Doctor Mike

And after Stanford backed out, Jim Jordan took a victory lap and said that he had exercised robust oversight over Stanford University.

This is kind of a wild claim for an American congressman to make over the, again, not government funded First Amendment protected research of an American research institution.

But here we are.

I think that a lot of the chilling effect was caused by the fact that we spoke with state and local election officials during our work.

So the same way that we spoke with public health officials during the vaccine work to say, hey, here's a viral rumor.

Be great.

You know, you guys should be responding to this.

We spoke with election officials.

Hey, Sharpie markers in Arizona.

This is a very big deal.

This is a very big deal, right?

Somebody should be responding to that.

When you try to interrupt the rumor mill, not by arguing that the stuff should come down, ironically, by not censoring it, in fact, but by saying somebody really needs to be labeling this, somebody needs to be getting the facts out, somebody needs to be doing that faster.

um those communication channels were reframed as some kind of collusion and so it created a chilling effect uh so i don't think that that i certainly wasn't working in the space in 2024 because i had just been not renewed um but the uh but as

I think that there are still people who are doing pieces of the research.

I know Kate Starbird's team at University of Washington continued to track and report on viral rumors in 2024.

But that question of are they communicating them to the state and local election officials who then respond quickly,

It's those connections, right?

Or how quickly are platforms seeing that and deciding to respond?

You have to realize also that platforms were subpoenaed as well.