How to Defend Independent Technology Research from Corporate and Political Opposition

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

In October 2022, a group of researchers including J. Nathan Matias, Susan Benesch, Rebekah Tromble, Alex Abdo, J. Bob Alotta, David Karpf, David Lazer, Nathalie Maréchal, Nabiha Syed, and Ethan Zuckerman published a manifesto establishing a coalition for independent technology research.

“Society needs trustworthy, independent research to relieve the harms of digital technologies and advance the common good,” they wrote. “Research can help us understand ourselves more clearly, identify problems, hold power accountable, imagine the world we want, and test ideas for change. In a democracy, this knowledge comes from academics, journalists, civil society, and community scientists, among others. Because independent research on digital technologies is a powerful force for the common good, it also faces powerful opposition.”

In the months since that document was published, that opposition has grown. From investigations in Congress to lawsuits aimed at specific researchers, there is a backlash particularly against those who study communications and media, especially where the subjects of that research are often those most interested in advancing false and misleading claims about issues including elections and public health.

I am a member of the coalition, and last week I caught up with Brandi Geurkink, who was hired as the coalition's first Executive Director in December 2023, to discuss its priorities.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Brandi Geurkink:

My name's Brandi Geurkink. I'm the executive director of the Coalition for Independent Tech Research.

Justin Hendrix:

Tell us what the Coalition for Independent Technology Research is.

Brandi Geurkink:

Yeah. The Coalition is a new organization. It's a membership organization comprised of people working across civil society, across academia, within media organizations, who are researchers working independently from the tech industry studying technology's impacts on society. And the Coalition is aiming to defend the right to conduct that research and really create enabling conditions that allow researchers to do that work without interference.

Justin Hendrix:

And I should tell my listeners that I'm a member of this Coalition. Take from that what you will. For the remainder of this interview, know that I am a supporter of its efforts and part of those efforts on occasion, but I suppose I'll just ask you the quick history of the thing. For those who aren't familiar with it, how long has it been around and who's behind it?

Brandi Geurkink:

So we started organizing this Coalition, really, back in 2021 or so is when we really started organizing people around the idea of it. And that largely came in response to a few concrete attacks on prominent researchers in our fields. Most notably, one of the attacks was on Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy of New York University and the Ad Observatory Project. And Facebook had essentially shut down their accounts in response to their research and sent them legal threats, like a cease and desist letter, for instance, telling them that they needed to stop conducting their research. And there was really a lot of sustained organizing behind that event to try to stand up in solidarity with Laura and Damon and push back against Facebook's threats. So the community really came together around that moment, and I suppose that there was a recognition that these attacks were going to become more frequent and there needed to be sustained organizing around the right to conduct this research.

And so we started organizing people, again, across different sectors of what we consider to be the independent research field, and started discussing with them what such an organization would look like and what kinds of activities they would want it to undertake. And that was really what informed those initial meetings and conversations, were what informed what the coalition became. And so then we officially launched it in October of 2022, and over the last year we've been organizing and coordinating a lot of interventions. And thanks to some funding that has just come through for our organization, we're able to bring on me as the first staff member of the Coalition.

Justin Hendrix:

So largely made up of volunteers, made up of the researchers who are part of the Coalition, doesn't just include university researchers?

Brandi Geurkink:

Exactly. It's also lots of non-profit researchers and also people working in media organizations in the field of journalism. So we recognize that people who are studying technology's impact on society aren't just using one method. They're not just present within one field or one type of institution. And what one of the things we're really trying to do is actually strengthen the identity of what it means to be an independent researcher, working to understand technology's impacts on society and have that itself become more of an identity.

Justin Hendrix:

A listener might be thinking, what does independent mean? Does that mean that you never work with money from the platforms? You never work with data from the platforms? You have no relationship with technology firms?

Brandi Geurkink:

This is a question that came up a lot in founding and organizing the Coalition initially, and we very intentionally take this big tent approach to understanding what independence means. Our coalition members are people who work outside of the tech industry, so they are not employees of technology companies, though many do different kinds of research. Some people pursue collaborative research projects, largely because it's one of the only ways of actually getting data that's needed to do research through data sharing agreements with platforms. Whereas others do very adversarial research that's getting to be increasingly risky, developing plugins and using other methods like scraping to actually obtain data from technology platforms and do their research that way. By taking this big tent approach, I think it allows us to not only understand the different dynamics of what independence means and some of the challenges that different people doing different kinds of research face, but also make sure that we are organized to be in solidarity with one another and recognize that an attack on one of us is really an attack on all of us and on the field in general.

Justin Hendrix:

You started off with concerns that big tech firms were going to throw up obstacles to independent research, like for instance, the situation between NYU's Cybersecurity for Democracy Lab. But now I guess we're seeing a very different environment, one that includes attacks not just from tech platforms unwilling to share information or skeptical about the purposes of this research, but also most significantly in the US from the right. You've had to get involved in writing an amicus brief as Supreme Court.

Brandi Geurkink:

I think that this is a natural outcome of technology being more and more pervasive across every area of society. So really, what a lot of technology and researchers are studying nowadays is the realm of information communications and understanding, say, the role of social media and how those platforms actually are not just forums for public discourse, but the way that they are designed actually shapes public discourse, and thus, shapes what people believe and the way that they behave and all of these other things. And so as a result of that, the subjects of people's research are not only technology corporations. They're also political actors. They are different types of people who are involved in the information ecosystem, such as media organizations or activist groups.

And as a result of that, we are seeing that attacks are not only coming from technology industry and the corporations themselves, but also the subjects of people's research. And so in the United States, as you alluded to, there has really been a concerted attack on disinformation researchers in particular, which is comprised of legislative harassment, threats that are within the legal realm and lawsuits being filed against independent researchers. And so that is more of an evolution of some of the threats that we've been seeing. And it's really concerning to note that the technology industry is not the only place where these attacks are coming from, but it is often inclusive of political leaders and people within governments.

Justin Hendrix:

This campaign has made some gains of late. Certainly, they've made some gains in the courts. They've advanced legislation as well. There has been an effort, essentially, to spread this campaign out into states. We've got attorney generals who are knocking on the doors of universities, etc. Can you just describe the scope of what you're seeing as you look across the membership? How many people are being targeted? What are the types of tactics that you're witnessing?

Brandi Geurkink:

One of the things that we're seeing is a weaponization of requests for information. State-level freedom of information laws are being used to send requests for information to university professors and researchers at an unprecedented scale. And these are mostly being filed by a handful of activist organizations. And this is something that, say, climate scientists, academics working in the field of climate science also dealt with coming from, again, a concerted movement which was tied to a wider culture war about climate denialism and that taking hold. And so we're seeing that emerge as a key tactic.

Another one is more in the realm of legislative harassment, and these are attacks that are primarily coming from government committees and subcommittees that are actually weaponizing their role in being able to bring forward investigations into what should be the behavior of Congress itself, and actually turning that on independent researchers in a way that we've advocated is actually impeding on researchers' First Amendment to rights to actually carry out their work. So this is another area that we're seeing congressional subpoenas, we're seeing, again, people being dragged in front of committees in a way that definitely is closer to harassment than it is an actual legitimate inquiry.

And another one that we're seeing is lawsuits and is using legal tools of intimidation and harassment to try to basically stop this work from happening. So there have been lawsuits that have been filed against independent researchers as individuals, and there are also lawsuits which have been filed against the federal government, which implicate independent researchers and essentially mischaracterize them as being actors of the state, which is a false accusation. But it is an accusation that, again, is part of a broader culture war narrative around something that's being called a censorship industrial complex, which is a conspiracy theory, which is something that does not exist, but that's being used in a very targeted way, and it's a message that's being spread amongst a particular base of civil society in order to provide fodder for these kinds of attacks that are now being waged against our community.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm struck by the fact that in some of these hearings, we've heard more substantiation for the idea that social media platforms have bent over backwards to try not to impede on conservative points of view or otherwise take action against conservative speech, which is the opposite of the narrative that's being advanced by individuals like Jim Jordan through his weaponization of the federal government Select Committee.

When you look at this situation, are there other historical precedents beyond climate? Are there other scenarios where there have been a retrenchment or a backlash against the individual studying a problem by the subjects of the problem itself? I mean, I think about Jim Jordan. He himself was one of the main individuals in the Republican Party advancing skepticism about the 2020 election and advancing false claims about it.

Brandi Geurkink:

To me, this is the most pronounced and has been the most pronounced in attacks on independent media generally. What's most disturbing to me is that an attack on independent media and attack on independent research and institutions, it's a tactic straight out of the repressive government's playbook. And that's one of the things that we're seeing here that is, I think, the most disturbing. And to a point that you made earlier, it is true that what has come out through some of these lawsuits through discovery in the courts, for instance, is that social media companies largely ignore any kinds of recommendations that have been made to them, say, even just from civil society. And those of us who have spent years advocating for companies to act more responsibly, act in line with their own policies, are looking at this saying, "Yeah. There's no way that companies are just going with whatever lands in their inbox." Has told to them, that's not actually what's happening here.

Most disturbingly is I think that there are very real concerns, and we wrote this in the amicus brief, about understanding the government's role in how it pressures private companies to behave and whether it pressures private companies to behave in a particular way. And what is most needed for that is independent research. And so the idea that the very institution of independent research in that practice is being attacked is actually very much counter to the efforts of this campaign in a way that leaves us a bit baffled.

Justin Hendrix:

I do want to turn to that amicus brief and there are some points in it where you, more or less, agree with the plaintiffs and the case that has become Murthy v. Missouri, which will be decided, we assume, by the Supreme Court sometime this term by June. You say "CITR agrees that there are real reasons to be concerned about the outsized influence that large technology companies have on our discourse. Such concerns are, in fact, the principal reason that CITR members study social media companies and their impacts." You also agree that government actors may not, consistent with the First Amendment, threaten private parties in order to coerce them into suppressing or excluding disfavored speech. But the point here is that, I suppose in earlier claims, the court has essentially lumped a bunch of people together that perhaps don't deserve to be lumped together. There's a distinction necessary between independent researchers and perhaps people working in the White House or federal agencies.

Brandi Geurkink:

Exactly. And I think that the goal should be for researchers to maintain their independence from both government and technology companies. And so technology companies having fully independent research and recommendations from independent experts telling them, here is what our research is showing, here are some things that you might do to actually uphold your own policies or actually change your policies to make your platform safer. These are things that we should actually be promoting and upholding because those are the things that actually influence good platform governance. And so what's disturbing about the claims that are made in the Murthy case is that it's essentially saying if you take enough non-coercive actions, I think this is a line that we use itself in the briefing and you cobble them together that can somehow constitute state action and that can somehow constitute coercion and state coercion to tell a platform, a private company to behave in a particular way when that's simply not what's happening. And certainly the implication that researchers are part of that is not true.

Justin Hendrix:

So there've already been results of this campaign, a chilling effect on federal government communication with the platforms. We've seen that in transparency reports, including from Meta, which I believe has indicated that in some cases it has ceased communication with the federal government even on foreign interference in elections. We've seen that various researchers have been hesitant to engage in research or in collaborative efforts similar to what they did in 2020 that were aimed particularly at election research. I assume younger researchers steering away from this area as a result of this campaign, and proposals in Congress to even limit communications research funding through the National Science Foundation, maybe other agencies as well. Are there other impacts you feel that we've seen?

Brandi Geurkink:

We tried to allude to this in the briefing, but it's very difficult to quantify the impact of a chilling effect, and that's precisely the purpose of all of the tactics that we've mentioned. I think that winning isn't essentially the end goal, or it isn't necessarily the end goal. It's about creating this chilling effect. It's about creating an environment where a researcher might say, "Maybe I'm going to pursue this topic instead of this topic." Because it's become risky. It's become reputationally risky, it's become risky in an actual legal real material sense to do some of this work. And I think that the thing that concerns me most about that is that this is very essential work that is being undertaken in the public interest. We do not have this kind of independent research, all that we have is research from companies themselves and statements and potentially research from governments.

And so that's really, we need independent research as kind of a source of trustworthy information for the public. And I think that the chilling effect is creating or could create an atmosphere where it becomes not worth it for people to take that risk for themselves. And that's one of the reasons why we established a coalition is to make people ... We shouldn't underestimate the importance of social support and of solidarity amongst the community for people who are facing these kinds of attacks. And I think that they're easier to navigate when people feel that they're not alone in it and they feel that they're part of a community of people who are doing public interest work because the public has a right to know and the public needs this kind of work to be able to depend on. And so that's really what the coalition is about, is trying to foster the conditions whereby that work can continue, even in spite of these threats.

Justin Hendrix:

Some of these researchers have had more than just requests for documents. The harassment campaigns against them have resulted in death threats, have resulted in harassment that's come across via social media and in other contexts as well. I know we've seen certain individuals that have had to take steps to try to hide where they live, try to protect themselves in other ways. This appears to have got to a level where it's beyond a sort of matter for the courts.

Brandi Geurkink:

Yeah. And I think that recognizing that this is part of a broader attack on institutions, which I think even goes broader than just the realm of independent tech research. There is a broader campaign to attack institutions that society and that democracy rely on. And this is very much a facet of that broader campaign and that broader attack. And the more that people understand that, I think the more that it helps. Of course, it doesn't make any of it better. I don't want to pretend that it does, but I think that it helps to be able to see that broader playbook and to understand that it's not about the individual. Their credibility, their scientific rigor, all of that still very much remains and that the community of support sees it and we recognize it and we admire it and we need it. I think the more that we can tell that that to people who are under attack and facing these threats, then the more that we help to build resiliency and support.

And I really want to raise up something you said earlier about junior scholars and younger researchers who see this, and particularly people who are, say, working within precarious working contracts and might not have visas to be able to stay and do this kind of work in the United States. All of these personal factors influence the way that people go about their work. And I think that letting people know, really creating structures for people to feel supported and letting them know that the rest of the field has their back when these things go down is super important. And that's really what I'm committed to doing.

Justin Hendrix:

Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy Information and communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I believe one of the members of the coalition had a piece recently where he stated "there's a constellation of factors. Increasing disinformation on some platforms, the closure of tools used to study social media lawsuits against investigations on disinformation suggests we may face an uphill battle to understand what happens in the digital public sphere in the near future." So it's not just these legal threats, it's not just this campaign of harassment, it's also closure of tools used to study social media obstacles that are being put up to get at the data at least by the major platforms. Let's talk about that for a moment. What's on your radar when it comes to advocating for access to data?

Brandi Geurkink:

I think that one of the emerging trends that I am keeping an eye out for is really the response that has come from social media platforms, which is largely a business-oriented response to the new growing market for data to train large language models and to create generative AI tools. And what platforms like Reddit, for instance, are identifying is that public data has value, has a lot more value even than it used to. And so in response, they are creating paywalls around their APIs and other tools that researchers use to access data to do public interest research.

And unfortunately though, again, I think some of these decisions aren't actually being made intentionally to keep researchers out, this is what happens when public interest access to data is not codified in law and platforms can essentially do whatever they want to with the data that they hold, even without consulting certainly their users and developing consensual models for data use. That's what we really saw earlier this year with Twitter and with Reddit in a very short timeframe, shutting down tools that researchers and in Reddit's case community moderators had used to really access information about the platform. And so that very significant backsliding is one of the things that I'm keeping an eye on, especially because as the holdover data is becoming tighter from the corporation side, the need for that data from the public interest side and the research side is really growing in a year where we have, what, 70 plus global elections happening.

Justin Hendrix:

The situation's different in Europe where I'm talking to you today, you are in Berlin at the moment. What's going on with the DSA? Is the coalition involved in thinking through how research access will work under the Digital Services Act?

Brandi Geurkink:

Definitely. What's going on with the DSA is that next month is the deadline for the digital service coordinators to be announced and appointed. So member states within the European Union need to appoint agencies that will serve as the digital service coordinator under the law, and those agencies are largely the ones who are going to be responsible for the provisions around data access for researchers. So the DSA provides opportunities for researchers primarily working within academic institutions to apply to agencies in their member state. There is a provision in the DSA around public data access. So this is a broader opportunity for researchers who are working outside of academic institutions, community scientists, hopefully to be able to access information about platforms that has not been available before and was largely at the whim of platforms themselves to decide whether they wanted to provide access to. And so the coalition has been very involved.

One of the things that we worked on was a policy filing, which we submitted jointly with several other organizations last summer, which was actually advocating for the kinds of data that should be made available under the public access data provision of the DSA. And so working together with researchers to really systematically look at what kind of data is needed and then to write that up and submit it to the European Commission's call for information about what they put into the Delegated Act, which is the act that provides more information on information, how companies need to comply with the provisions under the Digital Services Act. So that's something that we have already worked on and moving forward to other areas where we hope to be involved. One is in trying to really build bridges between the research community in Europe and the research community in the United States.

And I think that many people are hoping that there's an opportunity for the DSA to provide broader data access than to just Europeans. And certainly in my reading of the Digital Services Act is that systemic risk in the European Union is something that can be studied by researchers anywhere, not just researchers in the European Union. And also that many systemic risks to the European Union may also relate to issues of public concern in the United States or in other countries around the world. So that's one area. And the other one is this is a new project that we're working on to really look at what is promised in platforms data access programs that they've largely come out with in response to the DSA versus what is actually available. So many platforms have put out new applications, new information about programs such as Meta's content library that researchers can apply to access, but there seems to be a gap between what is promised and what researchers actually have.

For instance, I spoke about Reddit earlier who's not subject to the DSA as it's a very large online platform, but they put out an application for increased API access, and virtually no researchers have heard back on their applications to apply for these kinds of access from Reddit. And so we're really looking at how can we audit not only the programs themselves and what they promise, but the reality? When I think that's going to be really important is for continued advocacy on compliance with the DSA and to really be able to speak to specifically what researchers have and ensure that a press release about the kind of program that they're releasing and rolling out that is actually reflected in the reality that researchers have access to that data.

Justin Hendrix:

I assume that right now most of the members of the coalition are either in the US or in Europe. I know there are efforts abroad, including recently a project in Africa led by research ICT Africa down in South Africa. Others, I assume, elsewhere in the world grow the network of independent researchers. Are you engaging with those types of activities? Are you global in ambition?

Brandi Geurkink:

Definitely global in ambition. Yeah. The coalition was really set up by a group of US-based researchers, but whose research and whose network certainly in this space extend further. And I think that some of the attacks on independent researchers that are facing independent researchers in the field are more pronounced actually in places outside of the US and Europe. Just look, for instance, at the kinds of programs and policies that are made available around election integrity in the US and Europe, European countries versus the rest of the world. There have been multiple research projects that show that some of the impacts, the worst impacts of technology hit harder in countries where the platforms pay less attention. And so that is something that we're definitely aware of and aiming to increase our global membership. And right now, I think you're right in that our members are primarily situated in the US and Europe and most of our advocacy has focused on that area as such. But we definitely are globally minded in ambition and hope to do more.

Justin Hendrix:

Let me ask you a question, which I assume relates slightly to the ambition for the coalition, but also maybe back to some of these threats against independent researchers, and that's about the universities themselves. This is a coalition of independent researchers who join as individuals often or representing their labs. What role do the universities play? Are there ways in which we're advocating for this type of research or for researchers with universities as well? Are they one of the actors that you're involved in hoping to try to influence?

Brandi Geurkink:

Definitely. I think that a lot of researchers, the dynamics that they face in pursuing their research, largely some of those dynamics are within their control and some of them are not. So that is true whether you're working at a media organization, you're working in a newsroom, you're working for a nonprofit, you're working for a university. Universities I think are unique in some ways. One of the ones that comes to mind is that they're huge. And universities, many of the universities that our coalition members from academia are working within, are really institutions of knowledge, which means that they also have lots of other competing interests, areas of inquiry. And so they're massive in their own right. But in any case, I think what's true for almost all of the researchers, maybe with the exception of folks doing citizen or community science, is that the conditions in which their research can thrive or their research can be inhibited, are conditions that have internal implications to their institution as well as external ones.

And so trying to focus on how we can take a holistic view for independent researchers of the conditions that make their work easier or make their work harder is going to be really important. And we focused a lot of our energy on looking at the outside conditions because those also factor into one another, right? So if a tech company is putting pressure on an individual researcher, then that influences and the narratives that they might use to wage that attack are going to influence the way that researcher's boss or that researcher's dean or whatever the case may be, thinks about their research. But doing that internal work is going to be equally as important I think, in the coalition moving forward to really try to make sure that institutions understand the public interest nature of this work and really uphold and support the independence of that research as well.

Justin Hendrix:

The tricky place to be when you're studying issues that are core to the function of democracy and when essentially anti-democratic interests are opposed to what you're doing, you can find yourself, I'm sure between a rock and a hard place, both with regard to external actors and occasionally perhaps the internal interests of universities. A tough spot for researchers to be.

Brandi Geurkink:

Definitely.

Justin Hendrix:

So what's next? You just got this new job, you've got to set priorities for this organization. What are you going to work on in 2024?

Brandi Geurkink:

One of the things I plan to work on in 2024 is really listening and working together with coalition members on helping to influence the priorities of the organization. And I largely see our work so far and into the near future as falling into three areas. One of them is really providing crisis response support for independent researchers who are facing some of the attacks that we've spoken about today. And so that can mean connecting people to legal support and providing referrals to ensure that they get that support, but also helping with doing solidarity campaigns and calls for mutual aid within the community. And the second area is really in the realm of advocacy. And so one of the things the coalition aims to do is develop an advocacy portfolio that can be conducted jointly with our members on areas which are really right now largely taking people away from doing their public interest research.

So things like access to data. To be frank, that should just be a right that should already exist. And the fact that many researchers and research institutions are having to take so much time away from their actual research to do policy filings to advocate for the basic to access information that is needed to do their work in the first place is something that I hope with the coalition stepping in and being able to coordinate a lot of that advocacy can benefit the sector as a whole and allow a lot of the individual organizations who have been carrying that work to focus on doing public interest research. And then the third area is really in strategic comms. So I think that, as communities come under attack, I think especially in the nonprofit space and really anybody doing public interest work, the need to be really clear to policymakers, to the public, even to corporate actors about the work that you do and the value of that work as well as the barriers that people doing it face becomes even more important.

And so really I think that in the realm of public interest research, it's a bit difficult because the researchers who are doing this work, as I mentioned, are working across different sectors. And so really trying to have a unified story around the value of independent tech research and its importance is something that I'm thinking a lot about. And I think that woven throughout all of those kind of three key areas is the need for old-fashioned organizing, and getting people in a room together or on a Zoom together and helping to build those relationships. I really think that the strongest and most enduring movements are the ones that invest in that long-term sustained movement building. And so that's an approach that I'm taking into this new role is really in seeing myself as an organizer of this community and trying to work in service of that.

Justin Hendrix:

I look forward to in my small way, being involved in those efforts and a lot for one person. There are probably some folks listening to this who are wondering, how can I get involved? I might be someone who meets your membership criteria. Where would they go to do that?

Brandi Geurkink:

Sure. So our website is Independenttechresearch.org, and when you visit Independenttechresearch.org, if you are an independent researcher or an advocate who listened to this podcast and thought, "I care about the right to defend this type of research and I want to help." Then please apply to be a member of the coalition. It's quite a low bar application form. We just request that you give us a little bit of information about yourself and also that you declare any conflicts of interest. So I spoke at the beginning of the podcast about the importance of our members being independent of the tech industry. And so we ask people to consider that for themselves and to let us know those kind of conflicts of interest. And then if you are accepted to join the coalition, then there are plenty of ways, especially into this year to be involved in our programs and in our work. And I would encourage anybody who would like to join us,

Justin Hendrix:

Brandi, I hope we can check in some months down the line, find out how things are going and wish you all the best.

Brandi Geurkink:

Thank you.