# Stanford Internet Observatory The **Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO)** was a research center founded in 2019 by [[Alex Stamos]], formerly Facebook's chief security officer. It studied influence operations, platform abuse and online child safety. For about four years it was the best-known academic shop tracking election disinformation. That made it the main institutional target of the right's campaign against what its critics call the "censorship-industrial complex." The campaign lost in court and won anyway. ## What it did - **[[Election Integrity Partnership]] (2020, 2022).** SIO ran it with the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's [[Digital Forensic Research Lab]] and [[Graphika]]. It tracked viral false claims about *voting procedures*, such as wrong dates and fake rules, and flagged some of them to platforms and election officials. - **The Virality Project (2021).** The same model applied to COVID-19 vaccine narratives. - **Research infrastructure.** The *Journal of Online Trust and Safety* (launched 2021) and the annual Trust and Safety Research Conference, both of which outlived the center's election work. ## How it became a target The [[Twitter Files]] reporting recast the Election Integrity Partnership as a censorship clearinghouse, and [[Mike Benz]] popularized the "censorship-industrial complex" frame around it. The key move was redescription: flagging a post to a private platform became "government-directed censorship." It rested on the fact that EIP also talked to government election officials. From there: - **Congress.** [[Jim Jordan]]'s House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Stanford for its communications with the government and the platforms. - **Litigation.** [[America First Legal]] sued Stanford, Stamos, DiResta, [[Kate Starbird]], Graphika and the Atlantic Council in *Hines v. Stamos* (W.D. La.) on behalf of Louisiana activist Jill Hines and [[Jim Hoft]] of the [[Gateway Pundit]]. The theory was that SIO and its partners had conspired with the government to suppress their speech. - **The Supreme Court.** [[Murthy v. Missouri]] (June 26, 2024) reversed an injunction against federal contacts with platforms, holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The underlying theory never won a merits ruling. ## The wind-down Stamos left in November 2023. In June 2024 SIO cut staff and did not renew [[Renée DiResta]]'s contract, among others. Stanford denied it was dismantling the center and cited funding. The election work ended, while the child-safety research, the journal and the conference continued under new leadership. *Hines v. Stamos* was dismissed without prejudice on July 1, 2026, for lack of standing and jurisdiction. The judge was Terry Doughty, who had issued the sweeping injunction in the case that became *Murthy*. He found that "discovery has confirmed the absence of any factual basis to conclude the EIP or VP...coerced any social media platform to censor Plaintiffs' posts or accounts." By then the center's election program had been shut down for two years. **The pattern worth tracking:** the plaintiffs never won, but the cost of defending subpoenas and suits was enough to end the work. Litigation as punishment, rather than as a path to a judgment, is the template the campaign has since applied to other disinformation researchers. ## See also - [[Alex Stamos]] · [[Renée DiResta]] · [[Election Integrity Partnership]] · [[Murthy v. Missouri]] - [[Twitter Files]] · [[Mike Benz]] · [[America First Legal]] · [[Disinformation Hub]] · [[Prebunking]] - [[Clemson Media Forensics Hub]] · [[Institute for Strategic Dialogue]] · [[NewsGuard]] — fellow targets of the anti-disinformation-research campaign