The weaponization committee claims the State Department ‘outsourced’ its social-media censorship operations to Stanford researchers.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan is demanding that the Stanford Internet Observatory turn over all information related to a congressional subpoena before its expected closure.
In a letter to the observatory’s attorney on Monday, obtained exclusively by National Review, Jordan says the committee still expects SIO to comply with an ongoing subpoena despite media reports that the center, which studies so-called online misinformation, is effectively closing down.
In a report released in November, the House Judiciary Committee and its Weaponization Select Subcommittee found that researchers working for a partnership between the observatory and the University of Washington — the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — had worked with federal officials and social-media companies to violate the free-speech rights of conservatives.
Now, new reporting from Platformer and the Washington Post indicates that Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center will absorb what remains of the observatory, which was founded five years ago by former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos and currently employs just three staffers.
The observatory has cost Stanford millions of dollars in legal fees defending it against a pair of lawsuits and two congressional investigations, the Washington Post previously reported.
In response to news of the center’s closure, Jordan writes attorney John Bellinger reminding the observatory that the committee issued a subpoena to Stanford University in April 2023 that remains ongoing.
The Republican-led weaponization committee previously alleged that the State Department had “outsourced” its social-media censorship operations ahead of the 2020 election to researchers at the EIP. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) worked with EIP to “monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election” on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook under the guise of protecting election integrity, according to the committee’s report.
After House Republicans threatened to subpoena Stanford, the university turned over private EIP documents that showed that social-media platforms routinely censored factual information, jokes, satire, and political opinions under pressure from the federal government and universities.
The project was allegedly involved in censorship around Covid-19 and U.S. elections.
Federal officials would submit misinformation reports, which EIP researchers would review and then use to compile a list of offending posts to submit to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other major social-media platforms. The researchers would then advise the platforms on how best to censor the posts. Examples include “reducing the posts’ ‘discoverability,’ ‘suspending [an account’s] ability to continue tweeting for 12 hours,’ ‘monitoring if any of the tagged influencer accounts retweet’ a particular user, and . . . removing thousands of Americans’ posts.”
Now, the EIP has updated its Web page to say its work concluded with the 2022 election, and it will not be working on the 2024 election or other future races.
But in a statement to the outlet, Stanford University spokeswoman Dee Mostofi refuted the reporting that the observatory is closing, saying instead that much of the work it was doing will continue under new leadership, “including its critical work on child safety and other online harms, its publication of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, the Trust and Safety Research Conference, and the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium.”
“Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, that chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much needed academic research — both at Stanford and across academia,” Mostofi added.
Platformer reported that “remnants of the SIO will be reconstituted” and that some of its work would be continued by another program within Stanford.
In his letter on Monday, Jordan expresses concern over SIO’s continued operation in any form.
“Given the SIO’s role in the censorship of Americans in the lead-up to the 2020 election, and your client’s repeated false and/or misleading statements to the Committee and the Select Subcommittee, we remain concerned about what actions the SIO or its ‘remnants’ will take in the lead-up to the 2024 election that are antithetical to the First Amendment and Americans’ right to free expression,” he writes in the letter.
Jordan notes that the subpoena is “continuing in nature” and that the subpoena makes clear that “relevant documents and information related to the SIO—and its ‘successors’—are within the scope of the subpoena.”
Jordan gives SIO a deadline of July 1 to provide a written response to several questions, including, “Will the SIO, any successor to the SIO, or any other entity within Stanford University participate or otherwise support the Election Integrity Partnership?” and “Will the SIO, any successor to the SIO, or any other entity within Stanford University participate or otherwise support any monitoring, analysis, or research of Americans’ election-related speech in the lead-up to the 2024 election?”
Other questions include whether the SIO, its successor, or any other entity at the university “work with, or intend to work with, any part of the Executive Branch, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Global Engagement Center, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force, regarding election-related speech online?” and whether those entities work with or intend to work with any social-media or technology companies regarding the monitoring or moderation of Americans’ election-related speech online?
Finally, Jordan asks whether any of the aforementioned entities will provide recommendations to social-media or technology companies to remove or otherwise censor Americans’ election-related speech in the lead-up to the 2024 election?