‘Free Speech Wins’: Jim Jordan Celebrates Reported Shuttering of Stanford ‘Misinformation’ Research Center

The Stanford Internet Observatory, a group that studies so-called online misinformation and was the subject of congressional investigations into government censorship of Americans, is effectively closing down, according to media reports.

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 reports.

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.

“This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefitted one side of the political aisle: true information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors,” the report reads. 

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.

Meanwhile, the observatory ran low on funds after time-limited grants from the Hewlett Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and others came to an end, according to the Washington Post, while the censorship-related controversy surrounding the center seemed to prevent Stanford from stepping in to come to its aid.

“Free speech wins again! Great work from @Weaponization for shining a light on the censorship regime,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) wrote in a post on X responding to Platformer‘s report that the observatory is being dismantled.

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.

National Review has reached out to Stanford for comment.

Meanwhile the two lawsuits involving the observatory are still making their way through the courts.

America First Legal, a nonprofit led by former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the observatory in May 2023.

“This case challenges probably the largest mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program in American history—the so-called ‘Election Integrity Partnership’ [EIP] and ‘Virality Project,’” the nearly 90-page complaint says. “Four entities—Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab—collaborate closely with federal, state and local government officials to monitor and censor disfavored viewpoints on social media.”

The observatory is also mentioned in a lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri accusing the Biden administration and federal agencies of colluding with platforms to suppress users’ free speech.

The two states allege in their suit that several Biden administration agencies, including the State Department and DHS, suppressed online speech about the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election, the lab-leak theory about the global pandemic, the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, and election integrity in 2020. All these claims and more were deemed misinformation, and in some cases disinformation, at the time.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently hearing the case, Missouri v. Biden, and is expected to issue a ruling in the case in the next several weeks.