House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has threatened enforcement action against Stanford University for insufficiently complying with a congressional subpoena regarding the college’s involvement with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).
The EIP, as Breitbart News has reported previously, was a key cog in the wheels of the left’s election censorship machine in 2020 and 2022.
Led by the Stanford Internet Observatory, the partnership also included the University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Research Council’s Digital Forensic Lab.
In the runup to 2020, the consortium created a “ticketing” system whereby U.S. government actors including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could escalate complaints to social media companies.
The EIP claims that in 21 percent of cases, platforms added warning labels to identified content, and in 13 percent of cases, the content was removed from the platforms entirely.
In addition to pressure from the Judiciary Committee, the EIP is also facing a lawsuit from America First Legal, alleging that the consortium conspired with the federal government to censor Americans.
In its letter to Stanford, the Judiciary Committee identified specific information they would like to obtain, along with a deadline of June 14 to provide it.
#BREAKING: @Jim_Jordan threatens contempt of the Stanford Internet Observatory pic.twitter.com/6FaqKjqDNZ
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) June 1, 2023
From the letter:
The Committee is aware of evidence that suggests that the SIO is involved in the censorship of disfavored speech. Notably, SIO is a member of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project (VP), which used Atlassian’s Jira Service Desk to file “tickets” for alleged mis- and disinformation. The final summary reports issued by EIP and VP in 2021 and 2022 regarding the 2020 election and COVID-19 vaccines, respectively, state that individuals affiliated with SIO tracked both specific posts and entire “narratives” through the Jira ticketing system and shared them, at a minimum, with large social media companies. Public and non-public information obtained by the Committee confirms that large social media companies moderated content based upon these tickets and other information shared by Stanford personnel. For example, EIP boasted that “Twitter, Google, Facebook, and TikTok all had a 75% or higher response rate (on the EIP Jira ticketing platform) to tickets they were tagged in.”
Should SIO fail to comply with the subpoena, Rep. Jordan warned that the Committee will consider the use of “one or more enforcement mechanisms.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.