Pumps nearly $40 million into grants and contracts
(Pixabay)
By Bob Unruh
Under Joe Biden, one of the biggest “science” goals for America appears to be censoring social media.
That’s according to a new report from Foundation for Freedom Online, which released a report confirming the National Science Foundation has pumped “nearly $40 million into social media censorship grants and contracts.”
The report said the NSF spent $38.8 million on battling “misinformation” since Biden took office, and 64 grants totaling $31.8 million were given to 42 colleges and universities to “research” the concept of “stopping viral ideas.”
That the research was anything but neutral or “scientific” was evident in the fact that some of the grants “explicitly target ‘populist politicians’ and ‘populist communications’ to scientifically determine ‘how best to counter populist narratives.'”
The report said Americans might have thought of the NSF in terms of “mathematics, aerospace and engineering,” but “under the Biden administration, the fastest-growing field of NSF grant funding appears to be the science of censorship.”
The foundation said it previously reported that the exact two universities that partnered with Department of Homeland Security activists “to censor the 2020 election” got a $3 million grant from the NSF just after the election.
They were not on the grant recipient list before.
“But then, after an election where in effect they exclusively censored the social media opposition of the current administration, suddenly the current administration started hooking them up with government grants,” the report said.
The foundation said because of those payments, it looked at every NSF grant in 2021 and 2022 relating to social media and “disinformation.”
The results, it reported, were “disturbing.”
“Since the start of 2021, NSF has issued 64 government grants on the science of ‘countering’ social media ‘mis/disinformation,’ totaling $31.8 million. It has also issued two government grants, totaling $7 million. That brings a total of NSF-funded scientific censorship research to $38.8 million since the start of the Biden administration.”
Among those getting paid were State University of New York which got four grants totaling more than $4 million, George Washington University with four grants totaling $4 million, the University of Wisconsin with three grants totaling about $3.8 million and the University of Washington with three grants totaling about $3.5 million.
It revealed a video from UW, from the school’s “disinfo lab” creator Kate Starbird:
Here’s another from Starbird:
An example, the report said, of the “brazen political targeting being done by the Biden administration with government funds under the pretext of funding ‘science,'” is a $200,000 grant to George Washington University, included, “how best to counter these populist [COVID] narratives and develop more effective communication channels. The research studies four areas of communication: government-led pandemic communication, media policy, media coverage, and public attitudes towards the media. The project makes an important contribution to research on populist communication and political polarization by bringing two fields of expertise — populist communication and public health — together.”
The foundation report charged, “So this is a government grant, funded by the NSF, which explicitly takes aim at ‘populist politicians,’ ‘populist communications,’ and targets the former ‘populist leaders’ of four countries — including the United States.”
The foundation noted that the NSF grant “explicitly says the goal of the funding is ‘to counter these populist narratives.’ That is, point blank, just the U.S. government using U.S. taxpayer funds to counter the social media opinions of half of the entire U.S. electorate.”
