Federal government funds AI programs to censor online speech

The Biden administration has earmarked $550,436 to develop AI-based algorithms that would monitor online speech for “social discrimination”. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has already awarded $132,317 to researchers at the University of Washington to build the artificial intelligence program that aims to root out “implicit bias” in communication on social media. 

An NSF spokesman, according to the Washington Free Beacon, claims the program "does not attempt to hamper free speech” and simply creates "automated ways of identifying biases in speech,” but the NSF’s own description of the program makes clear it intends to “intervene”:

This project develops language technologies to detect and intervene in the language of social discrimination—sexist, racist, homophobic microaggressions, condescension, objectification, dehumanizing metaphors, and the like—which can be unconscious and unintentional, but cause prolonged personal and professional harms.

No examples of “language of social discrimination” are given, nor is the term defined, raising questions as to who will decide what language is discriminatory. 

The program, which seeks to create a “paradigm shift” in "monitoring civility in cyberspace,” will come in two phases. In the first phase, the AI programs will be supervised “by trained annotators”. In the second phase the program will begin “detecting biased framing about members of the LGBTQ community in narrative domains of digital media and develops data analytic tools by operationalizing, across languages, well-established social psychology theories.” 

The program takes its place beside other attempts by the federal government to control online speech. 

Frontline News reported this month that the Biden administration has commissioned a group of journalists called Hacks/Hackers to create software that will turn online users into programmed spokespeople for the federal government with an emphasis on vaccine propaganda. 

The NSF has paid Hacks/Hackers $5 million to create the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT), which will encourage users to confront others on social media who express opinions unapproved by the government.   

When a user wants to know if a post is “misinformation” they simply post the link or the text itself into the software. The software will then tell the user how “harmful” the post is and will suggest template retorts. 

Hacks/Hackers is also being commissioned to organize a group of Wikipedia censors called “Research Coordinators” for a project called NewsQ. These censors will list which sources of vaccine information are “credible sources” and which are “unreliable”. Job applicants need not have a medical background or expertise in a medical field to become a Research Coordinator.  

“That list is already taking shape on Wikipedia, with liberal outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, and The Atlantic all marked ‘reliable,’” reports The Daily Wire. “Conservative sites, including The Daily Wire, Daily Mail, Epoch Times, and The Federalist, are all classified as either ‘unreliable’ or ‘conspiracy'.”  

In September, the NSF funded a 22-page study which found that physics is racist.