In earlier posts on censorship in the internet age, I offered snapshots of specific instances of shadowbanning, outright banning, and so forth, to give some sense of how the new on-the-ground reality works. It could be a book you want to read — or your book — that is banned at Amazon if it upsets the White House.

As we saw earlier, the initiative for more internet censorship is coming from the highest levels, not just from an alphabet soup of interest groups. But the interest groups are very much in the picture. That House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report on February 5 that revealed the role of the National Science Foundation in the development of new technologies to censor the internet. National Science Foundation’s intended role is to support “science and engineering” in the United States. That said, the Committee report

… casts new light on how funding from the National Sciences Foundation is being given to elite institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Madison-Wisconsin and the University of Michigan, for a program called “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.”

Lydia Moynihan, “Biden’s AI plan to censor you revealed: Researchers say Americans can’t ‘ tell fact from fiction,’” February 6, 2024

The bee in the bonnets of the researchers who received the funding for the program (Track F) seems to be the view that average Americans cannot tell fact from fiction. Their goal is to make anti-“misinformation” tools for the social media giants to protect Americans from themselves.

The NSF censors understand what they are doing well enough. From the Report:

The Committee and the Select Subcommittee have also obtained, via document requests and subpoenas, nonpublic emails and other documents that reveal a years-long, intentional effort by NSF to hide its role in funding these censorship and propaganda tools from media and political scrutiny. From legal scholars, such as Jonathan Turley, to conservative journalists, NSF tracked public criticisms of its work in funding these projects. NSF went so far as to develop a media strategy that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools. [p. 2]

National Science Foundation had to be subpoena’d to cooperate with an investigation

The House Committee subpoena’d the head of the NSF on February 6 due to “inadequate voluntary compliance” in 2023.

Jay Bhattacharya, a prominent Stanford public health medic who got Canceled during the Covid years for offering views — which largely proved correct but were not sanctioned by the U.S. government — responded,

The Biden Admin. uses the @NIH and the @NSF to launder its censorship activities. By funding “misinformation” “research”, the government pays entities like the @Stanford Virality Project to embed within social media companies and pass on gov’t censorship demands. https://t.co/ljzByaGmm6— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) February 6, 2024

The Stanford Virality Project to which Bhattacharya refers is one of the groups claiming to counter “mis- and disinformation” which has been found by independent investigators to censor information that was factually true. But we should always keep in mind that disinformation does not mean “false information”; it means information other than what the government wants you to share.

We are already starting to live in NSF’s controlled information society

Strange as it may seem, in the classic controlled society that NSF’s grantees envision, if the government wants you to share information that it knows to be false, it becomes the approved information. Correct information then becomes “disinformation.” You don’t believe me? Well, something like that actually happened during the COVID years, as Slate Magazine tells us:

In March 2020, as the pandemic began, Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States, explained in a 60 Minutes interview that he felt community use of masks was unnecessary. A few months later, he argued that his statements were not meant to imply that he felt the data to justify the use of cloth masks was insufficient. Rather, he said, had he endorsed mask wearing (of any kind), mass panic would ensue and lead to a surgical and N95 mask shortage among health care workers, who needed the masks more. Yet, emails from a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Fauci privately gave the same advice—against mask use—suggesting it was not merely his outward stance to the broader public.

Although some have claimed that the evidence changed substantively in the early weeks of March, our assessment of the literature does not concur. We believe the evidence at the time of Fauci’s 60 Minutes interview was largely similar to that in April 2020. Thus, there are two ways to consider Fauci’s statement. One possibility is, as he says, that his initial statement was dishonest but motivated to avoid a run on masks needed by health care workers. The other is that he believed his initial statements were accurate, and he subsequently decided to advocate for cloth masks to divert attention from surgical or N95 masks, or to provide a sense of hope and control to a fearful and anxious public.

Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad, “The Noble Lies of COVID-19,” Slate, July 28, 2021

In that environment, whatever Fauci was saying was “information.” An independent alternative assessment — even if arrived at by reasonable methods and quite correct — would be “disinformation.”

Slate ponders whether Fauci’s shifting stories were “noble lie.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn counseled, from long experience in the Soviet world, “Live not by lies.” A society must choose.

Meanwhile, who are the social science researchers who are convinced that we all need them to shape our online experiences? Especially when the purpose seems to be to keep us from believing disinformation — that is, essentially, information the government does not want us to believe?

Next: Meet the disinformation czars who want to shape what you know