Biden-led NSF Grant Funds AI Censorship, Targets Free Speech

Clear Facts

• A report by the House Select Weaponization Subcommittee reveals a Biden-led National Science Foundation grant funding online censorship.
• Tech non-profit Meedan received $5.75 million for a program to identify and limit susceptibility to misinformation and pseudoscientific information online.
• The Co-Insights program worked with social media and messaging companies to develop tools for more effective content censorship.

A bombshell report released Tuesday by the House Select Weaponization Subcommittee exposed yet another President Joe Biden-led censorship plan against Americans. The report, previously covered by MRC Free Speech America, unveiled how the Biden-led National Science Foundation is using taxpayer-funded grants to use artificial intelligence to censor free speech online.

One of the grantees, tech non-profit Meedan, received $5.75 million for a program that would “work with social media apps to “identify and limit susceptibility to misinformation” and “pseudoscientific information online.” The taxpayer-funded program, dubbed Co-Insights, worked with social media and messaging companies like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal to develop tools to locate violating content to censor more effectively.

According to documents released by the House Weaponization Subcommittee, Meedan Director of Research Scott Hale highlighted that the company’s ultimate goal was to allow social media platforms to “put all the content they take down into a data enclave” and use code to “benchmark differentiated automated detection approaches without having direct access to the data.” In other words, the manual review of content moderation was too inefficient, so the team at Meedan wanted to do the heavy lifting and let social media companies detect blacklisted content in bulk.

Specifically, the team listed several examples of what kind of information it wanted to censor. According to the report, the list included “fear mongering and anti-Black narratives,” “undermining trust in mainstream media,” “glorifying vigilantism” and “weakening political participation.” An example of an “anti-Black” narrative would be criticizing The New York Times for “ignoring Black-on-Asian hate crimes.” This statement is not even a statement of fact, but simply a political opinion on the coverage of The Times, but that doesn’t stop the team at Meedan from wanting to get rid of it.

One fact in particular stuck out in the grant proposal and even prompted a reaction from Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) in a Tuesday hearing overseeing the content unveiled in the report. Meedan bragged in its grant proposal about having the ability to monitor 750,000 blog posts and news articles “daily” using its AI tools. Hageman cited this slide as evidence of “the absolute scope of what AI can do for violating people’s First Amendment rights.”

This NSF scheme is sadly not a fluke, but rather part of a larger complex of grants and government-sponsored programs designed to either censor content or perhaps worse, use propaganda to manipulate people’s views of the information they consume, particularly children.

MRC Free Speech America released a report last month exposing an initiative by the U. S. Embassy in Germany to host a series of seminars that imported German censorship methods into American classrooms. The grant’s fiscal agent was Media Literacy Now, a nonprofit that advocates for “media literacy” programs to be mandated in K-12 schools in all 50 states. MLN has pitched the need for these programs as a means to fight “misinformation” and “online radicalization.”

Notably, one of the seminars, MEET Tolerance, featured curricula from German socialist Konstantin Von Notz. The German politician helped lead the “No Hate Speech Movement,” a youth organization set up by the European Union to “combat hate speech and promote human rights online.” The movement mobilized kids to be activists by posting pre-approved messages and hashtags to create public pressure on politicians to enact new censorship laws. Von Notz has argued that freedom of speech does not protect “‘haters’ motivated by ‘right wing extremism.’”

Clear Thoughts (op-ed)

The bombshell report by the House Select Weaponization Subcommittee has revealed the disturbing reality of the Biden administration’s efforts to silence free speech. By funding tech non-profit Meedan, the National Science Foundation has given millions of taxpayer dollars to a company that aims to censor content and control the narrative on social media platforms.

It’s alarming that this program, Co-Insights, is working closely with popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. The goal? To develop artificial intelligence tools that can identify and censor content that doesn’t fit their agenda.

As conservatives, we must fight against this blatant attempt to control the narrative and silence our voices. The First Amendment rights of all Americans are at stake, and we cannot allow the government to use taxpayer dollars to fund this assault on free speech.

Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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