Comment by huijzer

Stanford has received more than $1 trillion in funding [1], so even while they are not an government agency, I would not call them independent. I also don't think this is bad. As Heather Douglas argued in her book, science is never completely independent of policy. But I think if policy overrules scientific evidence, then things are going too far.

There is also a government document that states that

> "The EIP and VP provided public factual findings to multiple entities, including government agencies and social media platforms" [2].

Here VP is the aforementioned Virality Project (VP) by Stanford. The document mentions that

> "The VP provided public information about observed social media trends that could be used by social media platforms and public health communicators to inform their responses and further public dialogue. Rather than attempting to censor speech, the VP’s goal was to share its analysis of social media trends so that social media platforms and public health officials were prepared to respond to widely shared narratives."

This defense is highly questionable I think. Why do social media platforms need to be prepared to respond to widely shared narratives? How can a social media platform prepare for a "widely shared narrative"? Why can the scientists not write a public paper and then communicate via that way instead of directly to the social media platform? If this is based on the assumption that the general public doesn't understand, then who says that the government understands? Is the government more clever than the general public? Do scientists know better than the general public? I think scientists are experts in their domain usually. But does that make them experts in general? Should a scientists in an university decide what's best for people outside university?

[1]: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-federal-funding-a-momen...

[2]: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115561/documents/...