Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

[Geee]

NY Post

Censorship in the digital age does not look like old-fashioned book burning. Under the guise of combating misinformation, the US government funds universities, ostensibly to analyze social-media trends — but in truth, to help censor the Internet. 

Agencies like the National Science Foundation provide taxpayer dollars to universities like Stanford and the University of Washington as part of a broader government effort to pressure social-media companies into censoring speech related to elections, public health and other matters.

We should know. We’ve experienced this censorship firsthand, and have seen it up close as recently as last month. 

Yet these prestigious universities are violating the prime directive of academic research: to do no harm to its subjects.

 

A lawsuit against the Biden administration in the case that became Murthy v. Missouri uncovered emails in which federal officials threatened to penalize social-media companies unless they complied with orders to banish users who posted speech contrary to the administration’s priorities.

 

Last year, a federal judge reviewing this evidence dubbed the administration’s effort a de facto “Ministry of Truth.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote that in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration “repeatedly pressured” his social-media empire to censor speech — even humor and satire.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and revealed similar evidence in the “Twitter Files,” the public first learned that university misinformation research teams, funded by the government, actively participated in those censorship efforts. 

These academics served as a front for the government’s censorship policy, essentially laundering it in the name of science. 

But if this is research, it is unethical research that harms the human subjects under study as its primary purpose. 

Every legitimate academic institution uses special committees to review the ethics of their studies.

University researchers must prove to these human-subjects review committees that their work will not harm subjects or violate subjects’ rights. The boards have the power to prevent investigators from conducting a research project altogether.

But censorship researchers are plainly doing harm.

For example, in 2021 the Stanford Internet Observatory, funded and supported by the federal government, flagged a tweet by Harvard vaccine expert Martin Kulldorff: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should.” 

Eliminating COVID vaccine criticism was a top priority of the Biden administration at the time. Twitter labeled the tweet misleading and suspended Kulldorff, even though he had correctly summarized the scientific information. 

Social-media sites are engaged in information policing to this day.