Reporters Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel made the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times with "G.O.P. Strikes At Researchers Into Deception -- A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics.”
It’s yet another Times attempt to dismiss concerns about the government squelching of free speech in the name of protecting citizens from “misinformation” and “disinformation” regarding COVID. This time the angle was sympathy for university-based researchers who now have to justify pressuring social media outlets, especially Twitter, into censor conservatives whose views were considered dangerous by so-called “public health experts” – even when those views were correct.
On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation, accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online.
The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas -- demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups' ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved.
They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise -- and when another presidential election is around the corner. 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.
Even as Stanford University was mentioned several times for its misinformation expertise, there was no mention in the piece of the Twitter blacklisting of Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for going against the “expert” trend demanding mandatory lockdowns and masking, a supposedly “extreme” position now vindicated by science.
The Times remained in denial.
Much of the disinformation surrounding both issues has come from the right. Many Republicans are convinced that researchers who study disinformation have pressed 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 communications show government officials urging Twitter to take action against accounts spreading disinformation but stopping short of ordering them to do, as some critics claimed.
But Matt Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” investigation showed these same researchers admitted to reducing the reach of what they called “disinformation,” but true content” as well. MRC’s Free Speech America project has much more on COVID censorship issues.
The Times, a journalistic entity that relies on the concept of free expression to exist, seemed awfully blasé about government interference in free expression, perhaps because the Times was in no danger of having its own lucrative limited. So as long as the federal government didn’t personally shut down a non-compliant social media account, there was nothing to worry about.
The House Judiciary Committee has focused much of its questioning on two collaborative projects. One 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 organized by Stanford, was called the Virality Project and focused on the spread of disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
Both subjects have become political lightning rods, exposing the researchers to partisan attacks online that have become ominously personal at times.
Personal attacks are out of line – but where has the Times been hiding the last three years, when COVID skeptics have had their livelihoods threatened or ruined for not adhering to the party line on COVID hysteria?
