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...

"If I'm being honest...This type of approach was common practice in the USSR.".. On April 22, 2021, the Aspen Institute — an influential civil society group that draws funding from several federal agencies and in recent years has become an odd hodge-podge of boutique-left ideas and hardcore security-state rhetoric — announced that a “Commission on Information Disorder” would be preparing a major report, one that: Aims to identify and prioritize the most critical sources and causes of information disorder and deliver a set of short-term actions and longer-term goals to help government, the private sector, and civil society respond to...

Two Obama-era officials were instrumental in the false flag operation in Alabama ahead of the special election in 2017, reports show. One of the Obama-era officials behind the misinformation campaign in Alabama finally opened up about his group’s role in the caper. Two of the people involved in the social media misinformation campaign in Alabama are denying their roles in the operation, reports indicate. A trove of reports show two Obama-era officials are partially responsible for a misinformation campaign designed to derail Republican Roy Moore’s senatorial campaign in Alabama. Former President Barack Obama campaign organizer, Mikey Dickerson, was instrumental in...

The Democrats’ Biggest Expert Accusing Republicans of Russian Trolling Was a Russian Troll They invented the Russian conspiracy, then they faked the crimes. December 31, 2018 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. When the Democrats and the media wanted to prove that Russian trolls were everywhere, and supporting Republicans, they turned to Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta. Morgan and DiResta had originally been part of Obama’s futile effort to fight ISIS on social media, before discovering a much more lucrative...

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....

Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation. It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors. Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of...

Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation. It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors. snip One of the most intelligent, influential, and fascinating public-facing leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex is...

Over the next several months, FFO will be releasing a series of revelations about domestic censorship operations being run out of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We have spent the past 16 weeks mapping virtually every element of DHS partnerships and operations connected to Internet censorship, and our findings tally to a government scandal so bizarre, and so disturbing, that its full story can only be told through an ongoing series. As a preview, in the clip below (source), you can watch a taxpayer-funded DHS video, instructing children to report their own family members to Facebook for “disinformation” if...

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden's laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute's disinformation commission. Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen's Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice's reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett's hate crime hoax. Commission members' censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The...