The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Meta’s Instagram had allowed a vast child pornography ring to spread without restraint and connect producers and users. Most shocking of all was the revelation that Instagram’s AI warned people of sensitive content but allowed them to see it anyway.

Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, was apparently too distracted with its censorship of “often-true” content, including testimonies of vaccine side effects, under direct orders from the White House, to focus on the truly bad stuff.

Stanford Internet Observatory, which we have criticized in the past for its leadership of the Censorship Industrial Complex, conducted the research. It thus deserves credit for having turned its powers toward a good cause.

Still, it’s hard not to be annoyed that so much effort by the US government and contractors like SIO over the last six years went into the illegal censorship of legitimate speech instead of the legal censorship of abhorrent material.

And Stanford keeps cranking out new censorship centers. Yesterday, Stanford announced a new initiative to “govern” how we get information in order to save democracy. They’re calling their new censorship initiative “Project Liberty.”

As reported last week, we emailed Stanford’s CyberPolicy Center, Stanford Internet Observatory, Barack Obama, and 50 other groups involved in censorship efforts, requesting an interview. Only ten responded, and just one agreed to be interviewed. Their lack of transparency speaks volumes.

Let’s hope our work, and that of many others, encourages a shift away from censoring speech viewed as a “threat to democracy” toward censoring content that is direct harm to children.

— MS

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