Biden’s National Science Foundation Has Pumped Nearly $40 Million Into Social Media Censorship Grants and Contracts
by Mike Benz, Foundation for Freedom, November 22, 2022
When most people think of the National Science Foundation (NSF), they think about the US government investing tax dollars in grand advancements in mathematics, aerospace and engineering.
But under the Biden administration, the fastest-growing field of NSF grant funding appears to be the science of censorship.
At Foundation for Freedom Online, we previously reported the strange fact that the exact two universities who partnered with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to censor the 2020 election received a $3 million joint grant from the National Science Foundation just months after the election ended.
Neither of those two academic “disinfo labs” were taxpayer-funded before the 2020 election. 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.
After that revelation, we investigated every NSF grant issued in 2021 and 2022 relating to social media “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Our goal was to determine the extent to which NSF is spending US tax dollars on censoring US taxpayers.
Our findings were profoundly 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.
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In just two years, those 64 government censorship grants were spread across 42 different colleges and universities. This incredible range of recipients covers every level of the country’s higher education institutions, both regionally and in terms of prestige.
The most highly NSF-funded “Misinformation/Disinformation” grantee universities are:
- State University of New York (SUNY) — 4 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $4.22 million
- George Washington University – 4 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $4 million.
- University of Wisconsin – 3 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $3.83 million
- University of Washington – 3 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $3.52 million
It is notable that #4 on that above list is University of Washington (UW), which is one of the two institutions that DHS worked directly with — and chose as a formal partner — to censor the 2020 election.
Click Here to See Videos describing the "disinformation" work being done at Universities
In a separate report, we will break down a list of the most highly NSF-funded “Mis/Disinformation” topics (Covid, elections, media distrust, etc.) and the most Orwellian grant descriptions we found.
As a preview of that full-breakdown analysis, below is just one NSF grant we’ll highlight in this report, which is representative of the brazen political targeting being done by the Biden Administration with government funds under the pretext of funding “science.”
On May 1, 2022, NSF gave a $200,000 grant to George Washington University (see full grant details here) with the following grant description:
PANDEMIC COMMUNICATION IN TIME OF POPULISM: This project uses several methods to study how populist politicians distorted Covid-19 pandemic health communication to encourage polarized attitudes and distrust among citizens, thus making them more vulnerable to misinformation....
It also studies how best to counter these populist 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 project will also study how best to counter these populist narratives and develop more efficient and reliable communication. The focus is on four countries — Brazil, Poland, Serbia, and the US — all led by populist leaders during the pandemic and capture different types of populist responses to the pandemic… This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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.
To ram the radical bias home, the NSF grant explicitly says the goal of the funding is “to counter these populist narratives.” That is, point blank, just the US government using US taxpayer funds to counter the social media opinions of half of the entire US electorate.
Isn’t the government supposed to work for us?
(Editors Note: It is ILLEGAL for the Government to censor the American People and violate our 1st Amendment Rights! This is ANOTHER group that MUST be Defunded by the New Republican House in the next budget bill!)
