The Biden administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and State Department have granted over $4 million to programs combatting “misinformation.”
Since September 1 of this year, the NSF awarded 9 grants to universities and a postdoctoral fellowship.
The $330,000 grant to the fellowship will be used to “develop educational materials to help identify misinformation in media.”
Arizona State University received $1.5 million from the NSF to create “new risk management strategies” for the spread of misinformation.
Florida International University, the Research Foundation for the State University of New York, the Trustees of Boston University, the University of Rochester, the Trustees of Indiana University, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of Rochester, and the Trustees of Indiana University received grants.
The State Department awarded 5 grants since September 1.
Among the grants was an $18,000 award to the Institute for Democracy, Media, and Culture to develop a “whole-of-society response to cyber incidents and misinformation.”
Thousands of dollars were also given to Paraguay’s American Cultural Center, the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Udayana University, New York University, and the non-profit organization Digitial Rights Nepal.
Reporting from Reclaim the Net:
While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted. For example, Biden’s State Department has previously funded foreign think tanks that created “disinformation” blacklists. These blacklists were used to target American conservative media outlets.
