For the past several years, the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) granted $5 million to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. to study “misinformation” online.
As first reported by The Daily Wire, the timing of the NSF’s grant links closely to conservative claims that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China—a theory that agencies such as the CIA have since given credence.
The project was dedicated to eliminating the “rapid spread of misinformation” and “abuse and harassment” directed toward “experts.” According to a summary of the grant, the funding lasted from September 2022 through August 2024.
“This project addresses the links between two significant problems impacting trust in contemporary communication systems: (1) the broad and rapid spread of misinformation and (2) abuse and harassment directed at members of expert communities,” the grant summary describes.
“Misinformation-driven harassment campaigns have particularly large impacts on those at the forefront of efforts to accurately inform the public, including journalists, scientists, and public health officials,” the summary continues. “As a result, this harassment undermines confidence in pivotal sources of knowledge and reduces expert participation in the information ecosystem.”
The summary says that the grant would initially focus on “journalists,” before eventually “expanding” into “other expert communities,” attempting to “mitigate harms” of “online abuse and harassment.”
The grant page also indicates that the project would utilize a “team of scientists, technical specialists, psychologists, as well as civil society and media representatives” to employ “disinformation studies” for the purpose of “supporting journalists” facing abuse.
A spokesperson from the NSF declined to comment further in a statement provided to Campus Reform.
In November, The New York Post reported that the Biden administration spent over $100 million in 2021 to evaluate “misinformation,” including more than $2 million given to the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) concerning COVID-19.
UPenn was awarded the grant to evaluate “COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among black and rural communities” to facilitate messaging regarding “health behaviors such as vaccination, mask wearing, and social distancing.”
The grant also aimed to “build a computational framework” to study “misinformation exposure” toward the COVID-19 vaccination, and to determine what the most “persuasive messages” would be to encourage vaccination.
Campus Reform has contacted George Washington University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
