The anti-‘disinformation’ group challenging Texas’s TikTok ban
Hudson Crozier
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Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) faces a lawsuit for banning TikTok in state agencies and universities over its ties to China. The nature of the legal challenge is curious, considering who is bringing it forward.
The Coalition for Independent Technology Research, which includes “academics, journalists, civil society researchers, and community scientists,” accused Abbott of violating the First Amendment rights of university faculty. Taking TikTok away “imposes a profound burden on speech” by affecting teaching and scholars’ ability to conduct research on the app, the suit argues.
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A careful look at the coalition’s members list shows the kind of “research” it wants to protect, and it’s not only studies about online social trends or other innocuous projects. It reveals a vast anti-“disinformation” network dedicated to helping liberal elites control public thought. This includes Renee DiResta of Stanford University and the Stanford Internet Observatory.
DiResta and the observatory were involved in the Election Integrity Partnership, a project that helped the federal government fight online “misinformation” ahead of the 2020 election. The EIP developed a “ticketing” system to track and submit thousands of social media posts for platforms to take down or suppress. The partnership was formed “in consultation with” the cybersecurity arm of the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, both of which were involved in filing tickets.
The same private entities formed the Virality Project, which used similar methods to help platforms censor skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine. The researchers “formed strong ties with” President Joe Biden’s Office of the Surgeon General and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take direction on what “anti-vaccine and vaccine hesitancy” content they should target. TikTok was among the companies involved in both the EIP and Virality Project.
A class-action lawsuit filed in May accuses DiResta and the Stanford lab she leads of acting as unofficial government censors through these initiatives. DiResta reportedly serves as a “subject matter expert” on false and misleading information for the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agency has used her as a lecturer and cited her research on these topics.
Regardless of the merits of the TikTok lawsuit, the irony is astounding. The CITR alleges that Texas’s governor violated the right to free speech by preventing research projects involving TikTok. Two such projects that CITR members have conducted violate that same right in spirit if not in law.
But the rabbit hole goes deeper.
A CITR member organization called Meedan is also a select partner with the Global Disinformation Index, which has received funding from the State Department. The GDI’s primary function is to “defund” mostly right-leaning media sites by putting them on a blacklist for advertisers. It’s worth noting that an anonymous member of its advisory panel expressed ethical “concern” about the blacklist.
Another member of the coalition is the Social Science Research Council, which “collects and synthesizes research on how to mitigate the influence of false, misleading, or hateful narratives online” through an initiative called MediaWell. The council hopes that MediaWell will help “regulatory … efforts to strengthen political discourse, reclaim the democratic potential of social media, reduce the spread of hatred and incivility, and strengthen our democracies,” it said in a 2019 statement.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, another CITR member, helps major online platforms with content moderation. Dozens of government agencies around the world currently fund the liberal group, which considers “misgendering” to be censor-worthy speech.
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Additionally, Biden’s National Science Foundation has awarded over $420,000 to the University of Texas at Austin to study the “impact of misinformation” and “address societal problems that stem from misinformation.” This university is one of many on CITR’s list.
All of these members align with CITR’s “core values,” its website says. It’s odd that a group claiming to fight for intellectual freedom supports government propagandists, speech police, and other elitist “experts” on what is true and false.
Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.