House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan Demands Stanford Turn Over Documents Relating To Foreign Censorship Scheme

When Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center announced last year that its donor Frank McCourt was cutting funding to the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), many of us thought it meant that the Center was getting out of the censorship game. After all, the Twitter Files and an investigation by Rep. Jim Jordan, who is now Chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, revealed that SIO was at the heart of the Censorship Industrial Complex’s work censoring Americans on elections and COVID, which it did on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “While SIO still had other sources of funding,” reported a blogger last year, “the McCourt funding decision was seen by some at SIO as a clear signal that Stanford had soured on its commitment to their work.”

But yesterday, we revealed that the Cyber Policy Center is back in the censorship business and in a big way. Last month, it hosted a strategy session with representatives of the governments of the EU, UK, Australia, and Brazil to coordinate global censorship. The strategy session was secret and only discovered thanks to a whistleblower who provided Jordan’s investigators with the agenda. The funder of that gathering was none other than Frank McCourt through his “Project Liberty Institute.”

Many Americans concerned over the weaponization of government for censorship and lawfare over the last 10 years are frustrated by the lack of prosecutions and convictions of the main actors, particularly the heads of intelligence agencies, who apparently got away with what they did. We have expressed our concern about the apparent lack of any significant reforms at the CIA.

But what has delivered results is Jordan and his committee, which investigated and revealed multiple government censorship efforts, including by Stanford Cyber Policy Center, by the Brazilian government of Twitter, and by the Biden Administration of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Last August, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jordan where he confirmed that the FBI had spread disinformation to its executives relating to the Hunter Biden laptop, that Biden officials “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” and that at Meta “we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.” And last month, Google admitted in a letter to Jordan, similar to the one from Zuckerberg, that the Biden White House ...