Will Oremus reports in the Washington Post:
In the wake of the 2020 election and covid-19 pandemic, there’s been a push from the right to limit the influence of academics and advocacy groups on efforts to moderate online speech. That pressure has a chilling effect on misinformation research and puncture efforts to guard against interference in the 2024 presidential election. Now academics and advocacy groups are asserting their own First Amendment rights. In a legal brief filed last week, Stanford University and two of its internet researchers blasted a Louisiana federal judge’s order that limited the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with them. In other words, they say Doughty is doing just what he accuses the Biden administration of doing: suppressing protected political speech.
In the wake of the 2020 election and covid-19 pandemic, there’s been a push from the right to limit the influence of academics and advocacy groups on efforts to moderate online speech. From House hearings to state laws to lawsuits, Republican leaders and like-minded industry titans such as Twitter CEO Elon Musk are making life more difficult for independent researchers and watchdogs focused on online extremism, misinformation and propaganda.
As my Washington Post colleagues have reported, that pressure could have a chilling effect on misinformation research and puncture efforts to guard against interference in the 2024 presidential election.
Now some of those academics and advocacy groups are asserting their own First Amendment rights.
In a legal brief filed last week, Stanford University and two of its internet researchers blasted a Louisiana federal judge’s order that limited the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with them about online misinformation.
Stanford and the researchers, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, claim that U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 ruling repeatedly quoted them as saying things they never said. Those “invented quotations,” they say, helped Doughty paint an inaccurate picture of their role in what Doughty deemed “censorship” of posts about the 2020 election and the covid-19 pandemic. The injunction he imposed “has cast a chill across academia” and violates Stamos and DiResta’s First Amendment rights, they argue.
Doughty told The Technology 202 he can’t comment on active cases in his court.
Stanford joins the fray as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is set to consider the Justice Department’s appeal of Doughty’s ruling, which the appeals court put on hold until it reaches a final ruling.
Stamos and DiResta aren’t named as defendants in the case. But they feature prominently in the judge’s ruling, which barred government agencies from contact with them. And their filing is the first that takes direct aim at the collateral damage of Doughty’s ruling to the First Amendment rights of academics who study social media.
In other words, they say Doughty is doing just what he accuses the Biden administration of doing: suppressing protected political speech.
The Stanford brief notes that Doughty quoted DiResta four times in his ruling as saying that Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership was designed to “get around” unclear legal authorities and First Amendment issues. In fact, the documents cited for that quote show DiResta simply said there were unclear legal authorities and First Amendment issues; she never said the goal was to “get around” them.
In another instance, Doughty’s ruling quotes an Election Integrity Project report as saying it targeted “domestic speakers,” a phrase that does not appear in the report the ruling cites. Stanford says the report was not targeting any speakers, but rather analyzing whether the instances of online election misinformation the project had collected were domestic or foreign in origin. (The report concluded that the most influential false narratives in the 2020 election came from authentic, domestic accounts, rather than from foreign influence campaigns.)
The issue of the First Amendment rights of people who criticize social media firms’ content moderation was also raised this week in a separate case in which Elon Musk’s renamed Twitter (now called X) sued the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The lawsuit accused the organization of unlawfully scraping X’s data as part of a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers.”
The lawsuit shows Musk “will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions,” the center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said in a statement. He added, “CCDH has no intention of stopping our independent research — Musk will not bully us into silence.”
On Wednesday, three Democratic lawmakers backed the center. Reps. Lori Trahan (Mass.), Sean Casten (Ill.), and Adam B. Schiff (Calif.) sent a letter to X accusing the company of trying to “harass, silence, and suppress research and accountability” for harmful content on its platform.
Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech consulting firm Anchor Change and a former public policy director at Facebook, told The Technology 202 she believes the various efforts to deter academic research into social media firms’ speech policies are misguided, regardless of one’s politics.
“There are some very valid questions here of the roles the government should have, the roles of academia, civil society” in addressing online speech, Harbath said. But she added, “If we're pushing for more transparency from these companies — if we don’t want them to continue to be black boxes — we need to be having folks from academia and civil society doing this research.”
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