The Silent Revolution: Free Speech, Censorship, and the Campus Dilemma in America (Part 2)
The Academics Turned Thought Police
A recurring theme of our writings has been pointing out the deliberate sidelining of crucial dissent at most (if not all) elite universities around the country. In Part 1 of our work directly addressing this theme, we noted polling in which both students and professors alike admit being afraid of asking the “wrong” questions or saying the “wrong” things when it comes to controversial subjects.[1]
While this itself is problematic for any university whose primary goal is supposedly pursuing the truth wherever that may lead, professors and students had perhaps been taking some solace in not being punished for their thoughts and feelings once they had left their offices and classrooms.
This was true until this past summer when a new standard was established through the posting of the paper “Anonymity and Identity Online” by Boston University’s Florian Ederer and Yale’s School of Management Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Kyle Jensen.[2] Through the posting of this paper, the authors have now set a new and appalling standard – that now professors and students have to think twice before even daring to speak on certain topics anonymously.
To many, this may seem to be the obvious and natural next step in the breaching of norms around free expression when retrospectively considering the egregious behaviors of university professors and administrators over the last two decades. However, we still feel it is essential to call this out for what it is – a massive, unethical overreach that threatens to eliminate any meaningful debate on or off campus.
Background
Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an anonymous forum on which many economists and those interested in economics post. As is the case with any online forum, the posts’ content has considerable variance. It includes legitimate discussions of academic papers in economics, economic news, political topics, job openings and hiring, or just academic life. It also includes posts that involve gratuitous insults of figures in the profession as well as blatantly racist, sexist, and tasteless remarks.
These posts across the board – from the ugly to the legitimate – typically are much less politically correct and would also generally be considered more right-leaning than what is standard on campus. While this forum had for a long time remained largely unknown, its popularity began to explode once it began receiving negative, mainstream press coverage.[3] In tandem, many gatekeepers in the economics profession have demanded that this forum be shut down. While we disagree with those who demand the shutdown of forums of this sort and believe that defending free speech principle requires us to allow people to express things that we may personally find abhorrent, we want to be clear from the outset that such a position should not be conflated with an endorsement of every post on the platform, or how such a platform chooses to moderate its vilest content.
The paper by Ederer et al focuses specifically on the posts and posters from the EJMR forum. In the initial abstract[4] posted by the economists in May of this past year, the authors claimed that they had “geolocated” a majority of the posts on EJMR. The abstract gave no indication of the underlying methodology, but the authors noted that all relevant questions would be answered at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute conference two months later. Still, the abstract suggested that the authors were able to identify individuals, which seemed at first glance infeasible.
While neglecting to answer specific questions on the paper’s methodology, the authors nonetheless used social media accounts to bask in the adulation from colleagues who interpreted the initial abstract as suggesting the authors had discovered a way to dox posters from the forum.[5] One of the authors[6] of the paper as well as another Yale faculty member[7] made public bets on whether specific individuals could be doxed. Another Yale professor – who himself was the victim of witch hunt at the hands of a cancellation mob for daring to suggest that students relax about one another’s Halloween costume choices[8] – mocked the very idea that a witch hunt might ensue due to this paper’s posting.[9]
An important piece of context is that it is unusual for an abstract to be posted months in advance of a paper’s posting and then for the authors of the paper to refuse any requests for further information about their findings and methodology. Whether or not it was the authors intent, their actions for obvious reasons sparked fear in those who posted on EJMR in the past – and we’re not only talking about people who wrote things that are offensive or abhorrent. People on the forum began posting about their anxiety or suicidal thoughts[10] brought on by the potentiality of being outed for having criticized colleagues, expressed views unacceptable within their field, disclosed private details about their personal lives, or complained about the politics in their respective countries (people on the blog post from all around the world including India, Turkey, and China).
The Paper’s Methodology
On July 18th – two days in advance of the NBER conference – the mystery around the paper’s methodology was cleared up, though allegedly by accident. According to the author’s own account, Florian Ederer posted the paper and slides of the presentation online only to remove them just minutes later upon realizing that he had mistakenly published them publicly. The initial documents posted revealed that the authors had managed to “recover” IP addresses for about two-thirds of the posts on the website by exploiting a security deficiency in the way that EJMR assigned author IDs to posts.[11] In effect, the authors guessed the way IP addresses of posters were turned into author IDs and then used high-powered computing (funded by Yale) to compute quadrillions of combinations and match them to specific posters.
The authors attempted to downplay this by claiming that all of this was “just public data and some math.” This is quite an understatement. The authors were and are trying to detract from the fact that what they had done using any reasonable, common-sense definition was hacking. They had also violated the obligation in cyberethics to notify the owner of a website about security flaws. Rather than do so, the authors instead opted to exploit this flaw to gather IP data, which could then be used to identify specific people.
While the authors have claimed that they will not publish personally identifying information and, in the presentation, they only discuss aggregated data, there is much reason to worry that this will not be the case. The original paper and slides they accidentally released divulged the old IP address of the anonymous owner of the site. Worse, they have gone so far as to note that there is an archive of the entire website available online, and they have even gone as far as publishing videos[12] showing how to use their code to derive IP addresses for yourself.
This means that virtually anyone who has access to someone’s IP address from any other source can crosscheck that IP address with those on the EJMR forum to identify that individual’s specific posts. Thus, it could be only a matter of time until people throughout the profession who have an axe to grind begin their own doxing operations, as the fans of the paper have already proudly boasted.[13] On their own twitter accounts, some academics have already begun speculating on who particular posters could be[14], while others have called for increased pressure to release the identities of the “worst” posters, so they face consequences.[15] However, beyond these individual campaigns, keep in mind that many foreign posters will post critiques about their own countries’ political and economic systems. If a government that has far fewer protections for speech has access to people’s IP addresses, the consequences for identified posters could lead to much more disastrous consequences that extend far beyond the professional sphere.
You may be wondering whether there are guardrails against this sort of thing in academic research or whether this behavior is even legal. To the first question, there is supposed to be. Every university has what is called an “Institutional Review Board” (IRB), which is supposed to protect the well-being of the subjects of research. While we do not know the specifics of the internal conversations had at Yale’s IRB about this paper, the fact that this study was allowed to proceed as constructed appears to indicate either gross negligence or a massive failure of principle on part of Yale’s IRB. To be fair to the IRB, the authors also could have misled the IRB by convincing them that this was simply “public data”. However, it seems clear that using massive computing power to derive personally identifying information from a site that promised anonymity suggests the data were not exactly publicly available. Even some academic defenders of the paper have publicly admitted that the IRB failed to uphold its duty in protecting those involved in the study.[16]
As to the legality of how the data were collected, this could present an issue particularly in Europe. While we are not lawyers, it does seem to us that under both the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation[17] and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act 2018[18], IPs are classified as personally identifiable information which is illegal to harvest without consent. In the U.S. this is less clear, but some states do seemingly have some protections including Yale’s home state of Connecticut. Again, while we are not lawyers, it is worth considering whether these behaviors technically violate Connecticut’s provisions against “disclosures of personal identifiable information without consent”[19] or those against “trafficking in personal identifying information.”[20]
The Merits of the Paper and Its Multiple Justifications
Aside from the ethics, wisdom, or legality of the study is the question of whether there was a compelling question worth studying in this case. In other words, what was the justification for all of this questionable behavior? The arguments for this, broadly speaking, fall into three lines of justification:
There was nothing extraordinary about this paper’s methods, as the authors just used “some math and public data”;
While the methods may be questionable, the authors are justified since the users on the forum are bad people who espouse evil ideas; and
Anonymity is increasingly not important or infeasible in the digital age, or perhaps even undesirable.[21]
As for the first line of reasoning, this is absurd on its face. The data were clearly not publicly available absent the authors’ exploitation of EJMR’s security flaws. Suppose a bank’s website proved to have a similar security flaw in its system – would Yale allow authors to similarly use “just some math” to fetch an entire database of the bank’s clients’ social security numbers, under a claim that these data were in fact publicly available? In principle, this situation is no different, and thus it appears clear that if there is any justification, more work must be done.
This brings us to the second justification which is that this paper managed to expose people and posts that are uniquely bad and worth exposing. This gets us to the main finding of the paper, which is that approximately a whopping 10% of all posts on EJMR are “toxic”. Thus, due to such a high degree of toxicity, this justifies violating every norm in academic research to expose the people responsible.
This raises a number of obvious questions. Suppose this 10% is meaningful and indicative of something particularly bad. Does this mean that this 10% is now the threshold whereby individuals lose the ability to remain anonymous on a platform and which allows for any individual to hack a qualifying website to expose its users? If that is the case then, how does this 10% toxicity figure compare to other online message boards? Thankfully, a few people decided to look for a counterfactual for themselves to analyze the authors’ results, as the authors puzzlingly left out any points of comparison in the paper’s initial iteration. One enterprising poster on EJMR decided to use this tool on his own by analyzing reddit’s basic r/news subreddit, which is one of the largest subreddits on the forum. The poster found that r/news had a 16% toxicity rate, so more than 50% more toxicity than EJMR.[22] An independent researcher, Chris Brunet, similarly ran the tool on a series of subreddits including r/conspiracy, r/politics, and r/worldnews where he also found much higher rates of toxicity than EJMR.[23]
The authors of the paper did respond to this critique by running a new analysis that looked at posts across the 1,000 most popular subreddits on the website. Here they found that EJMR posts were more likely to be labeled as toxic, misogynistic and hate speech than 69%, 73%, and 93%, respectively than the posts found on those subreddits.[24] We find these results unconvincing for a couple of reasons. For one, the top 1,000 subreddits include all sorts of topics that have no reason to ever touch on controversial or challenging subjects. To give you an idea, r/MadeMeSmile, r/gardening, and r/cats are among the top 100 most frequented subreddits.[25] It would be odd to find a critical mass of “toxic” posts of any sort on these subreddits, and thus it’s unclear whether this top 1,000 is a useful point of comparison. Frankly, focusing specifically on subreddits like r/politics and r/worldnews like Brunet did above makes much more sense as these subreddits are likely touching on similar subjects as EJMR.
Secondly, it is unclear to this point whether the authors are potentially double, triple, quadruple, etc. counting “toxic” phrases since the structure of post responses on EJMR reprint the initial post as many times as there are responses to that post. See below for an example[26]:
As such, the results could be greatly biased, making toxic posts on EJMR seem more frequent than they actually are.
This naturally brings us to a final question which is how dependable exactly is this measure of “toxicity”? One assumes that the authors must be coding their tool to capture clearly vile and racist phrases. Believe it or not, the tool[27] used by the authors is effectively meaningless as its currently constructed since it classifies all sorts of phrases as “toxic” or “not toxic” with what appears to be an obvious progressive bias. Consider the following examples provided by Brunet in his presentation for Stanford’s Classical Liberalism Seminar a few weeks back[28][29]:
The following phrases are considered TOXIC:
There are only 2 genders;
Men cannot become women;
Israel is the rightful Jewish land, it will never be reclaimed by Islam.
The following are considered NON-TOXIC:
Children should be given puberty blockers;
Sweep Israel into the sea;
Israel is rightful Muslim land, it will be reclaimed through jihad inshallah.
You can test these statements for yourself here.
Beyond the absurdity of the results is the fact that the authors have effectively admitted that their desire to expose the posters had little to do with this particular website’s “toxicity” being remarkably worse than any others. Otherwise, the authors would have published points of comparison like those above in their initial paper to show just how much worse these posters were relative to everywhere else on the internet. Rather, it seems that it is the types of criticism these posters are levying that are the problem. In one revelatory comment, Jake Grumbach, professor at Berkeley, exulted, “I think that paper is morally and ethically Good because contributing to rather than exiting or destroying a morally and ethically corrupt community is morally and ethically Bad. And I don’t think it’s nuanced, complicated, or controversial at all. It’s cool af, in fact.”[30] This comment was, of course, retweeted by author Florian Ederer.
But, again, there is seemingly no desire on part of any of these academics to explain how precisely these posters are worse than anyone else. Suppose someone were able to demonstrate that a BLM forum exceeded this 10% toxicity measure estimated by the authors of the paper -- do we suppose that the authors and professors like Jack Grumbach would find that to be sufficient cause to expose the identifies of those posting on the forum? Of course not. And herein lies the problem – the entire basis using this justification for exposing these particular identities is simply because the professors in question do not like the assumed political positions of those on the site and thus, they believe they are morally justified in publicly outing and punishing the posters. It would be greatly helpful if the authors would simply just admit as much rather than pretend to have followed some meaningful protocol in coming to this decision.
Finally, the last line of justification for the paper is that anonymity is not important or desirable anyway particularly in the digital age. Yale’s own Nicholas Christakis – despite having been a victim of a cancellation mob himself – only “reservedly” believes that there should be protections for anonymous speech. Yet recent years have shown that academic protections are no longer a sufficient protection for heterodox speech. In one of the most egregious examples,[31] Harald Uhlig was placed on leave from his editorship of the Journal of Political Economy and the Chicago Federal Reserve cut ties with him after a mass cancellation campaign caused by his arguing that BLM had “torpedoed itself” by backing defunding of public safety. Notably, one of the signatories of the petition calling for Uhlig’s cancellation is an author of the paper in question, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham.[32]
Thus, the message is clear from the authors. This paper is not merely targeting the vilest racists on the forum. No, rather the message is that they will hound you and call for your ostracization for what you say publicly, and then track you down to expose you for what you said privately.
Conclusion
Over the last decade, the public’s confidence in academic institutions has fallen precipitously.[33] This has no doubt been in part due to the university’s disregard for rules of research and conduct and its display of utter contempt for fair-dealing, rigor and basic decency. Instead, researchers have been allowed to do shoddy or ethically questionable research insofar as that research supports the correct narratives or undermines the correct targets. In this case, the authors correctly identified “bad people” on the internet, and thus any concerns about hacking or posters’ rights to anonymity become completely irrelevant.
And while we cannot stop universities from choosing to destroy themselves, we can suggest that it should no longer be the case that the public must continue to subsidize their demise. To put it more bluntly, we hope that leaders in government begin to strongly reconsider universities’ eligibility for federal research funding and student loan support. As it stands, Yale currently receives almost $700 million in federal funding.[34] If progressive academics are going to behave so unprofessionally and flippantly with research funds and if university IRBs are going to so recklessly support that research, then it makes absolutely no sense for the public to continue to support and fund institutions that are willing act against its interests.
For far too long, there have been too few people willing to speak out on the ongoing academic institutional decay, and to the extent a few brave souls do they typically merely point out the hypocrisy of those in question since these individuals will cry free speech when it has to do with political allies but then they will sign petitions calling for other professors’ professional demise insofar as they deem those academics as political enemies. But, calling out this hypocrisy assumes the principle in question is about “free speech” or “free inquiry”. This is a mistake, as the true principle with which many are operating is “it is okay when we do it.”
An unfortunate reality of our current political moment is that the criticisms laid out above will undoubtedly be received as “conservative” critiques of the paper. This is categorically untrue, as these criticisms would be just as applicable if the authors of the paper had decided to target an expressly left-wing forum. Until very recently, arguments of this sort were quite common from left-wing outfits like the American Civil Liberties Union which famously defended neo-Nazi groups’ right to march in 1978[35] or in 1958 when the NAACP sued the state of Alabama on free speech grounds to protest a law that would require the publishing of its membership list.[36] Furthermore, there have been recent examples of prominent Republican or conservative leaders making similar calls as these authors. Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley just this past month called for the unmasking of all anonymous social media accounts on the internet, citing their very existence as a “national security threat.”[37]
If you find yourself largely agreeing with the criticisms that we have laid out above, but you feel as though that in your current position it does not make sense to ever mention your distaste with current trends toward speech since your personal research or statements are not currently under fire, we strongly ask that you reconsider. No one individual or group can have a monopoly on the truth, and efforts to impose ideologies or ostracize those who do not agree with prevailing elite consensus completely defeat the purpose of living in a free society. Unprincipled mobs will inevitably come for us all. If the last 10-15 years have proved anything, it is that the rules of intellectual engagement are constantly changing, and these changes are largely based on the tastes of random people on social media reacting to the viral news of the day. And if one day the interpretation of those events of the day makes your research “problematic”, you can be sure that this unruly mob will come for you too.
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/files/2023-07/ejmr_paper_nber(1).pdf
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/upshot/evidence-of-a-toxic-environment-for-women-in-economics.html
https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1659715080798257152
[8] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/halloween-costume-controversy
https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1658900983462895621
[10] https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/broette-here-i-reached-out-to-the-nyt
[11] Technical details on how this was done can be found here: https://gofile.io/d/9mVkFF
https://twitter.com/paulgp/status/1682123923830210568
https://twitter.com/realChrisBrunet/status/1684978137258442752
https://twitter.com/jenniferdoleac/status/1682513220823666690
https://twitter.com/AnyaSamek/status/1683857917164896256
https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1682842941239197699
[17] https://www.hrpo.pitt.edu/european-union-eu-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr#:~:text=The%20General%20Data%20Protection%20Regulation,of%20individuals%20in%20the%20EEA.
[18] https://www.gov.uk/data-protection#:~:text=The%20Data%20Protection%20Act%202018%20is%20the%20UK's%20implementation%20of,used%20fairly%2C%20lawfully%20and%20transparently
[19] https://www.cga.ct.gov/ASP/CGABILLSTATUS/cgabillstatus.asp?selBillType=Bill&bill_num=SB00989&which_year=2021
[20] https://law.justia.com/codes/connecticut/2012/title-53a/chapter-952/section-53a-129e/#:~:text=(a)%20A%20person%20is%20guilty,the%20authorization%20of%20such%20other
[21] https://x.com/florianederer/status/1724899051559412176?s=20
[22] https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/new-paper-idea-for-ejmr-studies-field-ejmr-significantly-less-toxic-than-reddit
, see 48:15.
https://twitter.com/florianederer/status/1717153123049857197?s=20
[25] https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/
[26] https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/how-does-returning-from-industry-to-do-a-good-phd-work
[27] https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09509
, see 38:30.
[29] https://huggingface.co/tomh/toxigen_roberta
https://twitter.com/JakeMGrumbach/status/1681391473038860288
[31] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-university-of-chicago-economist-black-lives-matter-harald-uhlig-20200613-hjqqlox7wjbz5iosdxkgoe7ftq-story.html
[32] https://www.dropbox.com/s/45hnqjjki12529m/uhlig_petition_public.pdf?dl=0
[34] https://www.collegevaluesonline.com/colleges-benefiting-from-government-spending/#:~:text=New%20Haven%2C%20Connecticut&text=In%20the%202021%20fiscal%20year,from%20the%20Connecticut%20State%20Government).
[35] https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie
[36] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/357/449/#:~:text=This%20unanimous%20opinion%20ruled%20that,anonymity%20would%20expose%20the%20members.
https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1724524144954380794
 | A guest post by
|