Twitter Files: Meet Academic Disinfo Queen Claire Wardle
Authored by Paul Thacker via The DisInformation Chronicle (subscribe here),
The Washington Post defended campus researchers collaborating with federal agencies to censor Americans in an awkward, bumbling article last week, alleging that congressional staff demanding university documents were “harassing academics” who studied falsehoods spread by Trump. In reality, Congress is investigating campus employees who have little in common with traditional university scholars teaching Proust or studying the atmospheric chemistry of distant planets.
Just last year, one Stanford University researcher disclosed that he and other academics at Stanford and the University of Washington worked with an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves,” admitting that academics served as a cutout for federal censoring of Americans. The DHS agency campus researchers collaborated with is called the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.
In a recent investigation, Tablet magazine noted that in 2021 CISA began determining which ideas Americans were allowed to discuss and debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Documents I discovered at Twitter’s headquarters further tie these censorship efforts to another researcher—Brown University’s Claire Wardle.
The Washington Post defended campus researchers collaborating with federal agencies to censor Americans in an awkward, bumbling article last week, alleging that congressional staff demanding university documents were “harassing academics” who studied falsehoods spread by Trump. In reality, Congress is investigating campus employees who have little in common with traditional university scholars teaching Proust or studying the atmospheric chemistry of distant planets.
In a recent investigation, Tablet magazine noted that in 2021 CISA began determining which ideas Americans were allowed to discuss and debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Documents I discovered at Twitter’s headquarters further tie these censorship efforts to another researcher—Brown University’s Claire Wardle.
A peek behind the paywall;
As reported by the Washington Post, congressional staff are now investigating University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, who runs a government-funded think tank on disinformation. But the Post failed to report that Starbird serves on CISA’s advisory committee.
A new document disclosed by reporter Lee Fang finds that when reporters sent a freedom of information act (FOIA) request to understand Starbird’s work with CISA, a federal attorney intervened to delay release of this information and review CISA documents that might become public.
With so little of this context reported by the Post, it’s not surprising that their misleading article kicked off a twitterstorm of Democratic party complaints.
“Another day, another pointless witch-hunt,” tweeted David Brock, who the New York Times once labeled as the propaganda artist behind “Hillary Clinton’s outrage machine.” Meanwhile, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse drew awkward comparisons between Congress investigating CISA allied campus researchers to the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial operation.
The chair of CISA’s advisory committee is Tom Fanning, the CEO of the energy firm Southern Company. In a 2015 speech, Senator Whitehouse called out Southern Company and other energy firms for orchestrating climate denial by funding campus research.
Nonetheless, campus researchers’ ties to federal agencies that have been censoring Americans can be easily found with a bit of curiosity and few minutes spent on Google.
“The Election Integrity Partnership started with our team at Stanford sending a group of interns to go work with the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS, to work on election security,” said Stanford’s Alex Stamos in a talk last year. Because the government did not have legal authority to engage in certain activities, Stamos explained, he and others “worked to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves.”
In an August 2020 Commonwealth Club talk with New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel, Stamos explained that the Election Integrity Partnership’s goal was to not just study social media disinformation, but to censor that disinformation, in real time during the 2020 election.
Our goal is to operationalize our work, so we can have mitigating impacts in the middle of the election season, during election day, and then—I think critically this year—for the handful of days after the election. And then we will still do our academic research. We’ll still be able to publish our findings. But hopefully when we do so, we can say we were able to find and to mitigate the impact, before it ever happened.
Besides holding a position at Stanford, Stamos also runs the Krebs Stamos Group, a private consulting firm he founded with Chris Krebs, the first director of CISA.
4. Like University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, Stamos serves on the advisory committee of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA--a DHS agency pic.twitter.com/LCTxDWZRSa
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) June 14, 2023
Central figure
But the central figure in recent movements by universities to partner with government censors is Claire Wardle. In 2015, Wardle collaborated with multiple organizations to start First Draft as a means to study and address trust and truth in the media...
7. Guess who came calling? I tripped over this document marked “for official use only” that finds Wardle had also been chosen to brief CISA’s advisory committee.
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) June 14, 2023
CISA says they will get back to explain how often Wardle briefed them. pic.twitter.com/7hICzzI1bD
Subscribers to The DisInformation Chronicle can read the rest here...
