This week, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued a new report on the Biden Administration’s massive censorship system. The ongoing investigation has exposed the coordination in a system of blacklisting, throttling, and suspensions of targeted citizens and groups. Now, it appears that the Biden White House also pushed for Amazon to target dissenting books to suppress sales by blocking promotions. After all, why burn books when you can bury them?
The apparently successful effort by the White House was little surprise given what a federal court called Biden’s “Orwellian” and unprecedented censorship efforts. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage,” Biden is now unquestionably the most anti-free speech president since John Adams.
What is new is the details on how academic institutions are critical to this censorship system and the coordination with the government to deal with the backlash from the public. The disclosed emails show how government officials orchestrated media campaigns to shield the system, and their academic partners, from attacks over free speech. The report includes discussions in response to my own past writing denouncing this system.
Some of us have been raising the alarm over the role of universities in this censorship system. While faculty and students once opposed any academic research supporting the military industrial complex, there has been no such opposition to researchers supporting a censorship system targeting dissenting views and supplying blacklists to government and corporate partners.
There has long been a narrative in the media that portrayed academics working in this system as victims hounded by critics. For example, one article featured the work of Kate Starbird, director and co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public. The University of Washington is one of the most important partners in the academic-corporate-government triad. Other key institutions include Stanford University, University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. The article discussed how “her attempt to promote factual information and strengthen democracy has gotten her sued, blasted by congressional inquiries and subjected to a death threat.”
The internal messages revealed by the House show how such media campaigns were coordinated to frame the coverage. While these researchers actively work to target others, they often object to criticism of their work as bullying and the work of disinformers.
Notably, in her communications disclosed by the House, Starbird cautions against giving examples of disinformation to keep them from being used by critics, adding “since everything is politicized and disinformation inherently political, every example is bait.”
She and others reached out to grant managers in dealing with the public spin. Wisconsin Journalism Professor Michael Wagner flagged one of my columns to Michael Pozmantier, a program manager at the National Science Foundation, an independent government agency. What is striking that the two suggest that the column was wrong but do not state a single mistaken fact. Indeed, the report confirms the extensive effort to coordinate the identification of those spreading what the researchers deemed disinformation. In another email, Pozmantier explained that “Track F is the NSF ‘Accelerator track focused on combating mis/disinformation.’”
Pozmantier also shows the sweeping agenda behind these grants, noting “Projects in Track F will pursue a convergence research agenda and leverage multi-sector partnerships to 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.”
Other academic institutions in the report are shown marketing their own eagerness to become part of this censorship system. University of Michigan’s James Park is shown pitching that school’s WiseDex First Pitch program, promising that “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.”
These emails show the fluidity of what is deemed unacceptable viewpoints for these academics and their partners. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), during prior court testimony. CISA’s director, Jen Easterly, previously declared the administration’s intent to extend its role over maintaining critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure” and combating not just mis- and disinformation but also “malinformation,” which CISA describes as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
For academic institutions, the central role played in this censorship infrastructure is alarming. Some of these programs have now pledged that they will no longer target content on the Internet. However, for years, the Biden Administration funded blacklisting systems as well as programs to target the advertisers of conservative sites.
For example, the federal government helped to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the top 10 most risky sites are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” Those top disinformation sites included Reason, a libertarian-oriented source of news and commentary about the government. However, HuffPost, a far left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.
Universities should be places where false claims and conspiracy theories are debated and exposed. However, there is a dangerous line that is crossed when universities partner with the government or corporations in a system targeting individuals and groups for censorship.
Here is the report: NSF-Staff-Report_Appendix
