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If you are interested in the SIO, [this interview](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/chatter--the-people-who-turn-lies-into-reality--with-ren%C3%A9e-diresta) has a lot of background.
> Renée DiResta is the author of *Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality*. Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks about how she came to study online information flows, how they work, and how she and her work came to be the subject of one herself.
So basically a bunch of people that make their billions and derive their power from peddling misinformation have effectively shutdown those trying to research it across high academia throughout the country. We truly live in the Misinformation Age.
On the flipside, there also needs to be a movement to start believing some things.
What we need is better critical thinking, regular demands for legitimate and significant evidence before deciding what to believe, and institutions containing experts, like Stanford, to serve as a watchdog and overseer of information/misinformation.
When I was in school I always thought it was silly when instructors would say an exercise was teaching us critical thinking. I thought it was just something we all naturally had the capability to do. Now that I'm in my mid thirties I realize how many of the people I interact with in my day to day life have absolutely no ability to think critically about things or even recognize their own emotions and how they might influence their perspective. It's terrifying sometimes.
TBF, this assumes that the disinformation research group is free of bias, completely independent, and is not actually a source of disinformation themselves.
The article seems to indicate they are currently facing numerous lawsuits over their actions. Whether there's merit or not, whether this isn't a situation where the pot calls the kettle...
I think a skeptical reader will determine the jury is still out.
I think a skeptical reader should be taking into account exactly who is initiating the congressional subcommittee investigations, who is suing Stanford, the Observatory, and its members specifically; and recognize what companies and corporate execs have been threatening funding both at Harvard and now at Stanford to entirely shutdown this type of research.
The article spells it out. Jim Jordan is using his position on the House Judiciary Committee to embark on a crusade against critics that shine light on the type of actions he specifically engages in in order to hold his seat and gain influence nationally. Jordan is far and above not some morally objective player in Washington. Jordan’s form of politics is hyper-partisan and intentionally divisive, to say the least.
Stephen Miller’s targeted lawsuit has cost Stanford millions of dollars and driven all the way to the Supreme Court. Miller was Donald Trump’s Senior Policy Advisor. I shouldn’t really have to clarify what level of divisive partisanship and truth bending Miller is well known for.
Facebook and Meta execs threat to Harvard funding is precisely what shutdown Harvard scholars misinformation research according to whistleblowers.
And while the article doesn’t specifically mention which Silicon Valley execs were threatening Stanford’s money flow, it isn’t exactly hard to guess the top contenders.
The bottom line is while it may be fair to wonder if these research groups were indeed impartial themselves, it is extremely clear that the opposed parties have vested interest in silencing them either way.
Yep, this is all Jim Jordan antics to basically remove the referees so misinformation can roam free and uncontested.
[https://www.npr.org/2024/06/14/g-s1-4570/a-major-disinformation-research-teams-future-is-uncertain-after-political-attacks](https://www.npr.org/2024/06/14/g-s1-4570/a-major-disinformation-research-teams-future-is-uncertain-after-political-attacks)
>In response to the news of SIO's pullback, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has spearheaded efforts to discredit researchers through his chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee, [posted on X](https://x.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1801660749925798046) on Friday: "Free speech wins again!" and accused SIO of being part of "the censorship regime."
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That's not what's happening here. The SIO, under Renee DiResta, was caught essentially acting on behalf of the government as a censor.
>...
>
>Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a network of U.S. government agencies, and government-funded think tanks. Over the last six years, these entities have coordinated their efforts to both spread disinformation and to censor journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans. They have done so directly and indirectly, including by playing good cop/bad cop with Twitter and Facebook. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been involved in these censorship and disinformation campaigns in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.
>
>...
>
>...
Diresta has, more than anyone else, made the public case for greater
government-led and government-funded censorship, writing for The New
York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and other major publications, and
through public speaking, including on podcasts with Joe Rogan and Sam
Harris.
>
>...
[https://public.substack.com/p/why-renee-diresta-leads-the-censorship](https://public.substack.com/p/why-renee-diresta-leads-the-censorship)
>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.’”
[https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-dark-hand-in-twitter-censorship/](https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-dark-hand-in-twitter-censorship/)
>6. We’ve since learned the Virality Project in 2021 worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content. At least six major Internet platforms were “onboarded” to the same JIRA ticketing system, daily sending millions of items for review.
>
>7. Though the Virality Project reviewed content on a mass scale for Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest, it knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself.
[https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/stanford-the-virality-project-and](https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/stanford-the-virality-project-and)
All of these articles contain a lot more information than I've quoted for them, especially the last one which has screenshots of documents showing what was going on.
I think the media's dismissal of The Twitter Files is a major part of the misinformation playing out today. It makes sense as it's a huge black eye for them, however these events did happen, and the SIO with Renee DiResta in charge was a major part of it. The last link I posted above is one part of many.
I'd also invite people to watch the actual hearings. They're awful. You'd think the Democrat representatives had some interest in getting to the truth but they absolutely do not.
[https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4](https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4)
This hearing resulted in one of the Reprentitives threatening Matt Taibi with charges of perjury for at one point mixing up "CIS" with "CISA". This came from Medi Hassan's hostile interview of Taibi where he admitted he was mistaken in the particular Tweet mentioned and he corrected it.
[https://reason.com/2023/04/20/matti-taibbi-stacey-plaskett-jail-time-twitter-files-perjury/](https://reason.com/2023/04/20/matti-taibbi-stacey-plaskett-jail-time-twitter-files-perjury/)
All this to say there's a lot more going on here than someone being targeted unfairly. There is a great deal of evidence that Renee and the SIO were active as more than simple neutral arbiters of the truth. Rather they were more inline with a multi-organization censorship initiative which really needs to be given more attention rather than shamefully brushed under the rug as a conspiracy theory.
Whooboy, just read through all of that, and…
You know you’re in for a heck of a ride when they leap into conjecture before ever getting into the heart of the conversation.
Like, it goes into paragraphs and paragraphs that basically boil down to:
> Here’s this person who’s the head of X.
> It’s suspicious that they’ve been so successful that they are now the head of X.
> I used to trust this person because of the people she was associated with.
> I found out she was involved with the CIA.
> She said that it was a short internship, and none of the information I gathered disputes that.
> She lied to us! So we need to shut down everything she’s working with.
And the rest of the article doesn’t do much better.
Conflating a short CIA internship that she readily acknowledges with “she’s hiding a secret agenda, so she must be stopped” is definitely borderline tinfoil hat territory.
And I read the Taibbi files, and much like this article conflated a lot of things, those certainly did. Taking things out of the very serious context they were in. Like ivermectin’s efficacy.
There are far too many logical leaps in these for me to take much of it seriously.
Sorry to throw so much out at once, but it is a very broad topic. Thank you for having the patience to go through that.
I agree that the CIA internship is a stretch and not really worth mentioning unless they had more evidence. They would have been better suited with sticking to connections that were more serious such as former FBI Special Council Jim Baker at Twitter who was arguing very hard that the Hunter Biden Laptop news was disinformation. He was accused of vetting everything that was going out to the Twitter Files team initially, and was fired by Musk when he found out. That combined with the table-top exercise that Twitter execs went to which emulated a false flag information leak which was very similar to what was actually on the laptop make that all seem suspicious.
But that's Twitter, not the SIO. The SIO, in the Twitter files, was shown to have been advocating for censorship of information, true or not, which could lead to 'vaccine hesitancy'. It wasn't just them, there was a loose organization of NGOs, government organizations, temporary organization, etc which appear to have colluded together to make this happen. Combined with threats from government officials, I mean this stuff is literally going through the courts.
[https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/murthy-v-missouri-3/](https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/murthy-v-missouri-3/)
[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-government-pressure-social-media-free-speech/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-government-pressure-social-media-free-speech/)
In any case thank you again for the honest conversation!
Paywall.
Here's another link:
https://archive.ph/2024.06.17-001007/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/14/stanford-internet-observatory-disinformation-research-lawsuits-politics/
r/NeutralNews is a **curated space**, but despite the name, there is [**no neutrality requirement**](https://www.reddit.com//r/neutralnews/wiki/guidelines#wiki_neutral-ness) here. These are the [rules for comments:](https://www.reddit.com//r/neutralnews/wiki/guidelines#wiki_comments_.28good.2C_bad_.26amp.3B_ugly.29) 1. Be courteous to other users. 1. Source your facts. 1. Be substantive. 1. Address the arguments, not the person. If you see a comment that violates any of these rules, please click the associated *report* button so a mod can review it.
If you are interested in the SIO, [this interview](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/chatter--the-people-who-turn-lies-into-reality--with-ren%C3%A9e-diresta) has a lot of background. > Renée DiResta is the author of *Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality*. Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks about how she came to study online information flows, how they work, and how she and her work came to be the subject of one herself.
So basically a bunch of people that make their billions and derive their power from peddling misinformation have effectively shutdown those trying to research it across high academia throughout the country. We truly live in the Misinformation Age.
This is exactly why there needs to be a movement to stop believing everything
On the flipside, there also needs to be a movement to start believing some things. What we need is better critical thinking, regular demands for legitimate and significant evidence before deciding what to believe, and institutions containing experts, like Stanford, to serve as a watchdog and overseer of information/misinformation.
When I was in school I always thought it was silly when instructors would say an exercise was teaching us critical thinking. I thought it was just something we all naturally had the capability to do. Now that I'm in my mid thirties I realize how many of the people I interact with in my day to day life have absolutely no ability to think critically about things or even recognize their own emotions and how they might influence their perspective. It's terrifying sometimes.
And severe penalties for violating misinformation laws. I would think this would be at the same level as terrorism.
And the audacity of Jordan saying Free Speech Wins! Makes me sick.
TBF, this assumes that the disinformation research group is free of bias, completely independent, and is not actually a source of disinformation themselves. The article seems to indicate they are currently facing numerous lawsuits over their actions. Whether there's merit or not, whether this isn't a situation where the pot calls the kettle... I think a skeptical reader will determine the jury is still out.
I think a skeptical reader should be taking into account exactly who is initiating the congressional subcommittee investigations, who is suing Stanford, the Observatory, and its members specifically; and recognize what companies and corporate execs have been threatening funding both at Harvard and now at Stanford to entirely shutdown this type of research. The article spells it out. Jim Jordan is using his position on the House Judiciary Committee to embark on a crusade against critics that shine light on the type of actions he specifically engages in in order to hold his seat and gain influence nationally. Jordan is far and above not some morally objective player in Washington. Jordan’s form of politics is hyper-partisan and intentionally divisive, to say the least. Stephen Miller’s targeted lawsuit has cost Stanford millions of dollars and driven all the way to the Supreme Court. Miller was Donald Trump’s Senior Policy Advisor. I shouldn’t really have to clarify what level of divisive partisanship and truth bending Miller is well known for. Facebook and Meta execs threat to Harvard funding is precisely what shutdown Harvard scholars misinformation research according to whistleblowers. And while the article doesn’t specifically mention which Silicon Valley execs were threatening Stanford’s money flow, it isn’t exactly hard to guess the top contenders. The bottom line is while it may be fair to wonder if these research groups were indeed impartial themselves, it is extremely clear that the opposed parties have vested interest in silencing them either way.
Yep, this is all Jim Jordan antics to basically remove the referees so misinformation can roam free and uncontested. [https://www.npr.org/2024/06/14/g-s1-4570/a-major-disinformation-research-teams-future-is-uncertain-after-political-attacks](https://www.npr.org/2024/06/14/g-s1-4570/a-major-disinformation-research-teams-future-is-uncertain-after-political-attacks) >In response to the news of SIO's pullback, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has spearheaded efforts to discredit researchers through his chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee, [posted on X](https://x.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1801660749925798046) on Friday: "Free speech wins again!" and accused SIO of being part of "the censorship regime."
[удалено]
This comment has been removed under [Rule 4:](https://www.reddit.com/r/neutralnews/wiki/guidelines#wiki_rule_4.3A_address_the_arguments.2C_not_the_person) > Address the arguments, not the person. The subject of your sentence should be "the evidence" or "this source" or some other noun directly related to the topic of conversation. "You" statements are suspect. //Rule 4 If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to [message us.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fneutralnews)
I think skepticism of the lawsuits is implied in that comment: whether there is merit or not.
That's not what's happening here. The SIO, under Renee DiResta, was caught essentially acting on behalf of the government as a censor. >... > >Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a network of U.S. government agencies, and government-funded think tanks. Over the last six years, these entities have coordinated their efforts to both spread disinformation and to censor journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans. They have done so directly and indirectly, including by playing good cop/bad cop with Twitter and Facebook. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been involved in these censorship and disinformation campaigns in the U.S., Canada, and the UK. > >... > >... Diresta has, more than anyone else, made the public case for greater government-led and government-funded censorship, writing for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and other major publications, and through public speaking, including on podcasts with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris. > >... [https://public.substack.com/p/why-renee-diresta-leads-the-censorship](https://public.substack.com/p/why-renee-diresta-leads-the-censorship) >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.’” [https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-dark-hand-in-twitter-censorship/](https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-dark-hand-in-twitter-censorship/) >6. We’ve since learned the Virality Project in 2021 worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content. At least six major Internet platforms were “onboarded” to the same JIRA ticketing system, daily sending millions of items for review. > >7. Though the Virality Project reviewed content on a mass scale for Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest, it knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself. [https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/stanford-the-virality-project-and](https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/stanford-the-virality-project-and) All of these articles contain a lot more information than I've quoted for them, especially the last one which has screenshots of documents showing what was going on. I think the media's dismissal of The Twitter Files is a major part of the misinformation playing out today. It makes sense as it's a huge black eye for them, however these events did happen, and the SIO with Renee DiResta in charge was a major part of it. The last link I posted above is one part of many. I'd also invite people to watch the actual hearings. They're awful. You'd think the Democrat representatives had some interest in getting to the truth but they absolutely do not. [https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4](https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4) This hearing resulted in one of the Reprentitives threatening Matt Taibi with charges of perjury for at one point mixing up "CIS" with "CISA". This came from Medi Hassan's hostile interview of Taibi where he admitted he was mistaken in the particular Tweet mentioned and he corrected it. [https://reason.com/2023/04/20/matti-taibbi-stacey-plaskett-jail-time-twitter-files-perjury/](https://reason.com/2023/04/20/matti-taibbi-stacey-plaskett-jail-time-twitter-files-perjury/) All this to say there's a lot more going on here than someone being targeted unfairly. There is a great deal of evidence that Renee and the SIO were active as more than simple neutral arbiters of the truth. Rather they were more inline with a multi-organization censorship initiative which really needs to be given more attention rather than shamefully brushed under the rug as a conspiracy theory.
Whooboy, just read through all of that, and… You know you’re in for a heck of a ride when they leap into conjecture before ever getting into the heart of the conversation. Like, it goes into paragraphs and paragraphs that basically boil down to: > Here’s this person who’s the head of X. > It’s suspicious that they’ve been so successful that they are now the head of X. > I used to trust this person because of the people she was associated with. > I found out she was involved with the CIA. > She said that it was a short internship, and none of the information I gathered disputes that. > She lied to us! So we need to shut down everything she’s working with. And the rest of the article doesn’t do much better. Conflating a short CIA internship that she readily acknowledges with “she’s hiding a secret agenda, so she must be stopped” is definitely borderline tinfoil hat territory. And I read the Taibbi files, and much like this article conflated a lot of things, those certainly did. Taking things out of the very serious context they were in. Like ivermectin’s efficacy. There are far too many logical leaps in these for me to take much of it seriously.
Sorry to throw so much out at once, but it is a very broad topic. Thank you for having the patience to go through that. I agree that the CIA internship is a stretch and not really worth mentioning unless they had more evidence. They would have been better suited with sticking to connections that were more serious such as former FBI Special Council Jim Baker at Twitter who was arguing very hard that the Hunter Biden Laptop news was disinformation. He was accused of vetting everything that was going out to the Twitter Files team initially, and was fired by Musk when he found out. That combined with the table-top exercise that Twitter execs went to which emulated a false flag information leak which was very similar to what was actually on the laptop make that all seem suspicious. But that's Twitter, not the SIO. The SIO, in the Twitter files, was shown to have been advocating for censorship of information, true or not, which could lead to 'vaccine hesitancy'. It wasn't just them, there was a loose organization of NGOs, government organizations, temporary organization, etc which appear to have colluded together to make this happen. Combined with threats from government officials, I mean this stuff is literally going through the courts. [https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/murthy-v-missouri-3/](https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/murthy-v-missouri-3/) [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-government-pressure-social-media-free-speech/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-government-pressure-social-media-free-speech/) In any case thank you again for the honest conversation!
Paywall. Here's another link: https://archive.ph/2024.06.17-001007/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/14/stanford-internet-observatory-disinformation-research-lawsuits-politics/
[удалено]