# Alex Stamos Security executive who, as Facebook's chief security officer, made the company's first public disclosure of Russian ad buying in 2017 — and then, as the head of a Stanford research center that tracked election disinformation, became one of the principal villains of the right's "censorship-industrial complex" story. His career traces the arc from "platforms didn't do enough about Russian influence" to "platforms and researchers did too much." ## The Russia disclosure (2017) On September 6, 2017, Stamos published Facebook's finding that about **$100,000** had bought roughly **3,000 ads** from about **470 inauthentic accounts and Pages**, "likely operated out of Russia," between June 2015 and May 2017. It was the first acknowledgment from a platform of the [[Internet Research Agency]] operation. He left Facebook in August 2018 after internal disputes over how aggressively to handle Russian activity. (He had earlier left Yahoo in 2015 after the company complied with a secret government order to scan users' mail.) ## Stanford and the backlash In 2019 he founded the [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] (SIO), which with the University of Washington ran the Election Integrity Partnership — flagging viral election falsehoods to platforms in 2020 and 2022. That work became the target: | Date | Event | |---|---| | May 2023 | [[America First Legal]] files *Hines v. Stamos* for plaintiffs including [[The Gateway Pundit]] founder Jim Hoft, alleging a censorship conspiracy | | June 2023 | Stamos sits for a transcribed interview with [[Jim Jordan]]'s House Judiciary Committee (released April 2024) | | Nov 2023 | SentinelOne buys his consultancy with Chris Krebs; Stamos steps down as SIO director | | June 2024 | Platformer reports SIO is being wound down after lawsuits and subpoenas that reached students' names; House Judiciary calls it a "big win" | | Apr 2025 | Trump orders Krebs's clearance revoked and targets SentinelOne; Krebs leaves the company | | Aug 2025 | Stamos joins the AI code-security startup Corridor | | July 1, 2026 | *Hines v. Stamos* is dismissed in full — without prejudice — for lack of standing and personal jurisdiction | > [!note] How the fight ended > The lawsuit failed, but only after the research center it targeted had been wound down. The process was the punishment. This is the same dynamic the vault tracks in [[Trump Retribution Doctrine]] and in the pressure on law firms like [[Perkins Coie]]. In June 2026 he led a group of security leaders urging the administration to restore access to frontier AI security models, a sign of where he now works: AI and code security rather than disinformation. ## See Also - [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] · [[Internet Research Agency]] · [[Meta]] - [[Jim Jordan]] · [[America First Legal]] · [[The Gateway Pundit]] - [[Content Moderation]] · [[Deplatforming]] · [[YouTube]]