Shutting down Stanford’s Internet Observatory will push the US toward the end of democracy | John Naughton

For most of us, the word “medium” means “a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.” To a biologist, however, the term means something quite different: “the nutrient solution in which cells or organs grow.” But there are times when the two concepts merge, and we are living in such a time now.

How is it possible? All developed societies have a media ecosystem, the information environment in which they exist. Until relatively recently, that ecosystem was dominated by print technology. Then, in the mid-20th century, came broadcast technology (more or less), first as radio and later as television, which, from the 1950s to the 1990s, was the era’s dominant communication medium. And then came the Internet and the technologies it has created, the dominant one being the World Wide Web.

Each of these prominent technologies shaped the societies they enveloped. Printing shaped the world for four and a half centuries, followed by broadcasting, which ruled for about 50 years. None of this would have surprised a biologist, who would see human culture as something that grows on an enveloping nutrient. Change the nutrient and you change the culture that grows in it.

We are now early in the period of Internet dominance of our media ecosystem, and we have no real idea how this will play out in the long run. But some clues are starting to emerge. One is related to the idea of ​​public opinion. Until Gallup invented the opinion poll in 1935, there was actually no way to measure what the public as a whole thought about anything. For the next 70 years, improved polling methods and the growth of television broadcasting meant that it was possible to get a general idea of ​​what public opinion might be on political or social issues.

The advent of the Internet, and especially the Internet in the 1990s, began the process of radical fragmentation that has brought us to where we are now: instead of public opinion in the Gallup sense, we have countless audienceseach with different opinions and incompatible ideas about what is true, false, and undecided.

To make matters worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Mad Tom, Dick, and Harry to publish whatever they want on dark global platforms, which are driven to spread the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the production of disinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malevolent superpower out to destroy the democratic world, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than this.

Fortunately, scattered around the world (and mostly in academia) have been organizations whose mission is to conduct informed analysis of the nature and implications of the misinformation that pollutes the online world. Until recently, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) in California was one such outfit. Among other things (he was the first to give Russian support for Donald Trump online in 2016), he raised China’s spying concerns about the Clubhouse app in 2021, partnering with Wall Street Journal in a 2023 report on Instagram and online child sexual abuse material, and developed a curriculum to teach college students how to address trust and safety issues on social media platforms.

But guess what? After five years of pioneering research, it has been reported that the SIO is collapsing. Its founder and director, Alex Stamos, has left, and Renée DiResta, director of research, has not had her contract renewed, while other staff members have been told to look for jobs elsewhere. Stanford, the institutional home of the SIO, denies that it is dismantling the unit and loudly proclaims its commitment to independent research. On the other hand, according to DiResta, the university has drawn up “huge legal bills” protecting SIO researchers from harassment by Republican politicians and conspiracy theorists, and may have decided enough is enough.

Underlying all this are two neuroses. One is Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, as “bad actors—spammers, fraudsters, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people who target children and, yes, hyperpartisans who actively seek to manipulate the public” using digital platforms to achieve their goals is, somehow, anti-conservative.

The other neurosis is, if anything, more troubling: it’s an insanely broad idea of ​​”censorship” that involves labeling social media posts as potentially misleading, fact-checking, de-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution on people’s social media feeds allowing them to remain on a page and even report content for platform review.

If you think such a list is crazy, then join the queue. As I read it, what came to mind was Kenneth Tynan’s memorable definition of a neurosis as “a secret you don’t know you’re keeping.” The secret in this case is simple: the great American experiment with democracy is coming to an end.

What I have read

Vanishing point
AI as self-effacement is a thoughtful (and provocative) essay by Matthew Crawford at Review of the hedgehog.

Take Notes
A nice essay by Julian Simpson is Bits of the Mind’s String on what you can learn about yourself by keeping a notebook.

Presidential investigation
Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American Understack has a detailed piece recalling Watergate and the last time (before Trump) the US had a president who was completely unfit for office.