PreLaunch Regression Checks

But it's always better to be safe than sorry.

After learning in the Twitter Files that many if not most federal contracts for anti-disinformation work are not public, in some cases not even in Inspector General reports, Racket hooked up with the Substack author UndeadFOIA to find out what we could via Freedom of Information requests.

A year and hundreds of requests later, the handful of researcher names we began with proved more ubiquitous than expected.

“The thing that I found shocking,” says UndeadFOIA, “is how the same people seem to be involved in every facet of the anti-disinformation space. It doesn’t matter what University you go to or what program name it’s under, it’s the same people that pop up over and over.”

The Twitter Files gave us names like Renee DiResta of Stanford, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, Darren Linvill of Clemson, Joan Donovan* at Harvard, Caroline Orr of the University of Maryland, and perhaps two dozen other key figures, many of whom move freely from academia to officialdom to the private sector and back. Someone who was senior official at a federal agency like CISA ten minutes ago might now be Director of Information Integrity at Microsoft or a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Reading these emails, the lines between enforcement agencies, publicly funded university research outlets, and the internal trust and safety departments of private platforms seem blurred beyond recognition. It’s a blob.