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...

This afternoon, President Donald Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum that instructs the Department of Justice and “other aspects of [his] government” to investigate Chris Krebs and his acts as the former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). At the signing, President Trump’s White House staff secretary Will Scharf stated: “This is a man who weaponized his position against free speech in the election context and the context of COVID-19. This is a similar Presidential Memorandum to the one you just signed. It addresses his access to government existent clearances he might have and further instructs your Department...

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....

The billionaire founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism to help Democrats win elections. He is the nation’s leading financier of the “mis”- and “disinformation” industries and is now the largest private stakeholder in America’s legacy journalism schools. The most recent Twitter Files released by Matt Taibbi add a deeply disturbing new layer to the story. They show Newmark is at the very heart of an incestuous web of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and corporate media institutions operating in concert to censor political opponents on social media. Newmark is financing the...