Biden’s AI plan to develop censorship tools revealed

News

By Lydia Moynihan

Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 could soon be possible on an industrial scale — thanks to AI tools being built with funding from his father’s administration, a report from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee claimed Tuesday.

The report reveals how the Biden administration is spending millions on artificial intelligence research designed to make anti “misinformation” tools which could then be passed to social media giants.

And it discloses how researchers who got funding for the plan — known as “Track F” — emailed each other to say that Americans could not tell fact from fiction online, and that conservatives and veterans were even more susceptible than the public at large.

The report was published by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, which is chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH).

It 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.”

“Track F” was launched to identify “misinformation” and create “education and training materials” for those with “vulnerabilities to disinformation methods.”

It is part of a larger initiative, “The Convergence Accelerator Program,” that aims to solve issues with “significant national impact” by finding high-level research and which was quietly launched in 2021.

In theory, tools like this could be used to remove child pornography or deepfake photos — like the nude images created of Taylor Swift.

But the Republicans’ report details how researchers working on the technology aimed to censor the general public, with the $13 million program’s manager Michael Pozmantier describing it as “focused on combatting mis/disinformation.”

At MIT, one researcher told NSF officials “broad swaths of the public cannot effectively sort truth from fiction online.”

The researcher specifically called out “military veterans, older adults, military families” and those in “rural and indigenous communities” as particularly vulnerable to believing misinformation.

At the University of Michigan, one researcher who received millions suggested one possible outcome of the research was outsourcing content “moderation” decisions from social media platforms to government officials.

“Our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to… push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company… by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship,” a researcher at the University of Michigan’ said in a pitch to the NSF.

Another researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison who received funding said the team, “was specifically focused on… skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines.” 

The researchers point to certain groups like those that read “the Bible or the Constitution” as subject to misinformation. 

“Because interviewees distrusted both journalists and academics, they drew on this practice to fact check how media outlets reported the news” — when in actuality they weren’t fully informing themselves, the researcher said in a message.

A researcher at University of Washington which received funding to create a similar tool under another program — the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program — wrote to an NSF official that countering disinformation is “inherently political” and is ultimately “censorship.” 

It’s unclear if any of the tools have been finalized or will be adopted by social media companies.

Lawmakers like Jordan are concerned these tools could be perfected and deployed by platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook to limit what people can see and say online in a massive expansion of the actions which led to the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop being suppressed by Twitter and Facebook before the 2020 presidential election.

The report is part of a larger investigation into the extent of the federal government’s efforts to suppress speech on social media platforms. 

The Committee previously said it had found that Facebook removed posts about the origins of Covid at the behest of the Biden Administration.

Concern over growing tools for censorship comes as Silicon Valley titans including venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and X owner Elon Musk warn artificial intelligence could give those in government even more power to potentially suppress speech.

“Al is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world,” Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a essay last June.

“You should be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the age-old claim that they are protecting you.”