A new report by Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog, has revealed that since 2021, the Biden administration has spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on research related to “misinformation,” a significant rise compared to the first Trump administration.
The increase in spending raises serious concerns about civil liberties and free speech online, especially on social media platforms, where much of the Biden administrations’ efforts were directed.
Since 2021, the Biden-Harris White House has spent at least $267 million on research grants and contracts related to “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
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During President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, the same federal agencies provided just $6.72 million on similar programs. That means the Biden administration increased federal spending on contracts and grants for misinformation by more than 3,800%.
On its own, the fact that the Biden-Harris administration has spent $267 million on misinformation grants and contracts is extremely disconcerting. The federal government shouldn’t be involved, directly or indirectly, in the fact-checking industry. Nor should it engage in efforts designed to limit the speech of citizens, particularly when taxpayers are the ones footing the bill.
But the cost and creation of these misinformation programs is just the tip of the iceberg. Open the Books conducted a detailed review of many of the programs, contracts and grants as part of its report, and I subsequently verified and expanded upon some of their findings.
What we found is clear evidence that the Biden-Harris White House used funds to support or develop Orwellian surveillance and propaganda strategies, create methods and tools to restrict speech online, and even to finance highly politicized reports critical of Trump.
For example, Open the Books reports that in 2022 the Department of Health and Human Services provided $2.3 million to the University of Pennsylvania for “investigating and identifying the heterogeneity in COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among black and rural communities to inform precision public health messaging” because “misinformation contributes to confusion, distrust, and distress around health behaviors such as vaccination, mask wearing, and social distancing.”
The research description suggests that the project requires collecting and analyzing large amounts of social media posts online, all in the name of stopping public health misinformation — a term that has been used to justify silencing the speech of Americans questioning the views of government, academia and other powerful institutions.
The Biden administration funded similar COVID-19 misinformation projects at other universities as well, including the University of Texas and Michigan State University.
Of course, it’s true that health-related misinformation can be harmful to the public, but the Biden administration and many of America’s elite universities are clearly not qualified to speak authoritatively on the matter, nor worthy of receiving significant taxpayer funding. After all, throughout the height of the coronavirus pandemic, they repeatedly spread false information about public health issues.
For example, despite overwhelming evidence that mask mandates do not prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Biden administration forced Americans to wear masks while using public transportation systems, such as airlines. It also required masks for many federal workers and for citizens entering government buildings. This continued until 2022 — two years after the pandemic began and long after government health data had shown mask mandates do not work.
The University of Pennsylvania didn’t perform much better. It imposed Draconian mask-mandate policies of its own and its School of Medicine published poorly designed research claiming designed research claiming mask mandates were effective.
Much more comprehensive studies conducted over longer periods later proved reports like those published by the University of Pennsylvania were wrong, a conclusion supported by countless public health officials and even some pundits at left-wing publications, including New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
Incredibly, the grant to the University of Pennsylvania is still active and isn’t slated to end until 2027, which means taxpayers will likely continue to fund the research for years to come.
Open the Books also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired a defense contractor, Guidehouse, to conduct “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation analysis.” In September 2023, DHS started a $1.2 million contract with Guidehouse.
Public and private sector clients use Guidehouse to help them combat alleged misinformation online. In one report published by Guidehouse about the “growing threat of misinformation,” the group noted that it helps its clients, including governments, using a “six-step approach to misinformation and disinformation detection.” Among the six steps is a plan to “Configure and deploy the tools and technologies that will be used to monitor the information landscape,” as well as the creation of “counter-messages to inaccurate or false information.”
It’s not hard to imagine how such programs and strategies could be abused by federal officials, who have repeatedly been caught pressuring social media companies to restrict the speech of their users and limit the spread of news stories that damage left-wing politicians and their family members, such as Hunter Biden.
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The Biden administration even went so far as to fund partisan reports about its chief political opponent, Donald Trump. In Fiscal Year 2022, the National Science Foundation paid nearly $200,000 to George Washington University researchers to develop a study titled “Pandemic Communication in Time of Populism: Building Resilient Media and Ensuring Effective Pandemic Communication in Divided Societies.”
As Open the Books explains, “Researchers on this Biden-era grant examined how so-called ‘populist’ leaders supposedly prevented society from coming together in ‘solidarity’ during the COVID pandemic. Trump’s presidency was a focus of the research, along with the leaders of three other countries.”
Unsurprisingly, the NSF-funded report included a recommendation to give academics, government officials, and other “experts” more authority in how future public health crises are handled.
The truth is, a government that respects free speech rights does not spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out ways to limit, combat or research the speech of its citizens.
President-elect Trump has promised that his administration will defend free speech. If that truly is his intention, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, then a good place to start is eliminating the Biden administration’s disturbing, vast misinformation and disinformation programs.
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