by Didi Rankovic, Reclaim The Net:
Despite legal scrutiny, the Biden administration continues its interest in speech monitoring.
The White House’s latest initiative to carry out its brand of combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (which is now referred to by the handy “MDM” initial) continues to co-opt the education sector.
The Department of Justice agency the National Institute for Justice (NIJ) is behind the funding effort that is said to be designed to study and research “effective technologies and tools for identification, moderation, and/or removal of extremist content.”
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A grant worth $1 million will be spent to come up with a dashboard featuring an MDM tracker, which is supposed to surveil the internet for both speech, and narratives, and do so in real time. The project’s official name is, “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns.”
And reports say that the targeted speech coincides with “contentious political events.” Critics say that the taxpayer dollars here are in reality going towards suppression of conservative and religious groups, rather than as declared, violent extremists.
The recipient of the grant is South Carolina-based Clemson University. Researchers there are expected to come up with computer models that will keep an eye on accounts singled out as MDM peddlers and identify people associated with allegedly spreading MDM.
Eventually, the effort should produce the real-time tracking dashboard.
Regular citizens may not benefit from this project – considering the “fluid” nature of the very definitions of misinformation and its companions (some reports mention the initial, and subsequent treatment of the Covid origin and Hunter Biden laptop stories as examples of this.)
But the grant does specify who will benefit: law enforcement and policymakers.
This is by no means the only initiative of the kind coming from the Biden administration – since the current US president came to power, $39 million went to “MDM research” from the National Science Foundation (NSF) alone, also in some cases involving prominent educational institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
And while Clemson researchers are reassuring that their efforts are not politically or ideologically biased, the Internet Accountability Project and the Foundation for Freedom Online are voicing their fears that the end result will be yet another tool facilitating censorship, specifically by suppressing conservative voices.
