https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1801656948367962251

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Over the last 18 months, Public has extensively documented the mass censorship effort led by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) for the United States government. Accounts vary, but either the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked SIO to lead the effort or SIO’s ostensible leader, Alex Stamos, proposed the idea.

The brains of the SIO operation was Renée DiResta, an ostensibly “former” CIA employee. Senate Democrats, the New York Times, and other news media close to the Intelligence Community (IC) heavily promoted DiResta starting in 2018, when she spread disinformation exaggerating the influence of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. In 2020 and 2021, DiResta and SIO led a DHS effort that successfully pressured social media platforms to censor disfavored views of Covid and interfere in the 2020 elections.

Now, in a major victory for free speech advocates, SIO has decided not to renew its contracts with DiResta and Stamos, who have both left the organization. A blog called “Platformer,” which is sympathetic to SIO’s censorship efforts, reported yesterday that “the lab will not conduct research into the 2024 election or other elections in the future.”

Stanford cut funding from a donor named Frank McCourt to SIO. “While SIO still had other sources of funding,” reports Platformer, the McCourt funding decision was seen by some at SIO as a clear signal that Stanford had soured on its commitment to their work.” The announcement came just two days after DiResta published a book that spreads disinformation about her critics, including me.

The dismissal of DiResta and Stamos is unlikely to be sufficient to stop them from continuing their censorship advocacy, as DiResta’s book shows. DiResta and Stamos are two of the top censorship visionaries in the United States and may find resources to continue their lobbying in some other institution. DiResta continues to enjoy fawning coverage from partisan news outlets, such as The Atlantic, which demand ever-more censorship for ideological and financial reasons. And the Supreme Court is likely to allow the kind of third-party censorship pioneered by DiResta and Stamos in a critical free speech case, Murthy v. Missouri.

But Stanford’s repudiation of DiResta and Stamos suggests that the university’s leadership realizes the reputational damage that DiResta and Stamos caused the institution. Stanford has distanced itself from the two for reasons that had nothing to do with money. Indeed, the two showed themselves adept at raising money. SIO raised $5 million from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, “which allowed Stamos and DiResta to recruit nearly a dozen staff members,” notes Platformer. “Eventually, groups like the William D. Flora Hewlett Foundation and the National Science Foundation added their support.”

And SIO was the lead group of the four groups in total that advocated censorship on behalf of DHS in 2020 and 2021. “By 2022,” notes Platformer, “SIO had become the most visible research institute” engaged in censorship advocacy in the US. “Its staff members published a combined 10 journal articles and 22 op-eds. According to a 2022 annual report, SIO was cited in the media 5,400 times — a staggering number for a new and relatively small team.”

In 2021, DiResta advocated for creating a government censorship center, which she euphemistically described a “Center of Excellence,” within the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security acted on DiResta’s proposal to create a censorship center, calling it “Disinformation Governance Board,” which the agency announced publicly in April 2022.

As such, the symbolic impact of Stanford’s dismissal of Stamos and DiResta goes far beyond those two individuals and their government-funded NGO. Indeed, it is one of the most significant free speech victories of the last 18 months, particularly considering the failure of Congress to defund DHS’s censorship arm, the Cybersecurity and Internet Security Agency (CISA), NSF’s “Track F” censorship R&D funding, and reform Section 230 to allow social media platforms to moderate their own legal content. Anyone who cares about free speech should seek to understand what happened so we can replicate the success around the world.

I first came across DiResta’s censorship advocacy while reading the Twitter Files in late 2022 and early 2023. The Files show that she and her colleagues at SIO had been regularly emailing Twitter executives to urge them to censor disfavored views. I read up on DiResta and watched videos of her speaking on various panels at places like Aspen Institute, which is also heavily funded by the US government. I was struck by how frequently people deferred to her as the expert. And, indeed, she was not only the most knowledgeable person, she was also the one who led and shaped the conversation.

This research helped me understand that DiResta wasn’t just a censorship advocate; she was also one of the main promoters of the Russiagate hoax. DiResta testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018 about Russian influence in Trump’s 2016 election. She falsely claimed that it was significant when every mainstream political scientist who has looked at the question has concluded that it was so insignificant as to be unmeasurable.

I reached out to DiResta and requested an interview. She asked that we do it over WhatsApp and we went back and forth for several weeks. We also participated in a podcast with Sam Harris. I didn’t understand many things she was saying in our interview, and eventually, the conversation moved to a Google Doc.

Before testifying before Congress with Matt Taibbi in March 2023, I interviewed censorship researcher @MikeBenzCyber of @FFO_Freedom . Benz helped me understand what DiResta had done at SIO in 2020 and 2021 to promote censorship of disfavored views on the election and on Covid. Benz also told me that DiResta had worked for the CIA. In both my verbal and written testimony to Congress, I highlighted the role of DiResta and SIO.

DiResta responded to all of this by publishing the entire interview we conducted on Google Docs. This did not bother me. However, it is notable that, while I kept my word to keep our conversation off-the-record until she approved of the version to make public, she went ahead and published without asking permission.

I then published a long article, “Why Renée DiResta Leads The Censorship Industry,” at Public, followed by a video, “Inside The Censorship Industrial Complex,” where I walked readers through a video she had made for DHS on “the power of partnerships.”

We weren’t the only ones criticizing Stanford for hosting SIO. Benz, as noted above, did much of the groundbreaking work exposing SIO. Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government subpoenaed SIO’s work in April 2023 and conducted a transcribed interview with Stamos. Thanks to these subpoenas, we were able to reveal the DHS’s violation of the First Amendment and its interference in the elections.

In response, Stamos, DiResta, and Stanford have all played the victim. “The politically motivated attacks against our research on elections and vaccines have no merit, and the attempts by partisan House committee chairs to suppress First Amendment-protected research are a quintessential example of the weaponization of government,” Stamos and DiResta said in a statement they gave Platformer.

"Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, that chill freedom of inquiry,” a university spokesperson told Platformer.

But it’s clear from their collective behavior that the only people seeking to chill freedom of inquiry were the ones secretly demanding mass censorship by social media platforms, not those of us exposing such demands.

What lessons can we draw? First, it is important to identify each country’s real leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Often, there are many NGOs, news media organizations, and government agencies conspiring to suppress free speech. At first, they appear to be a single blob. But by tracing their actions over time, and watching their leaders talk in videos, it soon becomes clear who is really in charge. Other people were involved in the DHS censorship efforts, but it quickly became obvious to all of us that DiResta and SIO were more influential than the others.

Second, it is important for free speech advocates to share information and work together. We would not have understood what SIO was up to had it not been for Benz’s research. We were able to draw more attention to it with our Twitter Files testimony. And it was thanks to both that Jordan’s committee was able to take action.

Third, and finally, it’s important for free speech advocates and investigative journalists to remain steadfast against efforts to intimidate us. DiResta and the news media have repeatedly attacked Benz for his past activities and work in the Trump administration and suggested that we are somehow implicated. But Stanford’s action vindicates Benz and us and shows the importance of not being intimidated by McCarthyite guilt-by-association attacks.

As such, the SIO debacle should change how we view Stanford and the secretive war on free speech by the Censorship Industrial Complex and what’s required to defeat it. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant. And the price of freedom remains eternal vigilance.

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