Op-ed: University counter-disinformation shops shred their ethics to aid censorship
Op-ed: University counter-disinformation shops shred their ethics to aid censorship
Why are human subjects review boards AWOL?
Academic counter disinformation initiatives claim they are just doing research, but often defame and censor their research subjects by flagging content to social media for labeling and removal.
An New York Post op-ed with Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford Professor of Health Policy, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Teaser below. Follow the link at the end to read the full version.
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.
Read the full article.
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I sympathize with the spirit of your proposal. However, expecting university REBs to rise above the reigning dogmas of the age to anticipate harm is far beyond their capabilities. Disinformation is bad! Research to combat it is good! Approved! Gender affirming care is good! Research to support it is good! Approved! Critiques of genderism are bad! Research into its potential harms is bad! Not approved! Promoting vaccination is good! Research to support promoting maximum vaccination at all times is good! Approved! Etc etc.
The rise of ethics talk at unis has accompanied astonishingly egregious ethics failures which we will lament in due time. The fact is that for most people “ethics” means nothing more complicated than “current conventional wisdom on who is naughty and who is nice”. If you demand REBs “do more” you are asking for more of that definition of ethics, good and hard.
I sympathize with you as someone who researched the Involuntary Celibacy Community since 2017 for a threat assessment thesis paper. I have had the same experience with my own colleagues who were researching Incels as a novel terrorist organization.
When I presented my own research on Incels proving that Incels do not pose any real danger nor a threat to national security of the United States, my colleagues were appalled, some tried to fail me, and blocked me via online because I simply did not agree with imprisoning innocent people for speaking freely about the problems of dating and how feminism is hurting men & women online.