Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

 Censorship in the digital age does not look like old-fashioned book burning. Under the guise of combating misinformation, the US government funds universities, ostensibly to analyze social-media trends — but in truth, to help censor the Internet. 

Agencies like the National Science Foundation provide taxpayer dollars to universities like Stanford and the University of Washington as part of a broader government effort to pressure social-media companies into censoring speech related to elections, public health and other matters.

We should know. We’ve experienced this censorship firsthand, and have seen it up close as recently as last month. 

Yet these prestigious universities are violating the prime directive of academic research: to do no harm to its subjects.

A lawsuit against the Biden administration in the case that became Murthy v. Missouri uncovered emails in which federal officials threatened to penalize social-media companies unless they complied with orders to banish users who posted speech contrary to the administration’s priorities.

Last year, a federal judge reviewing this evidence dubbed the administration’s effort a de facto “Ministry of Truth.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote that in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration “repeatedly pressured” his social-media empire to censor speech — even humor and satire.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and revealed similar evidence in the “Twitter Files,” the public first learned that university misinformation research teams, funded by the government, actively participated in those censorship efforts. 

These academics served as a front for the government’s censorship policy, essentially laundering it in the name of science. 

But if this is research, it is unethical research that harms the human subjects under study as its primary purpose. 

Every legitimate academic institution uses special committees to review the ethics of their studies.

University researchers must prove to these human-subjects review committees that their work will not harm subjects or violate subjects’ rights. The boards have the power to prevent investigators from conducting a research project altogether.

But censorship researchers are plainly doing harm.

For example, in 2021 the Stanford Internet Observatory, funded and supported by the federal government, flagged a tweet by Harvard vaccine expert Martin Kulldorff: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should.” 

Eliminating COVID vaccine criticism was a top priority of the Biden administration at the time. Twitter labeled the tweet misleading and suspended Kulldorff, even though he had correctly summarized the scientific information. 

Social-media sites are engaged in information policing to this day.

Just last month, YouTube censored an audio interview by Prof. Bryce Nickels with two journalists who had exposed political interference in the Robert Koch Institute, the German equivalent of the CDC. 

The journalists’ exposé had generated a scandal that called the German government’s draconian COVID response into question. Did some Internet “research” team induce the takedown? 

After one of us lodged a complaint on X and embarrassed the company, YouTube restored the video — without explaining why it had been removed. 

University human-subjects boards are, as a rule, sensitive to even the slightest possibility of harm to research subjects.

They generally require investigators to show they will protect subjects’ confidentiality, and that the publication of results will not harm them.

But human subjects’ boards have been AWOL on misinformation research, which purposefully identifies those deemed to be disseminating misinformation.

It’s even worse when the research teams are embedded within social-media companies, feeding the results into databases that companies use to delete posts or label them as misinformation. 

These university researchers directly participate in defaming their research subjects — without the subjects’ knowledge. 

For scientists and doctors, such defamation can end careers.

No scientist wants to be labeled as a misinformation spreader. Such labels are a direct smear on scientists’ reputations, the coin of the realm in their disciplines. 

So many scientists silence themselves: They don’t want to risk writing what they know to be true for fear of being canceled.

Congress should act to penalize universities that don’t meet basic human-subjects protection obligations in conducting misinformation research.

Better yet, Congress should end federal funding of these unethical projects by agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. 

And universities should live up to their stated ethical principles: Stop authorizing research whose primary purpose is the wide-scale violation of Americans’ free-speech rights.

Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, is a professor of health policy at Stanford Medical School and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Andrew Lowenthal is CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties initiative, and a former fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

https://nypost.com/2024/10/13/opinion/universities-shred-ethics-to-aid-social-media-censorship/