Fingers are being pointed at House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) for squelching research to identify and clamp down on misinformation, The Washington Post is reporting.
According to the report, researchers seeking to figure out ways to weed out misrepresentations and lies with another election looming are blaming Jordan and a handful of his GOP collegues for making their lives miserable.
As the Post's Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Joseph Menn wrote, "The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online."
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Case in point, they note, is research being done at Stanford University that is stalling out under the threat of litigation.
Officials at the university, "... are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings."
According to the report dozens of analysts, "government officials, physicians, nonprofits and research funders, expressed frustration with how they are being treated."
One critic of the GOP's "war" on Big Tech tied to harassing President Joe Biden's administration that is hampering much needed safeguards is questionable.
According to Jen Jones, of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, "This effort is clearly intended to deter researchers from pursuing these studies and penalize them for their findings.”
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"Disinformation scholars, many of whom tracked both covid-19 and 2020 election-rigging conspiracies, also have faced an onslaught of public records requests and lawsuits from conservative sympathizers echoing Jordan’s probe," the report states before adding, "Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation is representing the founder of the conspiracy-spreading website, the Gateway Pundit, in a May lawsuit alleging researchers at Stanford, the University of Washington and other organizations conspired with the government to restrict speech. The case is ongoing."
You can read much more here.
