The Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, a highly respected research center that analyzes misinformation and social media manipulation, is under attack. In late January, a Christian conservative legal advocacy group called the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) announced that it is investigating the Indiana research group for allegedly participating in what it calls a “censorship-industrial complex,” demanding 10 categories of records from the university.
No such “censorship-industrial complex” exists. But that bogeyman is a powerful fiction created by conservative groups and politicians to delegitimize academic research on the online spread of election fraud conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination content, and sundry other falsehoods. And it has caused real damage.
Indiana University isn’t the only school in the ADF’s crosshairs. The group said it sent document demands to four other major universities as well: the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina, and University of California, Los Angeles. The ADF claims the universities “created ‘misinformation’ centers or tools designed to identify speech” that was “disfavored” by the federal government during Biden administration.
Attacks on Academic Research Follow a Common Script
We have seen this movie before. For several years, President Donald Trump and his supporters, such as Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, have tried to intimidate and silence academic and civil society researchers whose work has illuminated how misinformation spreads on social media, messaging apps, and other online venues.
These attacks follow a common script. First, the accusers use freedom of information demands to collect internal documents and communications. They then cherry-pick and distort the meaning of these exchanges, portraying them as incriminating when, in reality, they are innocuous. Lastly, they initiate litigation designed to drain university resources and convene congressional investigations that allow Republican politicians to curry favor with Trump while verbally pistol-whipping the victims of these charades.
This McCarthyite political theater hasn’t turned up anything even approaching a “censorship-industrial complex.” In June 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration had colluded with misinformation researchers and social media companies to suppress free speech. While the grounds for the ruling were technical — the politicians and activists who brought the suit lacked “standing” to do so — Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion forcefully rebuked lower courts for parroting baseless claims about a liberal conspiracy against conservatives. “The Fifth Circuit relied on the District Court’s factual findings, many of which unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous,” wrote Justice Barrett (no relation to the author of this article).
Justice Barrett did not have to reprimand the lower court for relying on false assertions. Her opinion underscored just how ludicrous the allegations were in the first place.
Despite lacking any basis in fact, these false allegations have taken a toll, rolling back misinformation research at major universities. Stanford University, the University of Washington, and other institutions helped shed light on election conspiracy theories during the 2020 and 2022 cycles. The university researchers documented how false claims – including that Trump, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election, only to have it “stolen” from him by the Democrats and their supposed accomplices – spread and were amplified online. But these same research initiatives collapsed as a result of the GOP’s withering attacks.
President Trump continues to promote phony accusations of an online plot against conservatives. In one of his Inauguration Day executive orders, Trump declared — based on no evidence — that “over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms.” The order barred the allocation of tax dollars “to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
The ADF’s attack on Indiana University appears to be part of an effort to enforce Trump’s order by threatening universities that receive federal research funding. Indeed, the group’s announcement explicitly mentions Trump’s executive orders. One could also view the ADF’s actions as part of a broader attempt to cripple higher education by threatening colleges and universities that supposedly run afoul of the Trump administration’s efforts to kill diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, permit dissent on topics such as the war in Gaza, and pursue certain kinds of biomedical research.
The ADF has participated in a longstanding conservative campaign to impose Christian legal precepts on the rest of society. As Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times wrote in a recent column, the ADF is “a prominent Christian litigating group that has scored a series of recent victories at the Supreme Court.” At the moment, the organization is representing an Oklahoma charter school board seeking a ruling from the high court that would require the state to fund charter schools that are explicitly religious. Such a ruling could then apply to all states that allow charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools – as most states do.
The Observatory Fights Back
In the struggle over misinformation research, Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media has decided to fight back. In a blog post, the computer science lab broke down the “censorship-industrial complex” narrative into three myths, refuting each in turn:
Myth #1: Content moderation is equivalent to censorship.
Critics blame misinformation researchers for fueling content moderation policies and enforcement efforts by social media companies like Meta, Google, and TikTok. But the premise that content moderation is the same as censorship is wrong. Adding a fact-checking label or a link to an authoritative source of information doesn’t squelch anyone’s right to speak freely. Documenting “deceptive foreign influence campaigns” so they can be thwarted by social media companies also does not qualify as censorship.
Myth #2: Researchers engage in social media content moderation.
Misinformation research may inform the policies and enforcement practices of social media platforms, but the platform companies make their own decisions about what type of content to allow on their venues. Indiana’s Observatory on Social Media states that it does not “collaborate with government entities or social media platforms on moderation policies or decisions.” Moreover, the group asserts that while it does “study the vulnerabilities of different groups to online manipulation,” it “does not target any group (political or otherwise) and does not censor, suppress, or limit speech (political or otherwise) in any way.”
Myth #3: Centers like the one at Indiana are arms of the government.
Many academic researchers receive government grants, or at least they did before the second Trump administration. But funding agencies like the National Science Foundation do not direct their research or dictate their findings.
Academic Research Should be Defended
The Indiana Observatory pursues a wide array of projects, including the development of “agent-based models” that simulate how information spreads on social media to improve understanding of how malicious actors use fake accounts to boost disinformation. The group also studies biases in the social media algorithms that rank and recommend posts to users, seeking insight into how they affect harmful content.
These researchers deserve to be defended and even honored, not demeaned and silenced. In fact, the campaign to end their research is a direct threat to the right to free speech – the very right that conservative groups like ADF claim to defend.