FOIA Files: Clemson University
The FOIA request we sent Clemson University reveals a tight-knit relationship between university professors, federal law enforcement, and the news media.
If you’ve read the Twitter Files, you’re likely already aware of the social media platform’s interactions with Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub. The relationship between the two parties was tense. Internal communications confirmed Twitter’s annoyance with Clemson’s practice of “running to [the] press” with claims that Russian trolls were running rampant on their site. In May 2020, Yoel Roth, then head of site integrity at Twitter, voiced some of those concerns to Nick Pickles, the company’s global senior strategist for public policy.
Roth also took issue with the Hub’s persistent attribution of certain accounts to Russian trolls. Later that same month, he questioned the Hub’s Russia-heavy focus.
What is the Media Forensics Hub? Described as “an interdisciplinary team of researchers working to study and combat online deception,” the project kicked off in 2017. That was the year communications professor Darren Linvill and economics professor Patrick Warren joined forces to “uncover and expose” millions of tweets they attributed to Russian trolls. Sponsored by the taxpayer-funded South Carolina Research Authority, the Hub was officially launched in May 2020. Two years later, along with the University at Buffalo and several other institutions, it received a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Last May, Racket filed a FOIA request with Clemson. Our search produced a series of emails that make explicit reference to the university’s dealings with federal law enforcement agencies (providing Clemson “help with resources,” among other things), social media companies, and the news media. The Clemson files are difficult to summarize, but offer probably the most comprehensive portrait we’ve gotten yet of the role such ostensibly non-governmental “anti-disinformation” research institutions can play as middleman organizations. These emails also document the high degree of influence the school had with federal agencies and media, even if Twitter was not always as cooperative.
A summary of key communications is listed below, while three new batches of documents have been uploaded to the Racket FOIA library, where as always, they’re not paywalled.
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