The cabal of US Intelligence agencies responsible for the censorship industrial complex can welcome a new member. New to us. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been fingered in a new Congressional report alleging tens of millions were spent on AI to censor the public.
“In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multimillion-dollar grants to university and nonprofit research teams,” reads the report by the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
“The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop 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.” ..
The efforts included tracking public criticism of the foundation’s work by conservative journalists and legal scholars.
The NSF also developed a media strategy “that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools,” according to the report.
NSF denies all of it while admitting that it funded Track F, which the report claims is “a systematic federal effort to replace human “disinformation” monitors with AI-driven digital systems that are capable of vastly more comprehensive monitoring and censoring.”
The Obama regime, which began in 2009, invested heavily in at least two ideas—weaponizing federal agencies and large-scale illegal surveillance (foreign and domestic). The rage campaigns against Trump have all proven to be inside smear jobs with the knowledge of high-ranking political appointees and elected officials. The Twitter files exposed the natural evolution of weaponization and surveillance in the form of deliberate Censorship. And the proposals from schools fishing for the grants might as well be NSF whistleblowers.
One illustration that the group provided to NSF in its funding pitch was its ability to “crawl” more than 750,000 blogs and media articles on a daily basis for misinformation and fact-checking on themes such as “undermining trust in mainstream media,” “fear-mongering and anti-Black narratives,” and “weakening political participation.”
“As [Scott] Hale, the director of research at Meedan, explained in an email to NSF, in his ‘dream world,’ Big Tech would collect all of the censored content to enable ‘disinformation’ researchers to use that data to create ‘automated detection’ to censor any similar speech automatically,” the report reads.
Another University “received $5.75 million in NSF funding “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 tool “would allow ‘fact-checkers to perform rapid-cycle testing of fact-checking messages and monitor their real-time performance among online communities at-risk of misinformation exposure,’” the congressional report reads.
If it walks like Censorship and talks like it,
The National Science Foundation can claim whatever it likes about its intentions. The grant winner applications outline how their AI tool can sift massive amounts of private speech in search of messaging that challenges the government’s approved narratives. Label it as misinformation or identify themes to which the state can launch counter-insurgent narrative warfare; that’s what you’re funding.
Taken as part of the ongoing mission to spy on citizens and control what they see, hear, and read, perhaps someone needs to censor their budget out of existence along with any number of other agencies whose mission creep extends to laundering tax dollars in service to an authoritarian surveillance state.
