After it was exposed as a quasi-government "disinformation" academic research center, and several lawsuits later, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) is being shuttered after founding director Alex Stamos left his position in November, and research director Renee DiResta left last week after her contract was not renewed.
SIO notably led a project initiated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) called the virality project, which sought to censor those who questioned government Covid-19 policies. The Virality Project primarily focused on so-called "anti-vaccine" "misinformation," and pushed social media platforms to censor "true stories," according to journalist Andrew Lowenthal, who added that the censorship was "often done incompetently and without even a cursory investigation of the original sources."