Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 10, 2023 6 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Representatives of a US government front group, "Stanford Internet Observatory," denied ever demanding censorship of anyone. They lied, and we have the proof. They got social media companies to censor accurate Covid information in a clear violation of the First Amendment. Bam. Image
Stanford Group Helped US Government Censor Covid Dissidents and Then Lied About It, New Documents Show

A trove of newly released Virality Project reports confirms that the government used a Stanford cut-out to censor true content about Covid vaccines, vindicating Twitter Files reporting
by @galexybrane & @NAffects

A Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) spokesperson says it “did not censor or ask social media platforms to remove any social media content regarding coronavirus vaccine side effects.”

This denial came in response to Twitter Files published by Matt Taibbi in March, which revealed that SIO’s so-called “Virality Project” had pushed platforms to treat user concerns about vaccine mandates and passports as “disinformation” and to consider “stories of true vaccine side effects” to be actionable content on social media.

The Virality Project was an initiative undertaken jointly by Big Tech, universities, and NGOs to combat “anti-vaccine misinformation.” SIO responded to Taibbi’s Twitter Files by claiming that his findings were “inaccurate and based on distortions of email exchanges in the Twitter Files.”

But new evidence shows that Stanford lied about the scope of the Virality Project and that its censorship efforts were undertaken on behalf of the US government.

As Public reported on Tuesday, new documents shared by the House Judiciary Committee revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created the Virality Project’s predecessor, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), to censor protected speech. Explains the committee, “EIP reconstituted as the Virality Project” and continued working with the federal government. The Twitter Files also found that the Project partnered “with several government agencies,” including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Still, Stanford and the mainstream media insist that “disinformation” experts were merely conducting research, and not involved in actual censorship.

Now, an investigation by Public has uncovered clear evidence that the Project was directly and deliberately involved in successful censorship efforts. Public analyzed a trove of newly released Jira system tickets, the Virality Project’s tipline to social media companies. These tickets overwhelmingly contradict Stanford’s assertion that it did not try to get content censored.

The Virality Project, acting as a cut-out for DHS and CISA, worked directly with employees at Facebook, Google, YouTube, TikTok, and more, who were all signed up to their Jira system.

Those companies regularly assured the Project that they were addressing the content it flagged. Companies responded with comments like, “Thanks for flagging this. We have actioned the content,” or “Thanks for escalating to us — our team is looking into this now.”

The Virality Project kept track of actions on the content it flagged, and was frequently successful in getting content labeled or removed by platforms, and in getting users suspended.

The Virality Project appears to have played a major role in one particularly infamous case of Covid-related censorship. On March 15, 2021, Harvard professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff tweeted, “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.”

“Dear Twitter Team,” a representative of the Virality Project wrote in response to Kulldorff’s post, “This Tweet directly contradicts CDC’s advice.”

“Thanks team — we’re looking into this,” a senior Twitter Trust & Safety policy specialist wrote back.

Kulldorff’s tweet was then labeled as misleading and he was temporarily suspended from the platform. Internally, the Virality Project identified Kulldorff, a renowned biostatistician, as a “repeat offender.”

This process was indeed a deliberate, state-sponsored act of censorship. In many egregious instances, the Virality Project — again, a government cut-out — intentionally and knowingly worked to silence and deplatform social media users. Jira records vindicate the Twitter Files and are evidence of First Amendment violations.

Here are some of the Virality Project’s most egregious, absurd, and anti-science censorship efforts:
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This is game over for the "Stanford Internet Observatory."

— It is a front group ("cut out") for the US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

— It is run by a "former" CIA "fellow"

— It lied about what it did

Here's what needs to happen next:

— Congress MUST defund and dismantle CISA. It is a rogue agency that has repeatedly violated the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

— @Stanford President Richard Saller MUST shut down "Stanford Internet Observatory" immediately.

We will not rest until CISA and SIO are shut down. They are a menace to free speech and America's liberal democracy.

They are run by unelected and self-appointed spies and goons who feel entitled to decide what we are allowed to say, hear, read, and write.

They are proven liars, along with the mainstream news media, which spent the last year smearing those of us who blew the whistle on the Censorship Industrial Complex.

Shame on CISA, Stanford, and all of the "journalist" propagandists who defended the censorship regime and the creepy people who run it.

More receipts:

Our ancestors fought and died so that we could have a free country that was run by the people, not by the speech police. It is grotesque that DHS, DOD, NSF, and other agencies secretly created and grew the Censorship Industrial Complex. I hope every presidential candidate will commit to defunding and dismantling it. We Americans are free people. We don't want secret committees of bureaucrats to decide what we are allowed to say, hear, write, and read. Let the Europeans engage in such authoritarian paternalism. Our ancestors invented America to get away from such horrors.

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More from @shellenberger

Jan 20
Biden pardoned Fauci. He says it’s not an admission of guilt. But if Fauci were innocent, no pardon would be needed. The evidence suggests Fauci helped create the Covid pandemic, and then covered it up. The investigation must go forward. All Covid & Fauci Files must be released.
Fauci led an aggressive disinformation effort to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. If the Covid virus didn’t escape from the lab, why did he deliberately spread false or misleading information about it? Why did he repeatedly interfere in the investigation?
Fauci played the media like a fiddle. They called the lab lead a “conspiracy theory.” Then, documents showed that Fauci’s main allies had sought to insert a furin cleavage site in the exact place where it exists on the Covid virus. Reason #7,969 for why the legacy media is dead.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 17
Strong words from LA fire fighters to the chief: "[I]f you had done things right... fatalities would have been reduced, property would have been saved....the preventive systems... were nonexistent... We attribute this to... lack of experience, arrogance, inability to lead..."
Another good scoop by @RichMcHugh @NewsNation

Read 5 tweets
Jan 15
January 2: National Weather Service (NWS) warns of “extreme fire weather conditions” in Los Angeles

Jan. 3: NWS repeats warning in special LA briefing

Jan. 4: LA Mayor Karen Bass flies to Ghana on junket

Jan. 7: LA goes up in flames as Bass poses for photos at cocktail party Image
January 2: "...extreme fire weather conditions... Potential Fire Weather Risk" Image
January 3: "Critical Fire Conditions... fire season will continue in to the New Year!" Image
Read 8 tweets
Jan 9
Over the next few weeks you’re going to hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles.

Those will be lies. They could have prevented them. Governor Newsom cut the funding for preventing forest fires and failed to build sufficient water resources for fighting fires. Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.5 million in funding for the Los Angeles Fire Department and then went to Ghana even though she knew of the risk of catastrophic fires.

It’s true that California, in general, and Los Angeles, in particular, are fiery places. It’s true that the Santa Ana winds made the fires worse.

But Newsom and Bass have known about those hazards for all of their careers and failed to deal with them. Their rank incompetence and lack of leadership are shocking and scandalous.

It’s hard to overstate how badly they screwed up water management. LA firefighters haven’t had the water they needed. Newsom hasn’t built the new water reservoirs that Los Angeles needed. And Newsom even cut the budget for water infrastructure projects last year.

Why is that? Part of the reason is that they were focused on other things. Making the fire department more racially diverse. Climate change. Homelessness.

And the reason they were focused on those things is because those are what the radical Left that controls the Democratic party wanted them to focus on.

Year after year, they do nothing while focusing on things like trans and Trump and climate and ignoring the things that really matter to the people of California.

The Democrats in California aren’t like Democrats in other states. They are radicals. I would know, since when I was a young radical I moved to California for that reason.

As many of us get older, we become more moderate. We become more practical. We understand firefighters and police officers are necessary. We are reminded of the importance of things like safe streets and hard work and good schools.

But more than that, I saw the consequences of radical progressive policies on the environment, homelessness, crime, education, water, and everything else. Violent criminals, in particular, are devouring Los Angeles, Oakland, and the rest of California.

The people who control the Democratic Party in California worship books about Los Angeles, like City of Quartz by the Marxist author Mike Davis. In that book, Davis claims that the problem in Los Angeles is that too much money goes to things like firefighting to protect wealthy neighborhoods.

They did the same thing on crime and homelessness. They failed to provide adequate funding to the police. They weakened the laws that allowed for burglaries and robberies. They subsidized homelessness, attracting homeless people from around the United States to camp illegally and start fires.

Over half of the fires in places like Los Angeles and Oakland are caused by the homeless committing arson, often out of some petty revenge.

We don’t know what started all of the fires, but at least one started within the housing subdivision. Others may have started in the interface between housing and wildlands. Or it could have been started by the homeless.

Whatever the case, California and LA didn’t invest enough in preventing fires because they were distracted by radical Left causes.

When Rick Caruso ran for Mayor against Karen Bass, he called for increasing the fire department’s budget.

A big part of the reason he lost is simply because he was white. I watched focus groups in 2022 and the most racist people were white liberals in Los Angeles. When they discussed the mayoral race, the white people overwhelmingly said they couldn’t vote for a white man and had to vote for a black woman because she was black.

The Latino men and women in separate focus groups were much less racist. They wanted to know about their policies.

It was the radical Left that invented the racist idea that white people alive today should feel guilty about things white people did in the past. Racist white guilt led people in Los Angeles and California to vote against a guy who would have prevented those fires.

And so, over the next few weeks, when you hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles, don’t believe them.

It’s time for California to grow up and move beyond the juvenile Leftism that has destroyed the state and destroyed Los Angeles. We can’t trust our leaders to run anything. It’s not just incompetence. It’s that they really don’t care.

It’s time for Californians to demand new leaders — ones who aren’t beholden to the radicals who control the Democratic Party. .
Called it. Here's @MayorOfLA claiming that the $17.5 million she cut from the budget " really did not impact what we've been going through over the last few days."
The LA Fire Chief disagrees. Last December she said her department was "facing unprecedented operational challenges due to... budgetary reductions" that had "affected the Department's ability to maintain core operations" including "fire prevention..." and "the Department's capacity to prepare for... large-scale emergencies, including wildfires..."

Couldn't be any clearer.Image
Read 5 tweets
Jan 8
The media is ridiculing Trump for saying that wind turbines are killing the whales. But they are. There were 12 whale deaths off the East Coast in December alone. The North Atlantic right whale species will go extinct unless the Trump administration acts to end the slaughter.
The science is clear. The increased wind industry boat traffic is behind the whale deaths. Scientists have also documented illegal, high-decibel noise, which separates mothers from babies. The Biden administration is covering up the evidence for money.

saverightwhales.org/media
Here is the full documentary, "Thrown to the Wind." It contains and explains all of the scientific evidence. The government agencies have refused to conduct the necessary research and are working with the media, paid off by the industry, to spread disinformation.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 6
Justin Trudeau has resigned. He framed himself as an honest, caring, and compassionate leader. He was not. He falsely smeared his critics as Nazis. He justified freezing bank accounts using faked intelligence. And he spread disinformation while demanding censorship. Let's dig in: Image
Trudeau spread disinformation to persecute his critics. He froze their bank accounts. He demanded censorship. We have to talk about the malignant narcissism of Justin Trudeau:

Trudeau froze the bank accounts of protesters by claiming it was an emergency. It wasn't. Public's @galexybrane helped uncover proof that his government used faked intelligence to illegally frame protesting truckers as violent extremists.

Read 5 tweets

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