Shannon Bonds hourly news plug 15 June 2024 16:00ET: [short audio clip]
Academic group studying disinformation is facing an uncertain future after political attacks. A campaign by Republicans is targeting research. NPRs Shannon Bond reports the Stanford Internet Observatory studies how social media platforms are abused. Its investigated thorny issues including child exploitation and the spread of false and misleading information about voting and vaccines.
Now its top leaders are out and future funding is uncertain. The group is among a slew of researchers who have come under attack by conservatives who allege they’re colluding with the government and tech companies to censor political speech. There’s no evidence for those claims, but they fueled online harassment campaigns and conspiracy theories.
Stanford University says The work of the internet observatory will continue under new leadership. Shannon Bond, NPR News, this.
Another NPR publication.
I wonder how much research Ms. Bond conducted for this article?
Matt Taibbi’s two latest “Twitter Files” drops revealed that Stanford played a direct role in this gross violation of online free speech. Emails revealed that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) actively collaborated with Twitter to suppress information they knew was factually true. Taibbi’s investigation revealed that Stanford’s Virality Project “recommends that multiple platforms take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
The project succeeded in getting big tech companies to take down about 35% of the content they flagged. They reviewed content en masse from almost every major social media company: Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest were all monitored by SIO. The questionable censorship decisions by the group all seemed to go in one direction—shutting down the now-vindicated Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, while taking direct guidance from Anthony Fauci about the supposed falsehood of the lab leak theory.
Deep dive on the twitter files, here.
So this “collapse” is occurring just before the Supreme Court case comes out. Odd.
What’s the answer to my original question, how much of a struggle was it for the experts in monitoring disinformation to handle attacks from conservatives? Were the attacks well grounded, or were the attacks disinformation?
IN THE COMMENTS: Kate said:
I salute the name, “Stanford Internet Observatory.” I think of astronomy and the clean pursuit of star systems, with the telescope instead focused on something infinite and microscopic: the galaxies of the internet.
However, it was just a run-of-the-mill political op, small and grubby, gussied up to sound fancy.