Pro-free speech academics are calling on Congress to halt the “unethical” government-funded censorship experiments causing “harm” to Americans. 
Stanford Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and liber-net CEO and former Harvard Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society fellow Andrew Lowenthal wrote an opinion piece for the New York Post reaming misinformation research and government censorship efforts. In their piece, the pair noted that government-funded censorship research often flies under the radar. “Under the guise of combating misinformation, the US government funds universities, ostensibly to analyze social-media trends — but in truth, to help censor the Internet,” they wrote. The pair also called on Congress “to penalize universities” and defund their “misinformation” studies.
Bhattacharya and Lowenthal referenced the Twitter Files that detailed how universities collaborate with or receive funding from the U.S. government to target so-called “misinformation” online. The authors called this research “unethical” and “violating the prime directive of academic research: to do no harm to its subjects.”
Bhattacharya and Lowenthal noted that there are typically high standards for research conducted using human subjects and that “[u]niversity human-subjects boards are, as a rule, sensitive to even the slightest possibility of harm to research subjects.” However, they noted that these standards are often not upheld against those studying the impacts and spread of so-called misinformation. They argued, “University researchers must prove to these human-subjects review committees that their work will not harm subjects or violate subjects’ rights. The boards have the power to prevent investigators from conducting a research project altogether.”
The authors of the op-ed went on to note how these research teams have become censorship proxies funded by the U.S. government. “Agencies like the National Science Foundation provide taxpayer dollars to universities like Stanford and the University of Washington as part of a broader government effort to pressure social-media companies into censoring speech related to elections, public health and other matters.” They later added that in some cases “research teams are embedded within social-media companies, feeding the results into databases that companies use to delete posts or label them as misinformation.”
The Stanford Internet Observatory has been identified as one such proxy with programs like the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project both of which were revealed in The Twitter Files to be working closely with Twitter and the federal government to censor Americans. Similar programs mentioned in the Twitter Files and uncovered by past MRC Free Speech America reporting include the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub and University of Dayton's PREVENTS-OH program and the University of Rhode Island Media Education Lab.
Bhattacharya and Lowenthal went so far as to argue that “misinformation” researchers are “defaming” their subjects and conducting studies on them without their consent. They continued, “For scientists and doctors, such defamation can end careers.” Hence many in the medical and scientific professions either “self-censor or find themselves in the cross-hairs of the censorship industrial complex.
The op-ed authors gave the example of, when in 2021 Harvard vaccine expert Martin Kulldorff posted on Twitter (now X), “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should.” The Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit and The Twitter Files revealed that, at that time Kulldorff tweeted that, the Biden administration and its academic censorship researchers were pressuring social media to censor posts critical of COVID-19 vaccines, so as Bhattacharya and Lowenthal noted, Kulldorff found himself suspended.
Bhattacharya and Lowenthal called on Congress to hold the universities acting as censorship proxies to account. “Congress should end federal funding of these unethical projects by agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation,” the authors demanded. “And universities should live up to their stated ethical principles: Stop authorizing research whose primary purpose is the wide-scale violation of Americans’ free-speech rights,” they added.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
