After five years of targeting mainly conservatives on social media, Stanford’s internet “disinformation” research group is reportedly shutting down.
On fifteen social media platforms, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) was behind the censorship of true or debatable information about COVID-19, the mRNA vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the 2020 election.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) coordinated with Stanford and three other groups to create an “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) in the summer of 2020.
SIO’s founding director, Alex Stamos, left his position in November and its research director, Renee DiResta, left last week after her contract was not renewed, Platformer reported.
According to sources, another staff member’s contract expired in June, and those remaining have been told to “look for jobs elsewhere.”
Over the past couple of years, the House Weaponization Committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio, has been conducting rigorous oversight of the EIP and its university cutouts.
The purpose of the partnership, according to Republicans on the Committee, was for “the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.”
Last November, the Committee released a report revealing how the censorship enterprise was targeting true information, jokes, and political opinions that were inconvenient to the regime. According to the report, the government-university partnership targeted Americans across the political spectrum, but especially conservatives—including then-President Donald Trump and Senator Thom Tillis, Newsmax and the Babylon Bee, and conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity, Mollie Hemingway, and Charlie Kirk.
“The pseudoscience of disinformation is now—and has always been—nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives,” the staff report said.
Cyber security expert Mike Benz said that the “academics” involved with the operation where really government cutouts, or agents who functioned as intermediaries between the regime and media platforms.
When Benz first broke the EIP story in 2022, he said “there was no subtlety in DHS’s targeting of conservative voices,” and that their outsourced “disinformation researcher” was flagging only right-of-center accounts.
Rather than address the allegations in his report, Benz said they responded by calling him an out-of-nowhere nobody and a “crank.”
Now the university is “quietly dismantling SIO,” having calculated that “the lab had become more trouble than it is worth,” according to Platformer.
What’s left of SIO will reportedly “be reconstituted under Jeff Hancock, the lab’s faculty sponsor.”
Hancock, a professor of communication, runs a separate program known as the Stanford Social Media Lab. SIO’s work on child safety will continue there, sources said.
Two of SIO’s major initiatives—the peer-reviewed Journal of Online Trust and Safety and its Trust and Safety Research Conference—will also continue.
The journal is funded through a separate grant from the Omidyar Network.
Left-wing billionaire and media donor Pierre Omidyar is behind the dark-money Omidyar Network, which led a corporate boycott campaign against X owner Elon Musk in 2022.
In a statement emailed to Platformer after publication, Stanford strongly disputed the reporting that SIO is being dismantled.
“The important work of SIO continues 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,” a spokesperson wrote. “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.”
Regardless, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan celebrated what he saw as a win.
“Free speech wins again! Great work from @Weaponization for shining a light on the censorship regime,” he wrote on X.