Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

[grarpamp]

The depth and breadth of 1984 is unprecedented...
Everything "* Security"... means 1984.


Twitter Files: Meet Academic Disinfo Queen Claire Wardle

https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/twitter-files-brown-universitys-claire
Authored by Paul Thacker via The DisInformation Chronicle

https://www.leefang.com/p/biden-justice-dept-intervened-to
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcQlhX3WRtk
https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/video/alex-stamos-social-media-and-digital-democracy
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/cwardle

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.

    CISA says they will get back to explain how often Wardle briefed
them. pic.twitter.com/7hICzzI1bD
    — Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) June 14, 2023

Subscribers to The DisInformation Chronicle can read the rest here...