When Alex Stamos describes the challenge of studying the worst problems of mass-scale bad behavior on the internet, he compares it to astronomy. To chart the cosmos, astronomers don't build their own Hubble telescopes or Arecibo observatories. They concentrate their resources in a few well-situated places, and share time on expensive hardware. But when it comes to tackling internet abuse ranging from extremism to disinformation to child exploitation, Stamos argues, Silicon Valley companies and academics are still trying to build their own telescopes. But what if they shared their tools—and more importantly, the massive datasets they've assembled?
That's the idea behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, founded with a $5 million donation from Craigslist creator Craig Newmark, and part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center where Stamos is a visiting professor. It aspires to be a central outlet for the study of all manner of internet abuse, assembling for visiting researchers the necessary machine learning tools, big data analysts, and perhaps most importantly, access to major tech platforms' user data—a key to the project that may hinge on which tech firms cooperate, and to what degree.
As an example of a potential undertaking, Stamos points to political disinformation of the kind that roiled the 2016 presidential election during his time at Facebook, a problem that has become the most glaring example of Silicon Valley's blindspots around abuse of their services. "Misinformation is not just a computer science problem. It's a problem that brings in political science, sociology, psychology," Stamos says. "Part of the idea of the Internet Observatory is to build a place for these people to w ..
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