EIP, the Virality Project, CISA and Stanford

The Election Integrity Partnership launched publicly in August 2020. [1] Its own final report, The Long Fuse, describes a ticket system through which partners, including CISA, election officials and civil-society groups, sent in reports. Analysts then escalated some to platforms. [2] This is not a secret uncovered by the Files; the partnership published it. What the Files and later subpoenas added was the internal texture: which posts, how often and with what wording.

House Republicans’ November 2023 report argued that the EIP was a way for the government to get around the First Amendment. It also featured a figure of some 22 million tweets. [3] The project’s response, entered into the congressional record, said the figure counted tweets in its research dataset, not posts flagged for removal, and that platforms made their own decisions. [4] Former SIO director Alex Stamos told the committee in a transcribed interview that the platforms made their own decisions. [5]

Both points can be true. A government agency connecting election officials to a university that then forwards reports to platforms is a real channel of influence, whatever the paperwork calls it. A dataset figure presented as a censorship count is still a misstatement.

In 2020 CISA forwarded election officials’ reports about false election claims to the platforms, a practice it called switchboarding. House Republicans’ June 2023 staff report argued this, together with CISA’s ties to the EIP and its advisory work on mis- and disinformation, made it the hub of a censorship system. [1]

The Fifth Circuit agreed CISA likely crossed the line, adding it to the injunction in October 2023. Its reasoning was that CISA’s role went beyond persuasion to significant encouragement. [2] The Supreme Court vacated that in June 2024 because the plaintiffs lacked standing, without deciding whether CISA had acted unconstitutionally. [3]

In February 2025 CISA placed election-security and disinformation staff on leave and paused that work pending review. [4][5] CISA was one of the three agencies bound by the 2026 Missouri consent decree, which bars threats and coercion for ten years. [6] The practice ended by political decision and settlement, not by a court ruling on its legality.

By June 2024 the Stanford Internet Observatory was winding down. Founding director Alex Stamos had left, Renée DiResta’s contract was not renewed, and the election work stopped before the 2024 vote. [1][2] The pressure included congressional subpoenas and private lawsuits such as Hines v. Stamos, which survived a motion to dismiss in December 2024. [3]

DiResta became the target of a false claim that she was a CIA operative running censorship. She had taken part in a CIA-linked student program that ended in 2004 and denied any later role. She said the unredacted names of her students in released material led to threats against them. [4]

The Files writers say SIO’s own records show it pushed platforms and later played that down. [5] DiResta published the full March 2021 Virality Project–Twitter exchange to argue the opposite. [6] Readers can compare both. The closure itself is documented. Calling it the collapse of a censorship operation, or the silencing of academic research, depends on which reading you accept.

The GEC was created to counter foreign propaganda. Taibbi’s Part 17 argued that the GEC and groups it funded sent Twitter lists of supposedly state-linked or inauthentic accounts, and that the lists swept in ordinary Americans. Twitter staff were sometimes skeptical of those lists. [1]

Congress let the GEC’s authority expire on December 23, 2024. [2] Secretary Rubio closed its successor office in April 2025, calling it a censorship operation. [3] The Daily Wire, The Federalist and Texas had sued over GEC-funded tools that rated news outlets for advertisers. That case ended in an April 8, 2026 consent decree barring the department from funding or promoting technology to suppress or downgrade Americans’ protected speech. [4][5]

The administration then went further. On December 23, 2025 it imposed visa restrictions on five Europeans it accused of pressuring American platforms, including former EU commissioner Thierry Breton and the heads of CCDH, HateAid and the Global Disinformation Index. [6][7] Critics called that retaliation against foreign speech. Supporters called it overdue.