The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled | Hacker News Reader

The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled

platformer.news

28 pointspulisse14 comments

Semi related, one of the key things Musk is doing by eliminating Twitter likes is removing a core ability to monitor platform manipulation. It's wild what an intensely dark dark forest Twitter has been turned into.

Really sad to see such an interesting noble effort to figure out what all is happening in this chaotic age dismantled by the powers that be. There seems like so many forces pushing to make social media chaotic & tolerant to truly hostile forces.

> And in an actual weaponization of government, Jordan’s committee has included students — both undergraduates and graduates — in its subpoena requests, publishing their names and putting them at risk of threats or worse.

1984 at work.

> 1984 at work.

This gets thrown around a lot, but here it is entirely appropriate. Jordan's "Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government" is in-fact, the weaponization of the federal government.

Is this supposed to be concerning? Most research groups publish a list of their staff online, including graduate students and undergrads. They contribute to and get credited in published work and attend conferences. If you're going to perform oversight of such a group, it has to include all the researchers, not just the people signing the grant paperwork.

> If you're going to perform oversight of such a group

"Oversight"[0] is something that the government only does to itself in a free country like the United States of America.

Why is the federal government performing "oversight" of Stanford, a private organization and university?

As a child, my family brought me to the USA from an authoritarian communist country to escape things like government "oversight" of private universities.

I understand that their findings were very uncomfortable for one political party, but that's how this type of thing works. One party is always going to be more uncomfortable.

My mind is melting right now. How is this not setting of all of the alarm bells against government overreach, for every liberty-minded person?

[0] https://oversight.house.gov/

The allegation is described in the article:

> SIO and its researchers have been sued three times by conservative groups alleging that its researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, forcing Stanford to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff and students.

This is the government investigating whether the government colluded with this private entity to take actions that violate the First Amendment. We have seen a lot of that lately, with government agencies leaning on private entities to avoid scrutiny and limit legal relief when it comes to 1A cases. Stanford's involvement is peripheral, the oversight is limited to their interactions with the government.

I suppose a liberty-minded individual would suggest that a private entity should not collude with the government, if it wants to avoid government oversight.

Was any collusion proven in court? Because if not, this feels a lot like the House Un-American Activities Committee, aka McCarthyism. This was historically settled as the definition of government overreach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

> I suppose a liberty-minded individual would suggest that a private entity should not collude with the government, if it wants to avoid government oversight.

I look forward to the endless oversight panels on intel contractors, which I am truly afraid to name, because that will happen as well, right?

Please note that afaik, Stanford's Internet Observatory was not a government contractor.

As described in the article, all that happened were subpoenas for documents. That's the very first step in any investigation. Those documents have shed significant light on the relationship between the SIO and government agencies [0]:

> Led by former CIA fellow Renee DiResta, the Virality Project functioned as an intermediary for government censorship. Ties between the US government and the academic research center were extremely close. DHS had “fellows” embedded at the Stanford Internet Observatory, while SIO had interns embedded at CISA, and former DHS staff contributed to the Virality Project’s final report.

> The Virality Project also had contact with the White House and the Office of the Surgeon General, described the CDC as a “partner” in its design documents, and the California Department of Public Health had a login to access the Jira content flagging system, as did CISA personnel.

It sure seems like SIO was acting as a government contractor/agent here, if it was providing services to the government in exchange for funding.

[0] - https://brownstone.org/articles/the-virality-projects-censor...

I am very thankful that you introduced me to the type of people who just took down the highly respected folks at Stanford. I did not realize that this is what had happened.

I now realize that I am on the wrong side of a previous wave function collapse, and I might be living in the dumbest possible branch of the multiverse.

Here is what I just learned about brownstone.org:

> Newly obtained internal emails from the Brownstone Institute reveal support for child labor and underage cigarette smoking at the COVID-19 misinformation dark money group.

https://www.importantcontext.news/p/leaked-brownstone-instit...

Please watch this deeply whackadoo insanity, from Jeffery Tucker, the founder of Brownstone:

> schoolsucksproject.com

> If you could earn money from the ages of 12 to 16...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUQpfalF-iM

This has been up on the School Sucks YT channel for 11 years. It was not taken down. Jeffery Tucker still believes in this.

My take is that the guy is nuts and I will never trust anything that he ever promotes. After watching this, do you?

> a private entity should not collude with the government, if it wants to avoid government oversight.

A private entity is any group different than the government. So, The People, by and for who the government was created in first place, shouldn't inspect the government that works FOR them?

This is stopping research that deals with mis-information.

> I suppose a liberty-minded individual would suggest that a private entity should not collude with the government

I find that far too many people are willing to argue principles of the first ammendment, but not willing to volunteer their time in the trenches of content moderation.

This is tragic.

Battles are fought for our principles. They are won, however, by tactics and operations.

Yeah, it seems like anti-anti-disinformation efforts are becoming one of focuses of Republicans.

"One shouldn't research our methods of lying at scale".

> 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.)

"Trust and safety" - brought to you by a left-wing activist billionaire megadonor.

Theres T&S / content-moderation on hacker news.

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