” and accused the SIO of being part of a “censorship regime.”
Stanford University rejected the idea that the SIO was dismantled.
“SIO’s important work continues under new leadership, including critical work on child safety and other online harm, the publication of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, the Trust and Safety Research Conference, and the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium,” university spokeswoman Dee Mostofi said in a statement. “Stanford remains concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, to stifle freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and necessary academic research — at Stanford and in academia.”
SIO staff, including Stamos and DiResta, have been targeted by the Jordanian Subcommittee on Federal Government Weapons, which says government agencies, tech companies, and academics have conspired to unconstitutionally shut down conservative speech – a claim the accused parties deny. In addition, Stamos and DiResta were named in a 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 lawsuits brought against the Biden administration by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana that made similar claims of collusion. Investigators have since been removed from the case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court in the coming weeks.
“The politically motivated attacks on our research on elections and vaccines are pointless, and the efforts by partisan House committee chairs to prevent research protected by the First Amendment is an important example of government weaponry,” Stamos and DiResta said in their first statement. given to the Platformer.
“We thank Stanford for defending our work, including before the US Supreme Court, and are confident that the justice system will finally act to protect our speech and the speech of other academics,” he wrote. “We hope Stanford is willing to support the rest of the SIO team and be a safe home for future research into how the internet is being used to harm individuals and our democracy.”
