Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex
The untold story of Stanford's pivotal place in the military-industrial-academic complex -- once trained on foreign foes, and that has now turned on dissenters from Ruling Class orthodoxy
Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex
In June the Supreme Court is likely to rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps "the most massive attack against free speech" ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.
The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News' new "Censorship Files" series, and continuing installments of the "Twitter Files" series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous. But the roots of what some have dubbed the censorship industrial complex stretch back decades, born of an alliance between government, business, and academia that Democrat Sen. William Fulbright termed the "military-industrial-academic-complex" – building on President Eisenhower's formulation – in a 1967 speech.
For RealClearInvestigations, I reviewed public records and court documents and interviewed experts to trace the origins and evolution of the government's allegedly unconstitutional censorship efforts. It is a rich history that includes the battles to defeat America's adversaries in World War II and the Cold War; the development of Silicon Valley; the post-9/11 War on Terror; the Obama administration's transition to targeting domestic violent extremism broadly; and the rise of Donald Trump.
If there is one ever-present player in this saga, it is the storied institution of Stanford University. Its idyllic campus has served as the setting over the last 70-plus years for a pivotal public-private partnership linking academia, business, and the national security apparatus. Stanford's central place, particularly in developing technologies to thwart the Soviet Union during the Cold War, would persist and evolve through the decades, leading to the creation of an entity called the Stanford Internet Observatory that would serve as the chief cutout – in critics' eyes – for government-driven censorship in defense of "democracy" during the 2020 election and beyond.
Read the whole story at RCI.