STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

March 30, 2026

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Free Speech Wins Big in Court

 

Including About the Questionable Activities of Stanford Internet Observatory and Others

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“In the first week of December, 2022, a group of reporters now scattered and divided over the Iran War and other issues searched through a pile of raw correspondence at the San Francisco office of Twitter. One file we found was 67 pages of complaints about content, mostly from state officials, sent to an address marked misinformation@cissecurity. In one case, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office complained about a Fox5 Atlanta report titled, 'Computer Problems Bring Down Voting Machines in Spaulding County.'

 

“The story about technical difficulties in Spaulding County turned out to be accurate....In those same 67 pages we found a form letter informing the Georgia official that his complaint about the Fox story had already been forwarded to ‘our partners,’ who included ‘The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security’ and ‘The Election Integrity Partnership’ at Stanford University.

 

“This was the first time an outsider had seen the plumbing of a wide-scale effort by federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to regulate mis-, dis-, and malinformation in the social media landscape. It took considerable effort to untangle the mechanism by which complaints of 'misinformation' were processed -- the process was deliberately confusing -- but the documents in the Twitter Files ended up playing a role in helping a landmark First Amendment case already launched in the courts, called Missouri v. Biden.

 

“[Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Stanford Prof. Jay Bhattacharya, Jill Hines,] and others filed their first amended complaint on August 2, 2022 on the grounds that their social media posts about issues like Covid had been suppressed by a smorgasbord of government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security....

 

“The Consent Decree handed down [last week] put into the books concepts that should provide a little comfort to those of us who fought to surface this issue. One principle agreed upon is that ‘modern technology does not alter the government’s obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment.’ It also enjoined government agencies from threatening social media companies with ‘some sort of punishment’ if they don’t ‘remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social media content containing protected speech.’ ...

 

“Congrats to Aaron and his co-plaintiffs, who went through a lot on the road to this result. Historians won’t know what a disgusting process it was to get here, but I’ll remember, and I hope Racket readers will as well. The plaintiffs who hung in deserve a hearty pat on the back. As John Vecchione, counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance put it, ‘Freedom of speech has been powerfully preserved by our clients.’ It’s true, and a happy thing that a few people cared enough to see it through.”

 

Full op-ed by Matt Taibbi at Substack.

 

See also Washington Post editorial: “Both sides ‘agree that government, politicians, media, academics, or anyone else applying labels such as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ or ‘malinformation’ to speech does not render it constitutionally unprotected,’ the settlement says. That bears repeating: Outside of narrow exceptions such as libel and threats, the government cannot punish people for speech about public affairs. ‘Misinformation’ is a bureaucratic label popularized in the 2010s. It has no legal meaning.’” and The Hill.

 

See also these articles previously posted at our Stanford Concerns-2 webpage:

 

• House Judiciary Committee Letter to Stanford Dated October 22, 2025 Regarding Alleged Censorship Activities 

   

• Stanford's Prior Roles in Censoring the Web 

   

• Stanford Prof. Jay Bhattacharya: The Government Censored Me and Other Scientists, and We Fought Back

 

See also paragraph 4.d. at our Back to Basics webpage: “Under no circumstances may any of these [200 to 300 centers and similar entities at Stanford], whether on or off the core campus, be engaged in censorship activities, either directly or in coordination with government entities, and especially regarding members of Stanford’s own faculty.”

 

Reader Comments in Response to Last Week’s Newsletter

 

Regarding the project to compare syllabi from the past 10 to 20 years or more in order to show increased bias in university curricula:

 

“Quantifying course content is indeed a ‘blunt instrument’ and wholly despicable in our current polarized political environment where the real danger to independent thought is the infringement on the university's long tradition of intellectual autonomy and the massive campaign to reduce or excise creative and qualitative analysis of human behavior by removing humanities and social sciences from the curriculum.” (See full comment at our Reader Comments webpage.)

 

Regarding the shortcomings in Stanford’s undergraduate housing:

 

“I personally believe there is little doubt of the direct and powerful connection between Stanford’s dystopian housing system and endemic shortages of adequate housing, and later alumni donor rates. The evidence is right in front of our noses: unfavorable responses from undergrads on surveys, low alumni donor rates as a general matter, and paltry donor rates relative to peer schools which, not coincidentally, provide their future alumni with stable, secure, well-appointed residences during their formative years on campus. Someone once said, ‘There is no such thing as a coincidence.’” (See full comment at our Reader Comments webpage.)

 

We welcome your own comments, now and in the future, here.

 

Professors Scramble to Save Critical Thinking in an Age of AI

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Bea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world.

 

“It’s an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. ‘There’s no AI-proof anything,’ Pao said. ‘Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there’s a way out.’

 

“It doesn’t always work. Recently, she asked students to visit a local museum, look at a painting for 10 minutes, and then write a few paragraphs describing the experience. It was a purposefully personal assignment, yet one student responded with a sophisticated but drab reflection -- ‘too perfect, without saying anything’, Pao said. She later learned the student had tried to visit the museum on a Monday, when it was closed, and then turned to AI....

 

“Michael Clune, a literature professor and novelist, said that, already, many students have been left ‘incapable of reading and analyzing, synthesizing data, all kinds of skills.' In a recent essay, he warned that colleges and universities rushing to embrace the technology were preparing to ‘self-lobotomize’....

 

“A number of tech and finance companies have recently said that they are looking to hire humanities majors for their creativity and critical thinking skills. Indeed, enrollment data at some universities suggests that the long-struggling humanities might have begun to see a resurgence in the age of AI, with early signs pointing to a reversal in decades-long decline in English majors in favor of Stem ones.” ...

 

Full article at The Guardian.

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Other Articles of Interest

 

Young Graduates Face the Grimmest Job Market in Years

Full article at NY Times: “Artificial intelligence could reshape work, but for now a low-hire, low-fire labor market is the main impediment for young people seeking employment.”

 

See also “Most Employers Still Value College Degrees” at Inside Higher Ed: “A new survey shows that employers still prefer to hire workers with college degrees. But only 54 percent of those same employers say students are graduating with the skills their organizations need.”

 

How One College Helps Students Navigate Civil Discourse

Full article at Inside Higher Ed: “During his senior seminar at Kalamazoo College, Hollis Masterson was given an assignment to interview someone whose political views sharply differed from his own. For Masterson, a self-described social democrat, the outcome surprised him.”

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Are We Headed for Federal Control of College Sports?

Full op-ed by Stanford alum Allysia Finley at WSJ: “The Supreme Court took away the NCAA’s ability to regulate. Now Congress is thinking of intervening.”

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Diversifying the Academy

Full op-ed by Vanderbilt Prof. Brian T. Fitzpatrick at Law & Liberty: “The supply problem is that very few conservatives want to go into academia. I don’t blame them.” See also the article in last week’s Newsletter about Stanford Prof. Ivan Marinovic’s research showing the increase in activism in the course offerings of select universities.

 

What to Make of the Wave of College Closures

Full article at Minding the Campus.

 

I Know What's Missing from College Education -- Virtue

Full op-ed by Pepperdine President Jim Gash at USA Today.

 

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

 

AI Could Spot the Next Financial Crisis -- But There’s a Catch

 

Immune Cell Bloodhounds Track Cancer Cells’ Unique Metabolic Signatures, Eliminate Tumors in Mice

 

Pythons’ Extreme Eating Habits Hint at a New Weight-Loss Pathway

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