Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative legal advocacy group, is investigating IU for what it deems participation in the “censorship-industrial complex” by requesting 10 types of records from the university.
The ADF announced the investigation on its website and by sending out press releases, including one sent directly to the IDS. The release said it is examining “misinformation” centers or tools designed to identify speech “disfavored” by the federal government at IU, the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina and the University of California, Los Angeles.
At IU, the ADF is specifically investigating The Observatory on Social Media and eight of its faculty members. The observatory studies “the role of media and technology in society,” and builds tools to “analyze and counter disinformation and manipulation on social media,” according to its website.
Neither the observatory or IU responded to multiple requests for comment.
ADF Legal Counsel Mathew Hoffmann said the ADF believes the investigated universities could use their federally funded tools to censor Americans on social media, without providing evidence that the tools have the capacity to do so. Hoffmann said the ADF is using their requests to answer a few questions.
“Why did they want to develop these tools?” Hoffmann said. “How do these tools operate and how could they be employed?”
According to Hoffmann, the alleged tools the ADF is examining infringe on free speech and help the government dictate what opinions the public can have.
“It’s not really the appropriate role of the government to pick winners and losers in public debates,” Hoffmann said. “That’s really for the people to decide.”
The University of Washington’s research center, the Center for an Informed Public conducts research on social media, misinformation and disinformation. From 2020 to 2023, the CIP faced claims from U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan and conservative activists on social media that it participated in censorship operations and regimes.
The CIP denied the claims and clarified that its work to study and help identify the spread of misleading information should not be undermined and incorrectly equated to censorship. UW professor and CIP co-founder Kate Starbird told the IDS in a statement that “investigations” like the ADF’s are an attempt to do just that.
“If anything, these 'investigations' attempt to intimidate and ultimately censor researchers for their work to help people understand how social media are manipulated by bad actors for financial and political gain,” Starbird wrote in the statement.
According to NPR, The Stanford Internet Observatory “lost its leadership and much of its staff” in 2024 after similar criticism about its supposed censorship.
The article quoted Renée DiResta, previously a research manager for the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research center similar to IU’s observatory.
“What we (are seeing) is right-wing efforts to disrupt research that the right sees as challenging its dominance on social media, reframed as being somehow anti-disinformation research,” DiResta told NPR.
In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” adding to the argument being made by conservative activists. The order claims the Biden administration violated the right to free speech and censored Americans on social media and other online platforms for speech the administration “did not approve.”
The policy section of the order requires “taxpayer resources” are not used to stifle free speech. Hoffmann said one goal of the ADF is to find out how much “public funding” goes toward tools that could be “deployed against the people that are funding these tools.”
Due to the ADF’s stance against bans on conversion therapy for minors and reforms targeted at making transgender students feel more comfortable in school, many – including the Southern Poverty Law Center – have dubbed it a “hate group.” According to the ADF’s website, some of their attorneys were on the legal team that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Now, the ADF is targeting the “censorship regime” that it says was established by the Biden administration.
This is not the first time that conservative activists have investigated IU’s observatory. More than a decade ago, an article in Science described conservative activist attacks on an earlier form of the research center, nicknamed “Truthy.”
Filippo Menczer, now the director of the observatory, told Science in 2014 the criticism the research was receiving was “a deliberate attempt to distort what we have done.”
According to an explanatory post made by Truthy in 2014, the project uses complex computer models to analyze information sharing on social media and “better understand how social media can be abused.” The post also clarified the project is “not informed by political partnership” and is not a database for federal government use.
The observatory now echoes the same claims. Its mission, according to its website, is to “offer access to data and tools to investigate the diffusion of (mis)information, uncover the vulnerabilities of the media ecosystem, and develop methods for increasing the resilience of citizens and democratic systems to manipulation.”
Hoffmann said that when the ADF receives the records from the requests, their mission is to make the findings public, support public awareness of how the “tools have been deployed against people” and inform the extent the federal government had in engaging in the “censorship-industrial complex.”
The request the ADF sent to IU asked for records containing communications between several staff, the Knight Foundation, officers or employees of Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Google, “Snap,” Twitter, X Corp. or Reddit and between federal government officials with a “.gov” or “.mil” email address. The Knight Foundation is a non-profit that issues grants for journalism, the arts, research and the communities where their founders, the Knight Brothers, published newspapers.
According to Hoffmann, the ADF is specifically looking into documents related to federal grants for the “censorship tools” being developed.
Along with this, the request required all records that referenced the National Science Foundation, Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“I think the risk in public universities receiving federal funding or other types of public funding for these tools is that they could then be deployed in the future by the government against disfavored views,” Hoffmann said.
