Stanford To Set Up An “Internet Observatory” For Abuse Monitoring

Facebook’s former head of security, Alex Stamos is developing a new tool that will assist researchers in studying online disinformation and harassment.

Stamos compares Stanford Internet Observatory, the name of his project with the Hubble Space Telescope. He envisions the Stanford Internet Observatory as a shared pool of resources that researchers can make use of without the need to build their own, according to Wired. But to persuade companies like Google and Facebook to agree on sharing their user data, it will require tough negotiations, especially after some recent privacy scandals.

Stamos brings up the political information incident that happened during the 2016 presidential election as an example of the kind of problems that he and his colleagues want the observatory to study and prevent. He said:

Stamos supervised the giant social media’s security when the Cambridge scandal broke out which resulted in the company receiving a $5 billion fine. He is now requiring access to user data from Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.

The idea is to make data coming from these tech giants anonymous, and at the same time, looking for anonymous as well as already-public posts on hate-filled sites like 8chan and 4chan.

The observatory will be placed at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Nate Persily, co-director of the center, said:

According to Stamos, engineers at the Silicon Valley are not prepared to take on disinformation and the hate spreading on their platforms. Therefore, the only solution is to let them access this kind of data.

Stamos said: