CV NEWS FEED // After dedicating several years towards censoring “misinformation” online, the self described research center Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) is coming to an end.
Stanford University’s Alex Stamos founded SIO in 2019 at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. According to SIO’s website, the observatory is a partnership of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Law School.
Julia Steinberg, now a writer at the Free Press, recently wrote about her time working at SIO, explaining that the program came under scrutiny before its collapse.
Steinberg wrote that she initially thought working for SIO meant fighting back against misinformation on topics such as anorexia, which are sometimes glorified on social media.
“I was drawn to work at a place that promised to ‘learn about the abuse of the internet in real time, to develop a novel curriculum on trust and safety that is a first in computer science, and to translate our research discoveries into training and policy innovations for the public good,’” she wrote.
However, she mainly worked on the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an SIO project that operated during the 2020 and 2022 elections.
According to an interim report from the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the EIP “worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.”
The report continues: “Created in the summer of 2020 ‘at the request’ of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.”
In her article, Steinberg explained that EIP aimed “to identify so-called ‘fake news’ spreading on social media.”
Moderators at Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok often received notice of the posts the students flagged.
“(The moderators) took them down in order to quash dissenting viewpoints—viewpoints that sometimes ended up being right, as in the case of Covid likely being the result of a lab leak, or Hunter Biden’s hard drive being his actual hard drive—not Russian disinformation,” Steinberg explained.
Steinberg noted that journalists, the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and a legal case now at the Supreme Court, Murthy v. Missouri, have raised questions about SIO’s integrity.
Amid the pressure, SIO is set to close down and be “absorbed” by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, according to the Washington Post, which also reported: “Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda.”
However, SIO stated on June 17, “Stanford has not shut down or dismantled SIO as a result of outside pressure. SIO does, however, face funding challenges as its founding grants will soon be exhausted.”
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Author: McKenna Snow
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