Over the past three weeks, anyone interested in free speech (or not) has been on the receiving end of a non-consensual firehouse of flood-the-zone information warfare. Every man and his DOGE has chimed in, capturing via screenshot a score of Osama bin Laden of censorship hideouts – “It’s USAID!” “It’s NED!” “It’s NIH”!
USAID in particular has been made responsible for everything, from funding chemtrails in Naples to biting your own cheek. It’s a shame the word misinformation is of so little use anymore.
USAID is important, but the censorship happens via a system comprising hundreds, possibly thousands, of organisations, small and large. Is there a secret bunker? I don’t know, it isn’t impossible, but the approach is cartoonish. There are key nodes, organisations, and networks that are more important than others, particularly those that hand out money. In fact “complex” was the term that quickly gained favour during the Twitter files, precisely because it captured the system’s complexity – it’s what made it work and minimised public scrutiny.
Over the past couple of months, liber-net has built a database of almost 1,000 federal government awards from 2016-2024 that went towards countering “misinformation” and other similar censorship pretexts. That work aims to complement the mapping of the Censorship Industrial Complex we did for Matt Taibbi. That work looked partly at government funding but focused more on the leading censorship organisations and their often public and private support.
Not all of the 1,000 grants logged are dubious, but many are. We’ve been going through each by hand – reading their project pages, papers, and reports to find out how big a problem they are. Can AI help? Yes to a degree but from what we’ve tried, AI can’t yet really understand why one grant is horrible and the next one is just a bit meh.
The map above is a sketch of where we think the funds have come from to date based on the analysis we’ve been able to do. I emphasise sketch because out of the almost 1,000 awards, I still have another 300-400 to review. Of the 500+ I have looked at so far, around 200 are highly problematic, and another 100 are extremely dubious.
Keep in mind we are looking only at grants that could be considered “censorship” so anything that looked at “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “information integrity,” “information operations,” “content moderation,” “fact-checking” et al. We aren’t looking at grants for dubious woke culture war projects that have set the internet aflame the past couple of weeks.
To give you an idea, the grants include NSF money to Meedan (one of Twitter’s four go-to organisations for Covid “misinformation”) to develop AI to spy on encrypted private messaging groups to weed out so-called “misinformation,” including to create and scale “tip lines” “to millions of users” – aka snitching on a mass scale.
Or more NSF money to the University of Illinois to “track locations, people, and organizational affiliations of dubious COVID-19 information” based on whether they questioned CDC guidance.
Once we’ve finalised reviewing the remaining grants we’ll produce a much more accurate map and systemic analysis of how much each agency was funding censorship, and who they were paying to do it. This teaser is because I have a bee in my bonnet about the dynamite fishing I am seeing where a net, if not a rod, would be more useful.
Hellbound and Down 