When Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center announced last year that its donor Frank McCourt was cutting funding to the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), many of us thought it meant that the Center was getting out of the censorship game. After all, the Twitter Files and an investigation by Rep. Jim Jordan, who is now Chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, revealed that SIO was at the heart of the Censorship Industrial Complex’s work censoring Americans on elections and COVID, which it did on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “While SIO still had other sources of funding,” reported a blogger last year, “the McCourt funding decision was seen by some at SIO as a clear signal that Stanford had soured on its commitment to their work.”
But yesterday, we revealed that the Cyber Policy Center is back in the censorship business and in a big way. Last month, it hosted a strategy session with representatives of the governments of the EU, UK, Australia, and Brazil to coordinate global censorship. The strategy session was secret and only discovered thanks to a whistleblower who provided Jordan’s investigators with the agenda. The funder of that gathering was none other than Frank McCourt through his “Project Liberty Institute.”
Many Americans concerned over the weaponization of government for censorship and lawfare over the last 10 years are frustrated by the lack of prosecutions and convictions of the main actors, particularly the heads of intelligence agencies, who apparently got away with what they did. We have expressed our concern about the apparent lack of any significant reforms at the CIA.
But what has delivered results is Jordan and his committee, which investigated and revealed multiple government censorship efforts, including by Stanford Cyber Policy Center, by the Brazilian government of Twitter, and by the Biden Administration of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Last August, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jordan where he confirmed that the FBI had spread disinformation to its executives relating to the Hunter Biden laptop, that Biden officials “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” and that at Meta “we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.” And last month, Google admitted in a letter to Jordan, similar to the one from Zuckerberg, that the Biden White House had demanded censorship of legal content and that it feared that the European censorship law (DSA) will require it and other tech companies “to remove lawful content” both “within and outside of” the EU.
And now Jordan’s office has sent a letter to Jeff Hancock, the head of the Cyber Policy Center, to demand documents, emails, text messages, and other information related to the Center’s foreign censorship scheme and the September 24 meeting to coordinate governmental and NGO efforts. The Center’s “roundtable brought together foreign officials who have directly targeted American speech and represent a serious threat to the First Amendment. The keynote speaker at this event was Julie Inman-Grant, the Australian eSafety Commissioner, who has explicitly argued that governments have the authority to demand and enforce global takedowns of content.”
Inman-Grant was a keynote speaker at the Stanford meeting and is the creator and head of a global government censorship network, which aims to leverage global economic power of her allies to force US tech firms to comply, including in the U.S. She told the World Economic Forum that her mission is to “coordinate, build capacity… use the tools that we have, and can be effective. But we know we’re going to be, go, much further, when we work together with other like-minded independent statutory authorities around the globe.”
Notes Jordan, “Other attendees and panelists included officials from some of the entities with the worst track records of extraterritorial censorship, including the United Kingdom’s (UK) Ofcom, the EU, and Brazil. By hosting this event, designed to encourage and facilitate censorship compliance with regulators from Australia, Brazil, the EU, and the UK, Stanford is working with foreign censorship officials to vitiate the First Amendment.”
The letter says Jordan “serves as a formal request to preserve all existing and future records and materials relating to the topics addressed in this letter” and demands a response by November 5, next Wednesday.” If the Stanford Cyber Policy Center does not respond, Jordan could issue a subpoena, as he did when investigating the SIO, after the Center actively resisted providing the Committee with information about its censorship-by-proxy scheme.
“This collaboration with foreign censorship officials is even more alarming in light of Stanford’s past efforts to facilitate domestic government censorship of lawful speech,” writes Jordan to Hancock. “As the Committee found in the 118th Congress, the Stanford Internet Observatory, an entity for which you were the faculty director, led the Election Integrity Partnership’s efforts to launder government censorship requests to social media platforms, enabling officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department to covertly silence voices they disapproved of to influence the 2020 election.”
The Election Integrity Project, or EIP, publicly claimed that “EIP did not make recommendations to the platforms about what actions they should take.” That was a lie, as Jordan’s committee revealed at length in a report on “How The Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech.” Some examples from EIP to platforms include: “We recommend labeling all instances of the article being shared on Facebook” and “This has circulated in pro-Trump conservative groups and sub-communities... We recommend that you all flag as false, or remove the posts below.” And “Hi Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter... we recommend it be removed from your platforms.” There are dozens of other examples.
As Jordan notes in his letter, “Not only did Stanford participate in this domestic conspiracy against Americans’ First Amendment rights, but it also attempted to cover up the scheme when the university’s counsel made misrepresentations to the Committee and threatened Committee staff. It seems that Stanford is once more attempting to covertly undermine the First Amendment rights of Americans by collaborating with foreign government officials.”
