In the brave new world of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP), it seems like “informed” is synonymous with “watched.” Birthed to combat the wildfires of online “misinformation,” CIP and its partners – including the defunct Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the short-lived Virality Project – thought they might have been celebrated defenders of truth. Instead, they became poster children for what happens when watchdogs get a little too cozy with power, diving into an experiment that teetered between public good and Orwellian oversight.
Election Integrity Partnership: A Marriage of “Good Intentions” and Government Influence
The Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition that included CIP as a key player, kicked off its operations with a noble-sounding mission: to shield our fragile electoral systems from the scourge of fake news. For the discerning reader, the term “integrity” in their name may raise eyebrows; it’s reminiscent of government programs cloaked in the language of virtue, their real work a little murkier. Partnering with government entities and social media giants like Facebook and then-Twitter, EIP set out to identify and “mitigate” misleading content related to elections. In other words, they assumed the job of selectively filtering out the lies, or as critics would say, the truths that didn’t toe the right political line.
For a while, EIP was in its element, functioning as a digital triage, purging the internet of what they deemed harmful content. But what started as “informational integrity” quickly became a federal hall monitor, policing citizens’ Facebook posts and Twitter threads with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Conservatives, in particular, saw this as more of a censorship scheme than a public service. Their view? EIP wasn’t there to inform – it was there to enforce.
Hellbound and Down 