At The College Fix, Jack Shields reports that a legal group is raising questions about the role universities have played in the U.S, government’s efforts at censorship during the Covid era:

Alliance Defending Freedom announced it filed public records requests to learn about how the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University-Bloomington, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of California Los Angeles may have worked to censor the voices of Americans.

“Legal group seeks info on universities’ role in ‘censorship-industrial complex’,” March 21, 2025

Alliance Defending Freedom is especially interested in universities’ role in creating tools for online censorship:

ADF Senior Counsel Mathew Hoffmann told The College Fix that during the Biden administration, the federal government helped these universities censor by “fund[ing] the development of censorship tools created by certain public universities.”

“The universities have created ‘misinformation’ centers or tools designed to identify and take down speech that the federal government has disfavored,” Hoffmann told The Fix via email.

For example, it’s known that the National Science Foundation gave universities funds to develop artificial intelligence to shape public opinion on social media:

University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and MIT are among the universities cited in the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government interim report.

It details the foundation’s “funding of AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools, and its repeated efforts to hide its actions and avoid political and media scrutiny.”

“NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams” for the purpose of developing AI-powered technologies “that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others,” states the report, released last month.

Daniel Nuccio, “NSF paid universities to develop AI censorship tools for social media, House report alleges,” The College Fix, March 27, 2024

But many details are not known. According to Shields, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has said it would review the requests for information but the others had not responded by the deadline.