On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists are waging an extensive legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation and accuse them of collaborating with the government to suppress conservative expression online.
The effort has burdened its targets with extensive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information pertaining to social media companies and government dating back to 2015. Compliance has taken time and resources and has has already impacted the groups’ ability to conduct research and raise funds, according to multiple stakeholders.
She and others warned that the campaign was undermining the fight against disinformation in American society when, by most accounts, the problem is on the rise — and as another presidential election looms. 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 obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — effort to cool down research,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that works for freedom of movement. expression and the press.
The House Judiciary Committee, which came under control of the Republican majority in January, has sent dozens of letters and subpoenas to investigators, only a few 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 Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller last month filed a class action lawsuit in Louisiana’s U.S. District Court that mirrors many of the commission’s allegations and targets some of the same defendants .
Targets are 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, Washington-based nongovernmental organizations; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that investigates online disinformation.
In a related line of inquiry, the committee also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, an industry association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media that it founded. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by colluding to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and technology companies that prove to be harmful.
The committee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a close ally of Mr Trump, has accused the organizations of “censorship of unfavorable speech” regarding issues that have vexed the Republican Party: the policies surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic and the integrity of the US political system, including the results of the 2020 election.
Much of the disinformation surrounding both issues comes from the right. Many Republicans are convinced that researchers studying disinformation have pushed 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 notices show that government officials are urging Twitter to take action against accounts spreading disinformation, but not directing them to do so, as some critics have claimed.
Patrick L. Warren, an associate professor at Clemson University, said researchers from the school provided documents to the committee and some staff members gave a brief presentation. “I think most of this was spurred by our appearance in the Twitter files, which gave people a pretty distorted view of our mission and work,” he said.
Last year, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration in U.S. District Court in Louisiana, arguing that government officials effectively coaxed or coerced Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms by threatening to change the law. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, rejected a defense request in March to dismiss the lawsuit.
The focus of the current campaign is not on government officials, but on individuals who work for universities or non-governmental organizations. They have their own First Amendment free speech guarantees, including their interactions with the social media companies.
The group behind the class action, America First Legal, named as defendants two Stanford Internet Observatory researchers, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta; a professor at the University of Washington, Kate Starbird; a director of Graphika, Camille François; and the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graham Brookie.
If the lawsuit goes ahead, they could go to trial and possibly receive civil damages if the charges are found to be well founded.
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 “got to the heart of the censorship-industrial complex.”
The investigators, who were asked by the House committee to submit emails and other documents, are also defendants in the lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The accusers include Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization accused of disinformation, and Jim Hoft, the founder of the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site. The court in the Western District of Louisiana, under Judge Doughty, has become a favorite venue for legal challenges against the Biden administration.
The attacks use “the same argument that starts with some false premises,” said Jeff Hancock, the founder and 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 congressional committees and in court cases, and it’s the same core argument, with an erroneous premise that the government is sort of directing the research we’re doing.”
The House Judiciary Committee has focused many of its questions on two collaborative projects. One of these 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 hosted by Stanford, was called the Virality Project and focused on spreading disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
Both topics have become political lightning rods, exposing the researchers to partisan attacks online that have sometimes turned ominously personal.
In the case of the Stanford Internet Observatory, requests for information — including all emails — have even extended to students who have volunteered to work as interns for the Election Integrity Partnership.
A central premise of the commission’s investigation — and the other censorship complaints — is that the investigators or government officials had the power or ability to shut down social media accounts. They didn’t, according to former employees of Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, who said the decision to penalize users who break platform rules belonged solely to the companies.
No evidence has emerged that government officials forced the companies to take action against accounts, even when the groups flagged problematic content.
“Not only do we have academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research, but also freedom of speech to tell Twitter or another company to look at tweets that we believe violate rules,” said Mr Hancock.
The universities and research organizations have attempted to comply with the committee’s requests, although collecting years of emails has been a time-consuming task complicated by privacy concerns. They face rising legal costs and questions from administrators and donors about the risks of studying disinformation. Online attacks have also taken a toll on morale and, in some cases, have scared off students.
In May, Mr. Jordan, the committee’s chairman, threatened Stanford with unspecified legal action for failing to comply with a previously issued subpoena, even though the university’s lawyers have been negotiating with the committee’s lawyers on how to protect the privacy of students can be protected. (Several of the students who volunteered are being identified in the America First Legal lawsuit.)
The commission declined to discuss details of the investigation, including how many requests or subpoenas it filed in total. Nor has it disclosed how it expects the investigation to proceed — whether it will produce a final report or make criminal references and, if so, when. In its statements, however, it seems 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 unfavorable speech online,” a spokesperson, 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 affects not only the researchers, but also the social media giants.
Twitter, under Mr. Musk, has made it a point to lift restrictions and restore accounts that had been suspended, including the Gateway Pundit’s. YouTube recently announced that it will no longer ban videos that “make false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election and other previous US presidential elections.”
