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Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy | John Naughton
The organisation responsible for monitoring digital falsehoods is reportedly being wound down after pressure from Republicans and conspiracy theorists
To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims is, somehow, anti-conservative. Presidential inquiry The historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American Substack has an insightful piece recalling Watergate and the last time (before Trump) the US had a president who was totally unfit for office.
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