Doctor Mike

I mean, so much child safety and CSAM research just to... I mean, we did research into CSAM and AI training data sets that led to major training data sets coming down and being cleaned.

I mean, the work that we did at SIO was so important.

And because the...

People who worked to claim that the 2020 election was stolen needed a scapegoat and wanted to tear down entities that they saw as presenting a, an obstacle to the sort of continued, you know, to continued dominance.

Right.

Um,

They came for us and they did it quite successfully and effectively.

And unfortunately, that was the way that it went.

And you can now see, I think, in what has happened, what has transpired in the first six months of this year, ways in which academia is vulnerable to attacks on, you know, First Amendment protected research if it becomes politically inexpedient.

So, when Stanford said that it was not going to do this work, it said it would reorient the observatory.

It said that it was not, you know, going to seek funding for that kind of work anymore.

You know, it didn't renew my contract.

A couple of others of us didn't have our contracts renewed.

Again, that was in June of last year.

Ultimately, the Internet Observatory doesn't exist anymore now.

And I think, unfortunately, again, the sacrifice of all of the other areas because of the fact that the election work was politically inexpedient for powerful people.

meant that they backed away from it.

They are continuing to fight the legal fight, and I'm very grateful for that.

So the court cases, as I mentioned, continue, and I'm happy that they continue to stand up for us on that front.

uh we know this is not the first time that um political machines have come for academics i know michael mann has written about this and how it came for climate scientists and uh certainly you know vaccine researchers dr hotez has spoken about this you know it's not the first time unfortunately it's that these types of attacks are effective and they create a chilling effect and