Federal Grant Worth $5.7 Million Given to Professors to Develop Misinformation Tool
“Skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines are two consequences of a decline in confidence in basic political processes and core medical institutions.”
Ah, yes. What could go wrong? From The College Fix:
National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.
This $5.7 million in grant money is on top of nearly another $200,000 awarded in 2020 through a Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act-funded NSF grant for a project focused in part on mental health that Course Correct is said to have grown out of.
According to the abstract of the 2021 grant, Course Correct’s developers, a group of five professors from various institutions nationwide, are using techniques related to machine learning and natural language processing to identify social media posts pertaining to electoral skepticism and vaccine hesitancy, identify people likely to be exposed to misinformation in the future, and flag at-risk online communities for intervention.
“Democracy and public health in the United States rely on trust in institutions,” the professors wrote in the grant abstract. “Skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines are two consequences of a decline in confidence in basic political processes and core medical institutions.”
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Comments
Call me silly, but isn’t this just a tool to find and censor people sceptical or opposing the government narrative, i.e. misinformation from folk like Fauci or Garland?
Speak plainly, show your work, call questions “questions” to address by explaining. In short, be admirable, transparent, and collaborative.
That has to do with the character and behavior of the people involved, not a tech band-aid, faux quick-fix they can apply while changing nothing about themselves, or their institutions. So, no chance of that.
So, they spend a butt-load of money to develop a tool to identify “misinformation” that doesn’t support their narrative. They will then counter with their own misinformation, otherwise known as propaganda.
I still want to know what Constitutional authority they have to appoint themselves arbiters of truth and deny anyone the right to say anything just because they don’t like it.
Note who they give the money to.
It is never a consortium made up of figures such as Tucker Carlson, James O’Keefe, Jordan Peterson, Ben Carson, Russell Brand, and Larry Elder—the sort of people willing to call shenanigans on the real disinformers, and make it stick.
(Speaking of Carson and Elder, their new bank is nearly ready to accept depositors. No chokepointing, no credit card tracking, no volunteering your private data to jackboots.)
Wasn’t the gross majority of the media, social media and academia enough?
We need an anti-misinformation group to counter the leftists. Carlson, Gutfeld etc. are a good start, but we have to expand the audience.
That is precisely what the left is trying to suppress.