(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Instead of using agencies such as the FBI to pressure social media companies to censor politically inconvenient content, the Biden administration is financing the creation of artificial intelligence programs that would automate such censorship efforts, according to a new report from the House Weaponization Subcommittee.
Citing non-public documents and other records, the subcommittee’s Tuesday report found that the National Science Foundation launched a $21 million initiative to create censorship programs powered by artificial intelligence.
According to the report, the NSF launched an initiative in March 2021 called “Track F: Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems”—a bureaucratic term that amounts to censorship.
“The euphemistic ‘trust and authenticity in communication systems,’ in fact, means combatting so-called ‘misinformation,’ i.e., censorship. In an early draft solicitation, NSF indicated that Track F projects will ‘address issues of trust and authenticity in communication systems, including predicting, preventing, detecting, correcting, and mitigating the spread of inaccurate information that harms people and society,’” the report said.
“As NSF’s Track F program manager, Michael Pozmantier, explained more plainly in a June 2021 email, Track F is the NSF ‘Accelerator track focused on combatting mis/disinformation.’”
In September 2021, the NSF publicly awarded 12 Track F teams $750,000 apiece (a total of $9 million) to develop their project ideas.
According to the report, one research team, led by researchers at the University of Michigan, used the $750,000 it received from NSF to examine how AI could help Big Tech handle and outsource the “responsibility of censorship” on social media.
The subcommittee said that the University of Michigan intended to use the federal funding to develop its tool “WiseDex,” which could use AI technology to assess the veracity of content on social media and assist large social media platforms with what content should be removed or otherwise censored.
Another recipient, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received $5.75 million to develop a tool to “empower efforts by journalists, developers, and citizens to fact-check” “delegitimizing information” about “election integrity and vaccine efficacy” on social media, the report said.
“Like Michigan’s WiseDex, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s CourseCorrect project harnessed AI and machine learning techniques to address misinformation on social media,” the report said.
“Unlike WiseDex, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers made clear that their project was specifically focused on ‘address[ing] two democratic and public health crises facing the U.S.: skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines.’”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology also received $750,000 to develop “effective interventions” to educate Americans—specifically, those that the MIT researchers alleged “may be more vulnerable to misinformation campaigns,” the report added.
“In particular, the MIT team believed that conservatives, minorities, and veterans were uniquely incapable of assessing the veracity of content online,” the report said.
The report gave several other examples of NSF-funded censorship initiatives, and the subcommittee had a hearing about the matter Tuesday.
WATCH: My full questioning on the alarming intersection between AI and censorship.
Thank you, @lhfang and @glukianoff, for sounding the alarm and fighting against these threats to the First Amendment. pic.twitter.com/jO6nY11Glv
— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) February 6, 2024
The subcommittee’s work follows a similar report by Headline USA on the issue of government-funded censorship. In December, this publication reported that the Department of Homeland Security is funding a group that uses targeted advertising to drive internet traffic towards DHS-approved social media influencers.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
