Yet more “innovative” – and comprehensive – ways in which US taxpayer-funded groups “communicated” with Big Tech behind major social media are coming to light. This one concerns the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub.
Twitter Files’ Matt Taibbi’s Substack project Racket News reports that the response to their FOIA requests unveiled what is referred to as “a tight-knit relationship between university professors, federal law enforcement, and the news media.”
The emails that went back and forth between the founders of the Clemson Hub and Twitter and Facebook (between July 2019 and September 2022) show that the focus was not only on removing content and accounts but also on making sure there was cooperation with politically aligned media like CNN (one of Twitter’s emails said this was already happening in the form of “data sharing”).
And while these social and legacy media are private, “disinformation research” done at Clemson was sponsored by South Carolina Research Authority – which is funded by taxpayer money. In October 2022, the National Science Foundation awarded (or rewarded?) Clemson’s Hub with a $5 million grant.
But the roundabout ties with the government don’t stop there: The documents also reveal that the professors behind the Clemson Hub were “coordinating” not only with CNN, but also federal law enforcement, and, with Graphika.
Racket News writes that the emails they got via FOIA show Clemson was receiving “help with resources” from law enforcement.
As for Graphika – this social media analytics firm says it is “the most trusted provider of intelligence” meant to protect the integrity of global elections, counter foreign malign influence, detect coordinated harassment and incitement to violence, and so on.
One entity that certainly trusted Graphika – to flag online speech for censorship, that is – is the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), among others of similar provenance.
The House Judiciary Committee looking into online media space manipulations ahead of the 2020 presidential ballot established that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had its hand in the setting up of Stanford and Washington universities’ scheme EIP – which then allegedly went on to collude with DHS’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
