Our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to . . . push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company . . . by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”

(The above statement is from the) Speaker’s notes from the University of Michigan’s first pitch to the National Science Foundation (NSF) about its NSF-funded, AI-powered WiseDex tool.1 This interim report details the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) funding of AI powered censorship and propaganda tools, and its repeated efforts to hide its actions and avoid political and media scrutiny.

In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams. The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence (AI)- powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.

Non-public documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government demonstrate that these federal bureaucrats, “disinformation” researchers, and non-profit groups understood that their actions— “content moderation” and combatting so-called misinformation—amounted to “censorship.” And yet, NSF forged ahead, supporting new technologies that would essentially enable the censorship of online speech “at scale.”

But NSF’s taxpayer funding for this potential automated censorship is only half of the story. The Committee and the Select Subcommittee have also obtained, via document requests and subpoenas, nonpublic emails and other documents that reveal a years-long, intentional effort by NSF to hide its role in funding these censorship and propaganda tools from media and political scrutiny. From legal scholars such as Jonathan Turley to conservative journalists, NSF tracked public criticisms of its work in funding these projects. NSF went so far as to develop a media strategy that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” Thus, “any law or government policy that reduces that freedom on the [social media] platforms . . . violates the First Amendment.” To inform potential legislation, the Committee and Select Subcommittee have been investigating the Executive Branch’s collusion with third party intermediaries, including universities, non-profits, and businesses, to censor protected speech on social media. The Committee and Subcommittee have uncovered serious violations of the First Amendment throughout the Executive Branch, including:

• The Biden White House directly coercing large social media companies, such as Facebook, to censor true information, memes, and satire, eventually leading Facebook to change its content moderation policies;
• Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP)—created at the request of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—working with the federal government to flag thousands of links and submit recommendations directly to large social media platforms to censor Americans’ online speech in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election
• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) harassing Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X) because of Musk’s commitment to free speech, even going so far as to target certain journalists by name.

As egregious as these violations of the First Amendment are, each still faced the same limitation: the censors were human. Senior Biden White House officials had to spend time personally berating the social media companies into changing their content moderation policies. Social media executives expended considerable time and effort responding to the White House’s threats and evaluating the flagged content. Stanford had nearly a hundred people working for the EIP in shifts flagging thousands of posts, which was only a fraction of the number of election related posts made in the fall of 2020.

But what happens if the censorship is automated and the censors are machines? There is no need for shifts or huge teams of people to identify and flag problematic online speech. AI driven tools can monitor online speech at a scale that would far outmatch even the largest team of “disinformation” bureaucrats and researchers. This interim report reveals how NSF is using American taxpayer dollars to fund the tools that could usher in an even greater threat to online speech than the original efforts to censor speech on social media. The NSF-funded projects threaten to help create a censorship regime that could significantly impede the fundamental First Amendment rights of millions of Americans, and potentially do so in a manner that is instantaneous and largely invisible to its victims.

You can read the entire 79-page report:

Click to access NSF-Staff-Report_Appendix.pdf

“A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.”

– Laurence J. Peter