“We’re not going to use the internet as a platform to censorship,” Alex Stamos, former director of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, said in congressional testimony in 2014. Stamos and his research team have been criticized by Republican lawmakers for their work amounting to censorship.
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The Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent research group at Stanford University that studies the misuse of social media platforms, has lost its top leadership and faces an uncertain future amid an ongoing right-wing campaign targeting its research for online lies.
SIO’s founding director, Alex Stamos, resigned in November, and in recent weeks the university did not renew the contracts of the group’s research manager, René DiResta, and other staff. The remaining staff have been told to look for other work, according to tech newsletter Platformer, which first reported the news.
SIO was founded five years ago as a multidisciplinary program to look at some of the troubling problems arising from the rise of the internet, including how social networks like Instagram are being used to exploit children and the spread of false and misleading information about elections and vaccines.
But over the past year, studies by researchers at SIO and other institutions about viral disinformation and its impact on democracy have become the focus of scrutiny from Republicans in the courts and Congress, who argue their work amounts to censorship.
The Election Integrity Partnership, a project run by SIO in collaboration with the University of Washington to track false and misleading information about the 2020 and 2022 elections, has become the focus of conspiracy theories that it is a front for the government to suppress speech it doesn’t like.
As a result, researchers at Stanford University, the University of Washington, and other institutions have been hit with lawsuits, subpoenas and document requests, and online harassment and attacks.
The result has been millions of dollars in legal fees and a significant amount of time spent responding to congressional investigations and lawsuits that researchers say distracts from their core work. The Washington Post On Friday, the SIO reported it was struggling to raise funds to continue its operations in an increasingly hostile environment.
Following news of SIO’s withdrawal, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has been at the forefront of the campaign to discredit the researchers, posted on X on Friday that “free speech has won again!” and accused SIO of being part of a “censorship regime.”
Stanford University opposed the idea of the SIO being dismantled.
“The SIO’s important work will continue under new leadership, including its important research on child safety and other online harms, its journal on online trust and safety, its Trust and Safety Research Conference and its Trust and Safety Education Consortium,” university spokesperson Dee Mostofi said in a statement. “Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, to stifle research freedom and undermine legitimate and much-needed scholarly work at Stanford and across academia.”
Stamos, DiResta and other SIO staffers have been targeted by Jordan’s subcommittee on federal weaponization, which has alleged that government agencies, technology companies and academics conspired to unconstitutionally silence conservative speech — allegations the defense denies. Additionally, Stamos and DiResta have been named in an ongoing civil lawsuit brought by America First Legal, a group run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
SIO and other academic research groups were initially named in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration alleging similar conspiracy. The researchers have since been removed from the case, which the Supreme Court is expected to rule on in the coming weeks.
“The politically motivated attacks on our election and vaccine research are baseless, and the attempts by partisan House committee chairs to suppress First Amendment-protected research is a classic example of government weaponization,” Stamos and DiResta said in a statement first provided to the platform.
“We are grateful that Stanford has defended our work before the U.S. Supreme Court and are confident that the judicial system will ultimately act to protect our speech and that of other scholars,” they wrote. “We look forward to Stanford supporting the remaining members of the SIO team and providing a safe home for future research into how the internet is being used to harm individuals and democracy.”
