The investigation stems from a legal campaign led by allies of former president Donald Trump to cast the study of misinformation as part of a broader conspiracy to censor conservative voices online. It has transformed the daily life and work of Wardle and many others who worked at tracking election misinformation online, a field now reeling as the 2024 presidential race enters its final months.
Wary of the political scrutiny, researchers held back from publicly airing some of their insights on the spate of conspiracy theories erupting online after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, according to one such researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of political retribution. False rumors and disinformation have proliferated online as the nation reels from that shooting and President Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
Just last month, researchers had notched a victory, when the Supreme Court reversed a lower-court ruling restricting tech companies and the government from communicating about misinformation online. But the ruling hasn’t deterred Republicans from bringing lawsuits and sending a string of legal demands.
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House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has peppered academics, including Wardle, with document requests as part of a broad probe into the alleged weaponization of government against conservatives. Earlier this month, Meedan, a nonprofit focused on promoting reliable information, received a request from Jordan about its efforts to monitor misinformation related to the 2024 election, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Jordan said the Supreme Court ruling emboldened him to continue with his efforts “to better protect Americans harmed by the unconstitutional censorship-industrial complex.”
The GOP campaign has eroded the once thriving ecosystem of academics, nonprofits and tech industry initiatives dedicated to addressing the spread of misinformation online. “I worry that we’re going to head into the election with a blindfold over our eyes, without data to understand what political advertising, disinformation and foreign influence looked like,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute.
Two University of Washington professors, Ryan Calo and Kate Starbird, warned in a July 4 article in the academic journal Science that the initiative has jeopardized academic freedom. “Courts, elected officials, and the public must stand up once more to this threat to independent inquiry and the American democratic process,” they wrote.
The ranks of misinformation researchers swelled following the 2016 elections, amid revelations that Russia had stoked divisions online to help elect Trump. Researchers rooted out attempts by Russia, China and Iran to influence elections on social media. In 2020, they studied how Trump used his social media following to develop one of the world’s most powerful political megaphones — and often used it to spread falsehoods about voting or the pandemic.
Four years later, the field is depleted. The Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the most prominent academic institutions studying misinformation, collapsed last month. Some researchers, burned out by online attacks and legal scrutiny, are fleeing the subject. And companies, philanthropies and other grant-giving institutions are withdrawing funding, spooked by the political controversy now surrounding the field.
For Wardle, who left Brown in late June for a tenure-track professor post at Cornell University, the constant monitoring and backlash spurred her decision to shift from responding to misinformation to a proactive topic: how to improve information systems like media.
“It’s just the drip, drip, drip,” she said. “There’s been this serious chilling effect.”
For months, Wardle feared that anyone who emailed her would be pulled into the dragnet. She hesitated before posting on social media and declined media interviews and public speaking engagements. She told conference organizers she would be less candid on panels streamed on YouTube out of concern that her comments could be taken out of context.
Brown University said in a statement that the Information Futures Lab, where Wardle worked, would continue studying “how a growing information crisis is impacting people, economics and democracies.”
“Our commitment and focus at Brown has been on supporting the academic freedom of researchers at the Information Futures Lab, including as we responded to questions from a Congressional committee, per standard practice,” university spokesman Brian Clark said.
Stefanie Friedhoff, the lab’s director, said she has felt “supported and reassured” by how Brown has handled the requests from Jordan’s committee.
Amid the litigation, some researchers are building elements of a collective defense. The Coalition for Independent Technology Research hosts a forum convening researchers from around the world to discuss threats to their work and lend emotional support. It also directs members to a legal-defense fund that provides lawyers to advise researchers on how to respond to document demands, subpoenas or lawsuits.
Nina Jankowicz, who was briefly head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, has formed a political advocacy group, the American Sunlight Project, to raise public awareness of the toll attacks on research are having on national security and free expression.
“Researchers are afraid to deal with and investigate some of the most important issues of our time because they’re afraid of being drawn into investigations, afraid for the safety of their families,” she said.
On Monday, a judge in Delaware dismissed Jankowicz’s lawsuit against Fox News, which alleged that the TV network defamed her as a proponent of censorship. Jankowicz told The Washington Post she disagrees with the decision and plans to appeal it in the 3rd Circuit. Fox News said in a statement that the decision protects the First Amendment and called Jankowicz’s complaint “politically motivated.”
Tech companies’ 2021 decisions to suspend Trump from social networks infuriated conservatives, many of whom argued the events confirmed their long-running concerns that tech platforms’ content moderation policies were biased against Republicans. They began to flex their political power in state capitals and the House of Representatives to launch lawsuits and investigations, publishing examples they turned up from communications between the government and tech platforms to allege a broad conspiracy to undermine the First Amendment.
The Republicans had an ally in Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in the fall of 2022 and swiftly allowed a handful of writers to publish the “Twitter Files,” reams of internal company communications that he said showed the company’s earlier efforts to undermine free speech.
Musk’s move prompted other tech companies to pull back from efforts to trace falsehoods on their platforms. Some companies have limited researcher tools that allow academics to pull the hood back on their platforms, and it is more difficult to study newer platforms like TikTok. Once-tightknit relationships with tech company employees have disintegrated, researchers say, after employees who had championed their work were pushed out.
“This is a perfect storm of events,” said Brandi Geurkink, executive director at the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, which was formed in 2022.
Geurkink and other researchers celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision in June as a rebuke against legal threats. But the court ruled on procedural grounds, avoiding clarifying which efforts to fight online misinformation are constitutional. While the case continues in lower courts, Republican state attorneys general say they plan to continue seeking documents to prove their allegations, spurring renewed scrutiny.
Jordan’s office did not respond to a request to quantify how many demands it has sent to researchers. Nadgey Louis-Charles, a Judiciary Committee spokeswoman, said lawmakers had “uncovered incontrovertible proof” that the Biden administration “directed and coerced Big Tech and Big Academia to censor Americans’ constitutionally protected speech.”
The House panel on the weaponization of the federal government, which Jordan also chairs, “will continue its critical investigative work to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights and put a stop to the censorship industrial complex,” she said.
The Stanford Internet Observatory incurred millions of dollars in legal fees related to the investigations and lawsuits before it shut down. The Election Integrity Partnership, which the observatory operated in conjunction with the University of Washington, said it would not continue its work tracking voter suppression and election denial in the 2024 race or future elections.
Nonprofits are also struggling to find funding in an increasingly polarized political environment. First Draft, Wardle’s nonprofit that helped organizations with misinformation challenges, closed in 2022 after donors significantly scaled back funding.
Federal agencies have also pulled back. Last year, the National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats. In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security dissolved its Disinformation Governance Board after three weeks of broad conservative backlash to the initiative and Jankowicz.
Wardle realized the backlash was reverberating offline a year ago when members of the Rhode Island state legislature received an article that called her lab at Brown University the “number one leader nationally” in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
She won’t be tracking election misinformation during the 2024 presidential elections.
“Who is doing that in November?” she said. “There’s a massive hole.”
