Stanford Internet Observatory wilts under legal pressure during election year

> SIO participated in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project (VP), along with other organizations, in an effort to limit online misinformation. Those efforts made it the target of legal groups like America First Legal, which sued SIO and those involved last November claiming [PDF] that the EIP, as a public-private partnership, violates First Amendment free speech rights.

There's really no one doing more basic simple heavily-bipartisan work to directly safeguard democracy than the Election Integrity Project. Highly under-praised under-known organization that's gone to the highest levels of patriotism possible, at the most important intersection.

Watching partners come under enormously financially-draining legal assault by an array of bottom dwellers is so disgusting.

Telling America that free speech means we can't even monitor what's happening, can't see, that we have to live in a propognadizing dark forest is some crazy authoritarian shit. Society should have some right and ability to try to see where messages are coming from and to assess their trustworthiness. Meanwhile Twitter & these GOP factions push us to a darker darker web.

Articles in the press often have to be read while thinking "assuming that this article is literally accurate, what might be wrong about the impression it's trying to give?"

If you read the article while thinking this, you'll notice that this article nowhere says things like "the report accused Stanford of being used to launder government censorship, but in fact the government has no involvement with..." or "the report points to ___ incident but that has nothing to do with following government requests" or "no, these incidents didn't happen" or anything else which substantively denies the accusations. It just says Stanford is accused of censorship by those evil conservatives, and this has costs, and we're deeply concerned about it. Well, yeah, if you get caught doing bad things, it should cost you and you should be concerned.

Disinformation, misinformation, malinformation (whatever that is), and even hate speech are all just censorship in sheep’s clothing. These fact checkers end up being used by the big social media and news organizations as their basis to suppress (censor) information that, at least currently, always seems to favor one side of the political spectrum. Hunter Biden’s laptop was discounted as Russian propaganda in the last election, but was just entered in to evidence by the DOJ in his trial as verified and legitimate. Many of the issues around Covid were labeled misinformation and censored at the time only later to be found credible (lab leak, ineffective social distancing, vaccine efficacy, etc.). It has always been up to the people to openly discuss these issues and choose what they find credible. Although one side of the aisle is benefiting from the “misinformation” label currently, pendulums swing and the whole script could flip in the future so it’s in the best interest of both sides to stop this craziness now. There is no such thing as nonpartisan or bipartisan, and these organizations should certainly exercise their 1st amendment right and share their analyses, but when they are used to control the actual flow of information to the people it becomes dangerous and destructive.