What is the Media Forensics Hub? Described as “an interdisciplinary team of researchers working to study and combat online deception,” the project kicked off in 2017. That was the year communications professor Darren Linvill and economics professor Patrick Warren joined forces to “uncover and expose” millions of tweets they attributed to Russian trolls. Sponsored by the taxpayer-funded South Carolina Research Authority, the Hub was officially launched in May 2020. Two years later, along with the University at Buffalo and several other institutions, it received a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Last May, Racket filed a FOIA request with Clemson. Our search produced a series of emails that make explicit reference to the university’s dealings with federal law enforcement agencies (providing Clemson “help with resources,” among other things), social media companies, and the news media. The Clemson files are difficult to summarize, but offer probably the most comprehensive portrait we’ve gotten yet of the role such ostensibly non-governmental “anti-disinformation” research institutions can play as middleman organizations. These emails also document the high degree of influence the school had with federal agencies and media, even if Twitter was not always as cooperative.
A summary of key communications is listed below, while three new batches of documents have been uploaded to the Racket FOIA library, where as always, they’re not paywalled.