Help Us Fight the Feds’ AI Censorship Machine

COVID-era censorship was only the beginning. Action Alert!

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THE TOPLINE

• Taxpayer money is being directed to non-profits and universities to create artificial intelligence (AI) censorship tools.
• These capabilities will far outstrip the “manual” censorship that took place during the COVID pandemic era.
• Help us stop this spiral toward free speech-obliterating authoritarianism.

Are you worried that there isn’t enough censorship? Or are you concerned that free speech on social networks that have become the digital town square is being unjustly limited?

Whatever your feelings on censorship, your tax dollars are going to research programs at universities that are using artificial intelligence (AI) to censor content on the internet. With these kinds of tools, the government will be better able to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints on politics, health, climate change and other sensitive issues while promoting others—and their hope is you won’t even know it’s happening. It’s all part of the wave of censorship that has spurred us to launch our FreeSpeech4Health campaign to fight Big Tech censorship of health information.

The details of the government’s support for shadowbanning and online censorship have been laid out in a detailed report from a House Judiciary subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Starting in 2021, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has poured millions of taxpayer dollars into research programs at universities and non-profits geared towards developing AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools.  

As the House of Representatives’ report notes, “The NSF-funded projects threaten to help create a censorship regime that could significantly impede the fundamental First Amendment rights of millions of Americans, and potentially do so in a manner that is instantaneous and largely invisible to its victims.” The invisibility of this censorship is a nod towards the shadowbanning of certain content that we’ve increasingly seen taking place.

In 2021, NSF began funding these programs under the heading of “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.” It is eerily reminiscent of the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit, which was titled “Truth, Trust, and Hope,” and appears to have similar goals. In classic Orwellian fashion, “Trust & Authenticity in Communications Systems” really means censorship.

In documents obtained by the House subcommittee, the insulting paternalism of this censorship is on full display. Federally-funded researchers at MIT explained in a summary of their project to NSF that “broad swaths of the public cannot effectively sort truth from fiction online.” According to these researchers, rural and indigenous communities, military veterans, and older adults are among the befuddled groups of Americans unable to arrive at the “correct” opinions.

The establishment stance on censorship was encapsulated by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier this year at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos when she proposed that misinformation and disinformation are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change.

The crusaders against mis- and disinformation would have us all blindly trusting health “authorities” like the CDC, FDA, and the WHO—the same “authorities” that got so many things outrageously wrong during the COVID pandemic, while trying to silence or marginalize those who presented alternatives or questioned their edicts. This is why our FreeSpeech4Health campaign is so critical. Big Tech platforms have wholly bought into the false notion that truthful health information solely emanates from major health authorities like the NIH or the WHO, mirroring YouTube’s medical misinformation policy.

We cannot let the government and their lackeys silence dissent under the guise of controlling “misinformation.” Sign our petition below if you haven’t already and given the censorship of our own content, we appeal to you to share it widely in your own networks!