This is a very ominous omen, at a time when the US presidential election campaign is drowning every day in a quagmire of misinformation and pathological confrontation on social networks. Washington Post He tells us that the Stanford Internet Observatory, an institute at the leading Silicon Valley university responsible for tracking and neutralizing online misinformation, has just shut down. And his Partnership for Elections with the University of Washington, which sought to identify and debunk the pro-Trump movement’s lies about alleged fraud in the 2020 election, announced online that its work was complete.
A giant joke. Having been cut up, stripped of its staff and funding, and reshaped in its ashes into a shapeless bureaucracy, the observatory has succumbed to nearly four years of relentless attacks and intimidation of its staff, mostly college students, by trolls loyal to the former president. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees paid to defend against two lawsuits filed by far-right groups have also devastated its budget. Add to that the political onslaught, the vile harassment, and the thousands of pages of documents and email exchanges subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative-elect Jim Jordan of Ohio. A Trump zealot, Jordan participated in the January 6 attack on Congress.
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