The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is facing pressure from Senate Republicans after a report revealed efforts to combat alleged misinformation.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) sent a letter to NSF Director Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan on Friday requesting a “comprehensive list of projects funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator Track F.” Through the program, the NSF has spent tens of millions of dollars to “combat mis- and disinformation,” according to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“To say that NSF’s reported involvement in funding research projects aimed at developing AI tools for identifying and combating alleged misinformation is un-American would be an understatement,” Schmitt wrote in the letter, obtained by The Daily Wire. “This seems to be yet another brazen attempt by your agency and the Biden Administration to collude with Big Tech to silence those who eschew the thoughts and ideals of the political Left.”
Schmitt’s request follows a report on the NSF program by the House Judiciary Committee.
“The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence (AI)- powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others,” the report said according to the DCNF.
The NSF has dolled out sizeable grants to top U.S. universities to track and study online discourse for examples of misinformation and disinformation. Syracuse University received nearly $500,000 to study how “misinformation becomes woven into narratives online, how technology influences this process, and how design might be used to alter it.”
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received $750,000 from the program. One of the researchers wrote in a project proposal summary to the NSF that “broad swaths of the public cannot effectively sort truth from fiction online.”
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The NSF program has already been the target of subpoenas by Republicans in the House.
“The Biden Administration has shown a stunning disregard for Americans’ freedom of speech online and has gone as far as to coerce social media companies to censor Americans online,” Schmitt told The Daily Wire in a statement. “With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence in the public and commercial sector, we have a duty to ensure AI is used responsibly and not weaponized against Americans’ constitutional rights.”