Groups Claiming to Fight “Disinformation” Hide What They Are Doing
At Public, Michael Shellenberger writes:
The people who say they are fighting disinformation appear to be transparent and trustworthy. Groups like Stanford Internet Observatory and the Atlantic Council put photos, bios, and contact information for their staff and board members on their websites. They record videos that explain their work. And they regularly write for mainstream media publications.
But of the 50 top ”anti-disinformation” governmental and nongovernmental groups in the world, which Matt Taibbi’s investigative team at Racket identified, only one has agreed to answer our questions, and only 10 even bothered responding to our repeated requests for an interview.
It’s reasonable to wonder if this low response rate has something to do with the fact that I have repeatedly called for all of them to be defunded and dismantled because they are violating a fundamental human right.
But the key “disinfo” censorship groups are not giving substantive interviews to other independent journalists. Indeed, over the last several weeks, they have increasingly gone quiet....
Two weeks ago, BBC heavily promoted the launch of its own “anti-disinfo” program called “Verify,” but has refused to answer questions about it or make its 27-year-old host, whose role is apparently to fact-check all of the news, available for an interview.
And now, the lead censorship organization, Stanford Internet Observatory, is refusing to respect a House Judiciary Committee subpoena for records in the form of “tickets” from the Jira project management software system...
Why? What are Stanford Internet Observatory, Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, BBC, and other pro-censorship organizations hiding?
Stanford Internet Observatory says it was simply “flagging” disfavored views to Twitter and Facebook, not demanding that they be censored, and not acting on behalf of the government.
But the de facto leader of the SIO, and the rest of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, openly boasted that the Virality Project existed to act as a proxy for the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security in demanding censorship by social media platforms of true vaccine side effect information.
