Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership was a government-funded censorship laundering operation

When government officials need something done but the Constitution says they can't do it themselves, history shows they often find a workaround. The story of Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership is a case study in how that workaround can operate in plain sight.

In 2020, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), part of the Department of Homeland Security, approached Stanford Internet Observatory with a specific request: help identify social media content that needed to be removed from platforms. Stanford accepted, creating what became known as the Election Integrity Partnership. On its face, this seemed reasonable—a university studying election security. What emerged from internal documents and testimony tells a different story.

The EIP, along with a related effort called the Virality Project, operated as a clearinghouse for censorship requests. CISA and other federal agencies would flag content they wanted suppressed, Stanford would validate it, and then the partnership would forward recommendations to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms. The platforms complied at a remarkable rate, removing approximately 35 percent of the flagged content. This mattered because it created a legal separation: the government wasn't censoring anyone directly, so First Amendment restrictions didn't technically apply. Stanford was the middleman.

Initially, the initiative's defenders argued it was purely about election security and preventing foreign disinformation. Critics who raised concerns were dismissed as conspiracy theorists paranoid about censorship. Fact-checkers debunked the notion that government was orchestrating content removal. Major news outlets largely ignored the story.

The verification came through documents and testimony that became public years later. Michael Shellenberger, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, presented internal Stanford communications showing the Virality Project recommended suppressing even "true posts which could fuel hesitancy" about COVID vaccines. The explicit goal wasn't merely stopping false information—it was managing what Americans could see, regardless of accuracy. RealClearInvestigations reported on Stanford's role as part of what researchers called the "censorship industrial complex," a network of universities, NGOs, and platforms coordinating content removal at government direction.