Free Republic

The Stanford Internet Observatory, a small but prominent research group studying abuse on social media platforms, looks to be in crisis, according to a report by Platformer. Some key staff have departed recently, including founding director Alex Stamos and research director Renée DiResta, Platformer reports. A handful of staff have left recently after not having their contracts renewed, and other members have been told to look for other jobs. Platformer describes the turmoil as a “dismantling” of the research group. Stanford Internet Observatory research centers on some of the most pressing types of abuse online, including threats to democracy and...

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files....

This evening I received an email (shared below) from Davey Alba at the New York Times. Davey explained that “researchers” from two organizations with direct connections to and funding from Facebook were defaming both myself personally and Gab as a whole for spreading “misinformation.” I’ll get into the baseless and defamatory claims, but first I’d like you to tell you a little more about these two organizations. Stanford Internet Observatory is led by Alex Stamos who is the former Chief Security Officer for Facebook. The CTO of Stanford Internet Observatory, David Thiel, also worked at Facebook before starting at SIO....

Former Facebook insider Alex Stamos tells @brianstelter: "We have to turn down the capability of these Conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences... There are people on YouTube for example that have a larger audience than daytime CNN."

Many have been critical of Google’s plan to launch a censored search engine in China, now a former Facebook executive has called out Google’s CEO for lying about the company’s motives. Facebook’s former security chief Alex Stamos took to Twitter recently to attack Google CEO Sundar Pichai for his comments defending the company’s decision to move into the China market with its censored search engine known as “Project Dragonfly,” Silicon Beat reports. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Pichai stated that Google was “committed to serving users in China” and compared Chinese censorship laws to the “right...

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer who helped track down how Russia harnessed the network for its 2016 disinformation campaign, is under a spotlight and reportedly set to resign later this year amid fallout over the social network's work with a data mining firm used by the Trump campaign. The social network is reeling from revelations that data for 50 million users was harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and facing renewed scrutiny from lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, putting Stamos’s future at Facebook in doubt.