[ A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to
undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and
other hot political topics.- aimed against those that study the spread
of disinformation.]
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GOP TARGETS RESEARCHERS WHO STUDY DISINFORMATION AHEAD OF 2024
ELECTION  
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Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel
June 19, 2023
New York Times
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_ A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to
undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and
other hot political topics.- aimed against those that study the spread
of disinformation. _

The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of
Ohio, has accused organizations that research disinformation of
censoring conservative speech online., Credit: Haiyun Jiang/The New
York Times

 

On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists
are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think
tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation,
accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress
conservative speech online.

The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for
information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails
and other information related to social media companies and the
government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and
resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research
and raise money, according to several people involved.

They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against
disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most
accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is
around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also
joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the
outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“I think it’s quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly
partisan — attempt to chill research,” said Jameel Jaffer, the
executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment
Institute, an organization that works to safeguard freedom of speech
and the press.

The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican
majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the
researchers — only some of which have been made public. It has
threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly
or fully enough.

A conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former
adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S.
District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s
accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants.

Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the
University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall
Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan,
nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation
in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches
disinformation online.

In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena
to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the
Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s
Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws
by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers
and tech companies found to be harmful.
 

A House subcommittee was created to scrutinize what Republicans have
charged is a government effort to silence conservatives.  (Photo
credit:  Kenny Holston/The New York Times)
The committee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a close
ally of Mr. Trump, has accused the organizations of “censorship of
disfavored speech” involving issues that have galvanized the
Republican Party: the policies around the Covid-19 pandemic and the
integrity of the American political system, including the outcome of
the 2020 election.

Much of the disinformation surrounding both issues has come from the
right. Many Republicans are convinced that researchers who study
disinformation have pressed social media platforms to discriminate
against conservative voices.

Those complaints have been fueled by Twitter’s decision under its
new owner, Elon Musk, to release selected internal communications
between government officials and Twitter employees. The communications
show government officials urging Twitter to take action against
accounts spreading disinformation but stopping short of ordering them
to do, as some critics claimed.

Patrick L. Warren, an associate professor at Clemson University, said
researchers at the school have provided documents to the committee,
and given some staff members a short presentation. “I think most of
this has been spurred by our appearance in the Twitter files, which
left people with a pretty distorted sense of our mission and work,”
he said.

Last year, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and
Louisiana sued
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Biden administration in U.S. District Court in Louisiana, arguing that
government officials effectively cajoled or coerced Twitter, Facebook
and other social media platforms by threatening legislative changes.
The judge, Terry A. Doughty, rejected a defense motion to dismiss the
lawsuit in March.

The current campaign’s focus is not government officials but rather
private individuals working for universities or nongovernmental
organizations. They have their own First Amendment guarantees of free
speech, including their interactions with the social media companies.

The group behind the class action, America First Legal, named as
defendants two researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex
Stamos and Renée DiResta; a professor at the University of
Washington, Kate Starbird; an executive of Graphika, Camille
François; and the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital
Forensic Research Lab, Graham Brookie.

 

Renée DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, is
among the defendants named in a lawsuit filed by America First Legal,
a conservative group.  (Credit:  Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated
Press  //  New York Times)
If the lawsuit proceeds, they could face trial and, potentially, civil
damages if the accusations are upheld.

Mr. Miller, the president of America First Legal, did not respond to a
request for comment. In a statement last month, he said the lawsuit
was “striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex.”

 

Stephen Miller, a former adviser to former President Donald J. Trump,
leads America First Legal.   (Credit...Kevin Dietsch )
The researchers, who have been asked by the House committee to submit
emails and other records, are also defendants in the lawsuit brought
by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The plaintiffs
include Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an
organization that has been accused of disinformation
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and Jim Hoft, the founder of the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news
site. The court in the Western District of Louisiana has, under Judge
Doughty, become a favored venue
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legal challenges against the Biden administration.

The attacks use “the same argument that starts with some false
premises,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford
Social Media Lab, which is not a party to any of the legal action.
“We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in
lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about
the government giving some type of direction to the research we do.”

The House Judiciary Committee has focused much of its questioning on
two collaborative projects. One was the Election Integrity
Partnership, which Stanford and the University of Washington formed
before the 2020 election to identify attempts “to suppress voting,
reduce participation, confuse voters or delegitimize election results
without evidence.” The other, also organized by Stanford, was called
the Virality Project and focused on the spread of disinformation about
Covid-19 vaccines.

Both subjects have become political lightning rods, exposing the
researchers to partisan attacks online that have become ominously
personal at times.

 

In the case of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the requests for
information — including all emails — have even extended to
students who volunteered to work as interns for the Election
Integrity Partnership [[link removed]].

A central premise of the committee’s investigation — and the other
complaints about censorship — is that the researchers or government
officials had the power or ability to shut down accounts on social
media. They did not, according to former employees at Twitter and
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, who said the decision to
punish users who violated platform rules belonged solely to the
companies.

No evidence has emerged that government officials coerced the
companies to take action against accounts, even when the groups
flagged problematic content.

“We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this
research but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to
look at tweets we might think violate rules,” Mr. Hancock said.

The universities and research organizations have sought to comply with
the committee’s requests, though the collection of years of emails
has been a time-consuming task complicated by issues of privacy. They
face mounting legal costs and questions from directors and donors
about the risks raised by studying disinformation. Online attacks have
also taken a toll on morale and, in some cases, scared away students.

In May, Mr. Jordan, the committee’s chairman, threatened Stanford
with unspecified legal action for not complying with a previously
issued subpoena, even though the university’s lawyers have been
negotiating with the committee’s lawyers over how to shield
students’ privacy. (Several of the students who volunteered are
identified in the America First Legal lawsuit.)

The committee declined to discuss details of the investigation,
including how many requests or subpoenas it has filed in total. Nor
has it disclosed how it expects the inquiry to unfold — whether it
would prepare a final report or make criminal referrals and, if so,
when. In its statements, though, it appears to have already reached a
broad conclusion.

“The Twitter files and information from private litigation show how
the federal government worked with social media companies and other
entities to silence disfavored speech online,” a spokesman, Russell
Dye, said in a statement. “The committee is working hard to get to
the bottom of this censorship to protect First Amendment rights for
all Americans.”

The partisan controversy is having an effect on not only the
researchers but also the social media giants.

Twitter, under Mr. Musk, has made a point of lifting restrictions and
restoring accounts
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had been suspended, including the Gateway Pundit’s.
YouTube recently announced
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it would no longer ban videos that advanced “false claims that
widespread fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other
past U.S. presidential elections.”

_[STEVEN LEE MYERS covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked
in Washington, Moscow, Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to
the articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2021.
He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of
Vladimir Putin.” @stevenleemyers
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_SHEERA FRENKEL is a prize-winning technology reporter based in San
Francisco. In 2021, she and Cecilia Kang published “An Ugly Truth:
Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @sheeraf
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* disinformation
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* 2024 Elections
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* MAGA
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* House GOP
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* Freedom Caucus
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* Jim Jordan
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* social media
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* research
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* First Amendment
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* Stephen Miller
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