A major disinformation research team's future is uncertain after political attacks

Alex Stamos, the former director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, during congressional testimony in 2014. The research team Stamos led came under fire from Republicans, who alleged that their research amounted to censorship.The Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent research group at Stanford University studying how social media platforms are abused, has lost its top leadership and faces an uncertain future amid a sustained right-wing campaign targeting the study of online falsehoods.

The Election Integrity Partnership, a joint project SIO ran with the University of Washington to track false and misleading information about the 2020 and 2022 elections, became the focus of conspiracy theories that it was a front for the government to suppress speech it didn't like.

"The important work of SIO continues under new leadership, including its critical work on child safety and other online harms, its publication of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, the Trust and Safety Research Conference, and the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium," university spokesperson Dee Mostofi said in a statement.

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