Originally named Election Misinformation Project, then Election Disinformation Partnership, then settled with EIP—an organization of “disinformation” experts led by Stanford Internet Observatory cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security and global engagement center created during the summer of 2020 “at the request” of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Conservatives victims of censorship disproportionately, but all political sides also affected.
“leading institutions focused on understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP), Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.”
no federal agency “has a focus on, or authority regarding, election misinformation originating from domestic sources within the United States,” there is “a critical gap for non-governmental entities to fill.”
August 4th, 2020, Alex Stamos writes to a Nextdoor employee saying that the EIP formed
“to provide a one-stop shop for local election officials, DHS, and voter protection organizations to report potential disinformation for [the EIP] to investigate and to refer to the appropriate platforms.”
Q. Do you recall who first came up with the idea for EIP? A. It was me. Q. Did you consult with Chris Krebs in the summer of 2020? A. I probably did, yes.
Email from EIP central figure states that “we just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief on disinfo, IO, etc.”
Tactics
Also used the mainstream media to pressure social media companies to comply. Alex Stamos said “So, if we wrote a blogpost that said, ‘This is something viral that’s happening that’s not true,’ you very well could find members of the media going out and then finding that content on five different platforms and then writing about it being up or not.”
| EIP Number | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| EIP-345 | ”The article is being shared on Facebook, and while it has been labeled when shared in a group, official Page shares did not receive such a label … We recommend labeling all instances of the article being shared on Facebook.” |
| EIP-378 | ”This has circulated in pro-Trump conservative groups and sub-communities … We recommend that you all flag as false, or remove the posts below.” |
| EIP-396 | ”Hi Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter … we recommend it be removed from your platforms.” |
| EIP-407 | ”Hi Twitter team – please see the ticket above, which we’d recommend be labeled with information pertaining to mail-in voting.” |
| EIP-421 | ”We recommend that posts like these be labeled if they are alleging fraud, and that further action may be appropriate if this post actually documents fraud.” |
| EIP-460 | ”Huckabee has not said whether the tweet was a joke or not … We recommend that Twitter labels the post with (a) proper voting information.” |
| EIP-461 | ”Given the large audiences and Pennsylvania’s swing state status, we’d recommend this content be actioned.” |
| EIP-581 | ”We recommend you label or reduce the discoverability of the post.” |
| EIP-638 | ”We recommend labeling his [sic] tweets and monitoring if any of the tagged influencer accounts retweet him.” |
| EIP-656 | ”@SeanHannity is sharing a partial statement by Rep. Ilhan Omar … we recommend Twitter adds a label to Tweets sharing the link to the article.” |
| EIP-668 | ”We repeat our recommendation that this account be suspended for the duration of election day from posting additional misleading information about voting.” |
| EIP-673 | ”We recommend that this tweet, and other tweets sharing this false information, should be removed.”; “We recommend taking action specifically on this account, such as suspending their ability to continue tweeting for 12 hours.” |
| EIP-680 | ”We recommend that this tweet, as well as the tweets with the original video should be removed or labeled as misleading.” |
| EIP-1020 | ”[W]e recommend links to its content be labeled or removed.” |