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NOTE: This article may include commentary reflecting the author’s position.
The House Committee on the Weaponization of Government chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has discovered that the Biden administration is spending millions in funding to develop artificial intelligence tools to combat “misinformation” that could then be passed on to social media companies.
The National Science Foundation is funding the development of AI tools at several universities to help counter “misinformation” and “disinformation” online.
We know that the woke mind virus is pervasive in academia with the vast majority of professors identifying as on the left of the political spectrum, but that’s probably a feature, not a bug, as the Biden admin shovels out millions in research funding.
One Republican lawmaker claimed that Twitter’s 2020 censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story could soon be possible on an industrial scale.
Researchers who received government funding for the plan currently known as “Track F” stated in email exchanges that Americans couldn’t tell fact from fiction online and that Christians, conservatives, and veterans are particularly susceptible to believing misinformation.
It casts new light on how funding from the National Sciences Foundation is being given to elite institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Madison-Wisconsin and the University of Michigan, for a program called “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.”
“Track F” was launched to identify “misinformation” and create “education and training materials” for those with “vulnerabilities to disinformation methods.”
It is part of a larger initiative, “The Convergence Accelerator Program,” that aims to solve issues with “significant national impact” by finding high-level research and which was quietly launched in 2021.
In theory, tools like this could be used to remove child pornography or deepfake photos — like the nude images created of Taylor Swift.
But the Republicans’ report details how researchers working on the technology aimed to censor the general public, with the $13 million program’s manager Michael Pozmantier describing it as “focused on combatting mis/disinformation.”
Source: New York Post
One of the researchers at MIT told NSF officials that “broad swaths of the public cannot effectively sort truth from fiction online” and specifically identified the most vulnerable to the mis/disinformation as “military veterans, older adults, military families” as well as those in “rural and indigenous communities.”
Another from the University of Michigan suggested that moderation on social media platforms could be outsourced to AI.
“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,” said the researcher in a pitch to the NSF.
One researcher from the University of Wisconsin said that team was “specifically focused on… skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines.”
Researchers identified groups that read “the Bible or the Constitution” as particularly susceptible to misinformation and disinformation because of their distrust of journalists and academics. The researcher said that when these groups — Christians and Patriots — use the Bible or Constitution to fact-check how media outlets report the news, they’re not “fully informing” themselves.
Basically it’s censorship of people with a different perspective from the elite, liberal worldview.
One researcher from the University of Washington openly admitted that to the NSF.
A researcher at University of Washington which received funding to create a similar tool under another program — the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program — wrote to an NSF official that countering disinformation is “inherently political” and is ultimately “censorship.”
It’s unclear if any of the tools have been finalized or will be adopted by social media companies.
Lawmakers like Jordan are concerned these tools could be perfected and deployed by platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook to limit what people can see and say online in a massive expansion of the actions which led to the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop being suppressed by Twitter and Facebook before the 2020 presidential election.
The report is part of a larger investigation into the extent of the federal government’s efforts to suppress speech on social media platforms.
Source: New York Post
There are concerns from tech-savvy bros like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen who are concerned that AI will give the government significant power to censor dissenting voices as they attempted to do with COVID and other issues exposed in the Twitter files.
In an essay last June, Andreessen wrote, “Al is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world,” adding, “You should be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the age-old claim that they are protecting you.”
The same people calling Trump and Desantis “fascists” are the ones that are banning books and trying to censor anyone that they disagree with online. And they’re enlisting the people that are in institutions that assert that men can magically become women because they declare that they are. What could possibly go wrong?
