# Clemson Media Forensics Hub The Media Forensics Hub is a research center at Clemson University in South Carolina, co-directed by communication professor Darren Linvill and economist Patrick Warren. It launched in May 2020, funded through the South Carolina Research Authority. It grew out of the pair's 2017 project that exposed more than 3 million tweets from the Russian [[Internet Research Agency]]. In 2022 it received a $3.8 million Knight Foundation grant, which Clemson matched. ## Signature work - **The IRA tweet archive (2017–18):** one of the foundational public datasets on the [[Internet Research Agency]]. - **[[Storm-1516]] (December 2023):** the Hub says it "first publicly identified" the operation, which had been active since at least August 2023. In October 2024 Linvill traced a fake Bucks County ballot-destruction video to it, which U.S. officials then attributed to Russia. Linvill calls the operation "IRA 2.0." - **[[Operation Overload]] (March 25, 2026):** the report "Matryoshka's Next Layer" documented AI-generated impersonation accounts on Bluesky pushing pro-[[AfD]] content around Germany's 2025 election, with help from [[Antibot4Navalny]]. ## Political pressure In early March 2023, Rep. [[Jim Jordan]], as chair of the House Judiciary Committee and its weaponization subcommittee, sent document requests to Clemson, Stanford, the University of Washington and the German Marshall Fund. They sought communications since 2015 with the federal government and platforms about content moderation. These were letters, not subpoenas. The [[Stanford Internet Observatory]], another recipient, wound down in 2024. No 2025–26 action aimed at the Hub specifically has been confirmed. ## See Also - [[Storm-1516]] - [[Operation Overload]] - [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] - [[Fact-Checking]] - [[Disinformation Hub]]