As the presidential election approaches, the Biden administration is expanding its controversial initiative to control information and censor Americans by funding a new project that tracks the spread of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM)” by internet users. A public university in South Carolina is getting nearly $1 million from the government to map the spread of MDM in real time and create an online dashboard with an MDM tracker. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is doling out the funds to researchers at Clemson University to meet its reported mission of “improving knowledge and understanding of crime and justice issues through science.” The NIJ claims it provides objective and independent knowledge and tools to inform the decision-making of the criminal and juvenile justice communities to reduce crime and advance justice.
It is difficult to see how this project meets the agency’s mission, however. The government is giving Clemson researchers a bunch of taxpayer dollars to identify information and opinions it does not like by conducting the “first real-time mapping of the spread of MDM campaigns around contentious public events,” according to the grant announcement. The venture has been named “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns” and researchers assure their work will not be biased even though a leftist administration is funding the work, and most academics are themselves on the left politically. The research is essential, the Biden administration laughably asserts, to avert “violent extremism.” This is the explanation offered in the DOJ’s grant document: “Nationally publicized political events often become focal points of MDM, which are exploited by various individuals and groups to launch disinformation campaigns and trigger spontaneous or crowd-sourced diffusion of disinformation and violent extremism.”
Clemson researchers will use the public funds to develop specialized algorithms to identify the creation of MDM campaigns and capture event-level characteristics of real-life events that trigger MDM, the grant announcement explains. The academics will also help determine what characteristics of high-profile events are more likely to trigger online MDM campaigns and what are the common characteristics of organizations and other actors engaged in MDM campaigns. The new dashboard will feature a “tracker” that identifies links between specific linguistic characteristics and MDM outbreaks. It is not unreasonable to predict that language considered by the administration to be politically conservative will get flagged as we have seen in social media censorship campaigns. “Additionally, the MDM tracker will provide insights into the commonalities and differences amongst online behaviors of MDM adopters, non-adopters, and disseminators,” according to the grant announcement.
This latest project with the added category of “mal-information” is part of a broader effort to divert substantial amounts of public funds for a fictitious crisis created by the Biden administration to control information. The movement started with a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) panel known as the Disinformation Governance Board, which was technically dismantled after major backlash. Taxpayer dollars keep flowing to related causes, however. Millions in DHS terrorism prevention grants have gone to combat “misinformation and disinformation” and to create media disinformation networks worldwide. Large sums have also gone to related projects such as fighting science misinformation and misperceptions in black communities and, of course, COVID-19 misinformation, especially involving minorities and vaccines.
Last summer a congressional probe exposed a scandalous government misinformation scheme in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) colluded with a compromised Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor the speech of Americans. The federal agency responsible for protecting the nation against terrorists, violent street gangs and serial killers actually joined forces with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which is widely known to be infiltrated by Russian-aligned forces, to take down the authentic social media accounts of Americans. This includes a verified U.S. State Department profile and those belonging to American journalists. Interestingly, accounts targeted for removal by the SBU and FBI criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin and expressed pro-Ukrainian views. With the presidential election approaching and Biden’s popularity at an all-time low, there is no telling what the administration will do to control information.
