(Daily360.com) – The government used tax money to fund research in order to create artificial intelligence (AI) capable of censoring information available online. Newly released information shows the U.S. government, through the National Science Foundation (NSF), used millions of taxpayer dollars to develop censorship tools for Big Tech to deploy against American citizens. They claim this is an effort to battle what they call disinformation but it appears the true objective was to block people from seeing information the government did not want them to see.
The Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government and the Judiciary Committee’s investigators said they uncovered at least $40 million being spent to achieve this goal. They reported $13 million being spread among a software company and three universities to develop cutting edge AI tools capable of censoring information on a much greater scale and with more speed than anything humans can achieve. One of the schools that received money was the University of Michigan for development of what they call the WiseDex AI tool. They describe their mission as being an outlet for Big Tech to outsource the “responsibility of censorship” throughout social media.
Lawmakers on the committee said the NSF has been trying to conceal these activities from them. They say the agency knew that what they were doing was clear censorship but that they wanted to forge ahead with it anyway by hiding their work from the legislators. They say the NSF rejected all requests from media entities and other professionals who were inquiring as to what they were doing with their funding.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison received $5.75 million from the NSF and created what they call the CourseCorrect tool. Massachusetts Institute of Technology took their $750,000 and returned the Search Lit platform. A nonprofit software company called Meedan was given an astounding $5.75 million which it used to create the Co-Insights program.
Lawmakers say the Meedan team said their software was currently able to monitor about 750,000 media articles and blogs every day in addition to mining massive amounts of data from social media. Lawmakers also said the criteria for what is labeled misinformation are specious at best. For example, the Meedan software flagged any criticism of the New York Times failure to report incidents of black-on-Asian crime as “fearmongering” and worthy of censoring.
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