Yale suspends scholar after ‘AI-empowered’ site said she supported a terrorist group

Helyeh Doutaghi says she was ‘speaking truth about genocide’ of Palestinians

Yale Law School is facing criticism after the suspension of Helyeh Doutaghi. Bloomberg

A Yale Law School scholar claims the institution wrongly suspended her after a website that uses artificial intelligence published a story accusing her of being a supporter of a US-designated terror group.

Helyeh Doutaghi, a scholar of international law and political economy, said on Wednesday that the report was a defamatory smear, and warned that AI is being used as a weapon to “to target students, faculty and organisers who dare to speak out against genocide, systemic starvation and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians".

JewishOnliner, the site at the centre of the controversy, describes itself as “your online hub for insights, investigations, data and exposes about issues impacting the Jewish community. Empowered by AI capabilities".

The site claimed Ms Doutaghi was connected to the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the US Treasury Department in 2024 designated as a “sham charity” and an “international fund-raiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist organisation".

Helyeh Doutaghi said that Jewish Onliner, a website claiming to be AI-powered, posted false information about her, and that Yale Law School then wrongly suspended her.

Jewish Onliner does not have bylines on its stories and it was not clear if the "investigation" into Ms Doutaghi was produced with any human input. A message to the site was not immediately returned.

“Jewish Onliner is your AI-empowered, trusted online hub for insights, actionable intelligence,” the site states.

In a social media post, Ms Doutaghi said the allegations had prompted death threats and harassment.

“Rather than investigate the source of these allegations first, the nation's 'top law school' accepted them at face value, and shifted the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, treating me, prima facie, as guilty until proven otherwise,” she wrote. “Whether Yale Law School's attorneys knowingly relied on Al-fabricated claims or simply chose wilful ignorance remains unanswered.”

Ms Doutaghi has since retained legal counsel, Eric Lee, who said he was trying to arrange a meeting between Yale officials and his client, but that Yale's outside counsel rushed to place her on administrative leave.

“Yale is bending the knee to Trump's effort to suppress free speech, crush academic freedom and establish a dictatorship. Whether he succeeds will depend entirely on the response of the population,” he wrote on social media. “We urge everyone to stand up and come to the defence of Dr Doutaghi and the democratic principles of free speech and due process which are fundamental to us all.”

Alden Ferro, a spokesperson for Yale Law School, provided the following statement to The National.

“In response to allegations about potential unlawful conduct, the appropriate process is to place an employee on a temporary administrative leave while a review is conducted to understand the facts of the matter. Such an action is never initiated based on a person’s protected speech," he said.

Earlier this month when the story about Ms Doutaghi was published, Yale Law School said it was looking into the matter.

“We take these allegations extremely seriously and immediately opened an investigation into the matter to ascertain the facts," a statement read. "Helyeh Doutaghi’s short-term position as an associate research scholar with the LPE Project expires next month. Until then, she has been placed on an immediate administrative leave pending the outcome of this investigation."

The case is the latest in a series of attempts to use artificial intelligence and social networks to try to gain an upper hand in influence since the Israel-Gaza war began in 2023.

Just weeks after the start of the war, the professional social networking platform LinkedIn sent a cease and desist letter to a website, Anti-Israel-Employees.com, accusing it of breaching the site's policies on data scraping, a tactic in which automated software can be used to lift information from various sites.

The letter came amid criticisms that Anti-Israeli-Employees.com unfairly highlighted various users who used hashtags such as #FreeGaza and #PrayForPalestine, and mentioned their place of employment.

The website, Anti-Israel-Employees.com, came under criticism and accusations that it breached social media website policies by scraping for data.

“Using automated tools to scrape LinkedIn violates our terms of service,” a representative for the Microsoft-owned site told The National last year. “And we work to notify sites when they do.”

Anti-Israeli-Employees.com is no longer active.

On Monday, an Axios report suggested the US State Department would use artificial intelligence to potentially revoke the visas of international students accused of supporting Hamas.

The State Department told The National it “is committed to protecting our nation and its citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process”.

Craig Smith, a partner at the Boston-based Lando and Anastasi law firm, said the State Department's potential use of AI was problematic on several levels.

“In addition to the free speech issues, the use of artificial intelligence tools without transparency is concerning. AI tools are only as good as the models they are based on and how they are trained,” he told The National, referring to the potential for bias with AI.

“AI tools are effective at summarising known information, but interpreting the meaning of that information is more difficult. Social media posts and reactions to them can be very nuanced, which requires a sophisticated understanding of the issues and the context in which the posts were made."

Despite tremendous technological developments in recent years, AI tools and chatbots have been widely known to have problems in response to various user prompts, said Mr Smith,who specialises in technology law.

“An analysis of this information by an AI tool would need to be subject to quality control and verification,” Mr Smith said. “These errors may be inevitable in certain AI tools, and therefore verification of any analysis or conclusions is critical.”