Gym Jordan’s War
By 
Republicans (and their TWITTER FILES fellow travelers) have successfully had a very chilling effect on numerous scholars of misinformation, including my brilliant colleague Kate Starbird, by falsely accusing them of being part of a government censorship program:
Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and his allies in Congress are demanding documents from and meetings with leading academics who study disinformation, increasing pressure on a group they accuse of colluding with government officials to suppress conservative speech.
Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events.
Last week, Jordan (Ohio) threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests. The university turned over its scholars’ communications with government officials and big social media platforms but is holding back records of some disinformation complaints. Stanford told The Washington Post that it omitted internal records, some filed by students. The university is negotiating for limited interviews.
The push caps years of pressure from conservative activists who have harangued such academics online and in person and filed open-records requests to obtain the correspondence of those working at public universities. The researchers who have been targeted study the online spread of disinformation, including falsehoods that have been accelerated by former president and candidate Donald Trump and other Republican politicians. Jordan has argued that content removals urged by some in the government have suppressed legitimate theories on vaccine risks and the covid-19 origins as well as news stories wrongly suspected of being part of foreign disinformation campaigns.
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Even when her colleagues and peers publicly backed her, the abuse took its toll. Starbird walked away from her Twitter account, which had roughly 50,000 followers, and cut back on media appearances, a venue in which she could explain her findings to a broader audience.
Another source of this attack on actual free speech in the name of fake “free speech”, as detailed here, was a disgraceful Intercept hit job by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein. I don’t like…well, to be honest, I like saying “I told you so,” but in this case I will just quote the last paragraph without comment:
And there’s a deeper story here about something that has gone badly wrong with one part of the American left, which I used to be reasonably friendly with, and have found increasingly weird and alienating over the last few years (some things I used to think, I don’t think any more; some people I respected, I’ve given up on). One of the key consequences of the Intercept article has been to undermine efforts to understand, let alone push back against, democratic disinformation. I suspect that is an intended consequence. The article’s authors make it clear that they don’t think that government should have any role in making the information environment better. That’s an argument that I strongly disagree with, but it is not an inherently stupid argument. What is stupid – and worse than stupid – is the conspiratorial logic they use to defend it, patching together out-of-context quotes, breathless rhetoric, and disconnected factoids to suggest by sheer force of volume that There Is Something Wicked Going On. A healthy distrust of the state has mutated into a creepy wake-up-sheeple paranoia. The Intercept is still publishing good journalism (e.g.). But this is a style of writing that it needs to cut off at the roots.
OK, one brief comment: it extends (in at least one case) to Brazil, and we should perhaps think had about whether we’re dealing with “left” here at all.