Stanford University says Internet Observatory, which engaged in election-time censorship, will stay open

The following is an excerpt from The College Fix.

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.” (Continued…)