A grant from the National Science Foundation went to George Washington University to police so-called misinformation and harassment online.
The grant, which began in September 2022, allocated $5 million to GWU to address “the links between two significant problems impacting trust in contemporary communications systems: (1) The broad and rapid spread of misinformation and (2) abuse and harassment directed at members of expert communities,” the grant summary says.
“Misinformation-driven harassment campaigns have particularly large impacts on those at the forefront of efforts to accurately inform the public, including journalists, scientists, and public health officials,” the grant continues. “As a result, this harassment undermines confidence in pivotal sources of knowledge and reduces expert participation in the information ecosystem.”
The grant provides no examples of what “misinformation” needs to be corrected, what “harassment” took place, or even which “experts” were being harassed.
Given the timing of the grant, it is likely that the “misinformation” being targeted was the same “misinformation” the Biden administration warned against: Conservatives pointing out facts with which the Left disagrees. For example, for years the idea that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China was considered misinformation, yet now it is the dominating theory about where the virus originated. Combatting misinformation has always been less about actual misinformation and more about censorship.
In November, The Daily Wire reported that the Biden administration spent at least $267 million on research grants to combat “misinformation,” but the administration itself promoted misinformation.
Likewise, “harassment” has also meant criticism of “experts” anointed by the Left – who also agree with Leftist policies such as endless masking, rather than the doctors who spoke out against such policies.
A Daily Wire inquiry to George Washington University went unanswered prior to press time.
The grant to GWU went to creating “a socio-technical system that provides real-time support to experts experiencing online harassment” and would focus on “journalists” in the beginning, but expand to others.
The system would include: “(1) personalized assistance with digital safety and security, (2) support monitoring and reporting abuse, and (3) help identifying and building a community care system.”
That community care system would be “[g]rounded in best practices from trauma-informed care,” which has also been weaponized in certain situations. For example, colleges and universities use “trauma-informed care” to insist women claiming to be the victims of sexual assault are telling the truth because they exhibit the actions of some other women who have been victims. That translates into absurd levels of belief, including insisting that women who lie about details of the alleged encounter or continue to send loving messages to their alleged attacker are only doing so out of trauma.
