Major Tentacle Sliced Off Censorship Beast With Disgraced Stanford Think Tank Shutdown—What New Form Will It Take?
revolver.news
A victory for free speech:
One of the most notorious censorship think tanks, the Stanford Internet Observatory, is shutting down in the aftermath of months of devastating exposés detailing the organization’s collusion with the federal government to illegally censor First Amendment-protected speech. Stanford Internet Observatory is a private organization doing the government's dirty work:
The sweet spot of the censorship industry, however, lies in the gray zone of a public-private partnership between government agencies that want to censor with plausible deniability and private sector NGO cutouts that exist to do the government’s censorship dirty work for it. This was precisely the story of CISA, formally known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, housed within the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS is, of course, generally the tip of the spear when it comes to corrupted and politically weaponized components of the national security state. CISA played a direct and critical role in flagging First Amendment protected speech as “misinformation,” thereby contributing to government-driven censorship on all sorts of topics (Covid, election rigging, Hunter’s laptop, etc.). As public attention turned toward CISA’s illegal censorship activities, CISA operatives understood the imperative of outsourcing its censorship practices to private-sector NGO cutouts.
The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was one of the key cutout institutions through which CISA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the regime generally carried out its censorship objectives.
EIP, it should be noted, was jointly run from Stamos’ Stanford Internet Observatory and disgraced censorship operative Kate Starbird‘s ironically named Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. But they'll be back.
The nefarious activities of the Stanford Internet Observatory described above should redouble our enthusiasm that such a malicious and censorious organization should be reduced to shambles and its former leaders, Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta cast away in disgrace. This is a major victory for the good guys any way one cuts it, but we still can’t help but wonder: will the same censors simply set up shop in some new organization with a different name but with the same underlying purpose? Tom |
